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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.


 

 

 

 

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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