Iowa Summer Writing Festival


Previous Page \| Registration Form \| Site Map \| Next Page
Workshop Descriptions & Instructors Faith Adiele Mary Allen Kate Aspengren Thomas Fox Averill Nancy Barry Timothy Bascom Linda Bendorf Venise Berry Bruce Bond Michael Dennis Browne Susan Taylor Chehak John Dalton Thomas K. Dean Amber Dermont Kelly Dwyer Hope Edelman Josh Emmons Katie Ford Patricia Foster Laura Fraser Cecile Goding Douglas Goetsch Kevin González John Griesemer Sands Hall Christine Hemp Jim Heynen Rick Hillis Charles Holdefer Richard Jackson Cheryl Fusco Johnson Wayne Johnson Bret Anthony Johnston Daniel Khalastchi Zachary Lazar Carolyn Lieberg BK Loren Fritz Mc Donald James McKean Gordon Mennenga Katherine Min Sharelle Byars Moranville Michael Morse Barbara Robinette Moss Marc Nieson Shannon Olson Lon Otto Juliet Patterson Anjali Sachdeva Sarah Saffian Sam Samuels Leslie Schwartz Sandra Scofield Mary Kay Shanley Carol Spindel Karen Subach Mary Vermillion Ashley Warlick Jan Weissmiller Bart Yates	Amber Dermont Trigger Happy: Getting Your Story Started Weekend Workshop June 21–22 Have I Got A Story For You: Short Fiction Workshop One-Week Workshop June 22–27 Biography Trigger Happy: Getting Your Story Started Weekend Workshop June 21–22 Sometimes all a writer needs is a word, an image, a structure, a form, a directive, a constraint to get their story up and running wildly. In this class, we will consider new strategies and techniques for generating fiction. Through in-class and take-home writing assignments, we will play with narrative form and structure, with character development, with formal constraints, with point of view. We will create new rules for ourselves and have fun breaking them. At the end of the weekend we should all have at least half a dozen new pieces triggered and ready for us to develop into fully sustained narratives. Have I Got A Story For You: Short Fiction Workshop One-Week Workshop June 22–27 We are going to do something very dangerous in this class: we’re going to workshop and revise our short stories. Each student will bring a maximum of thirty pages of short fiction for our class to consider and discuss. We’re going to strive to make these characters, settings, and plots so credible and engaging that we, and others, would prefer to spend our time exploring them than do just about anything else in the world. The great American short story writer Flannery O’Connor, who grew up poor in Milledgeville, Georgia, and spent most of her life dying from lupus and tending to the ornery peacocks she kept as watchdogs, once said about her own writing, “my subject in fiction is the action of grace in a territory held largely by the devil.” In writing our own stories, we will negotiate this space between beauty and mischief as we set about to discover new approaches for revision. Biography Amber Dermont’s fiction has recently appeared in The Georgia Review, Tin House, Zoetrope: All-Story and the anthologies Best New American Voices 2006 (ed. Jane Smiley) and Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005 (ed. Dave Eggers). A graduate of The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Amber received her Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. Her honors include a Donald Barthelme Memorial Fellowship, the Alan Collins Scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and several Pushcart Prize Special Mentions. Amber is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia.

	Site Map \| Welcome \| Workshops by Session Date \| Workshops by Instructor Workshops by Genre \| Registration & Housing Information \| Registration Form Sponsored by the Division of Continuing Education Iowa Summer Writing Festival C215 Seashore Hall The University of Iowa Iowa City, IA 52242 Phone 319-335-4160 FAX 319-335-4743 iswfestival@uiowa.edu Last updated on January 10, 2008