Workshop Descriptions & Instructors

Douglas Goetsch

Description & Emotion: A Workshop for All Genres
Weekend Workshop June 16-17

Free-Writing Intensive: A Generative Workshop for All Genres
One-Week Workshop June 17-22

Poems in Conversation
Weekend Workshop June 23-24

Biography

Description & Emotion: A Workshop for All Genres
Weekend Workshop June 16-17

Description and emotion are key ingredients for every novelist, essayist, memoirist, or poet, yet they are seldom studied as craft elements. How do we transform what we see into what the reader sees, what we feel into what the reader feels? What should we be thinking about, and excluding, when we select details? How do we approach emotions, especially raw and conflicting emotions, and when do we exclude them? This workshop will be a series of unveilings, through models, discussion and exercises, of how to work more deeply with these two basic elements.

Free-Writing Intensive: A Generative Workshop for All Genres
One-Week Workshop June 17-22

Free-writing can be the most important tool in a writer’s arsenal, the one that gives us the best chance of surprising ourselves. It is also the first way we honor an impulse to write, and the act during which that impulse either catches fire or peters out. Many writers know this, but few approach free-writing as a practice, one with a wide range of methods and purposes. Put another way, there are as many ways to free-write as there are to dance, but most of us are stuck doing the frat boy two-step. This course will open the vault to the theory and practice of free-writing, giving participants techniques for getting out of mental and stylistic ruts, expanding the range of available subjects, and generating a bounty of new material. Free-writing can also be used to solve problems in the middle of the composition process, and we’ll look at those techniques as well.

Poems in Conversation
Weekend Workshop June 23-24

This workshop aims to dramatically improve your poems through revealing the conversation they’re having (often unwittingly) with other poems, and poetry itself. For each participant poem, after an initial workshop, we will look at carefully chosen models—contemporary poems and/or poems from the canon—dealing with similar themes or compositional issues. We will examine the choices others have made in parallel situations in order to become more aware of ourselves, our choices, and the consequences they invite. In this way, we expose ourselves not just to the work of one another, but to the history of the craft of poetry.

Biography

Douglas Goetsch is the author of three full-length poetry collections—most recently Nameless Boy, forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press—and four prize-winning chapbooks. He is the recipient of National Endowment for the Arts and New York Foundation for the Arts poetry fellowships, and the Donald Murray Prize for nonfiction writing. His poems, essays and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The American Scholar, The Gettysburg Review, Best American Poetry and the Pushcart Prize anthology. He resides in New York City, where he runs Jane Street Press.

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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 February 24, 2012