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Workshop Descriptions & Instructors


Marilyn Abildskov
Mary Allen
Kate Aspengren
Thomas Fox Averill
Nancy Barry
Timothy Bascom
Kyle Beachy
Karen Bender
Linda Bendorf
Maudy Benz
Venise Berry
Bruce Bond
David Bouchier
Michael Dennis Browne
Maggie Conroy
Mary Cross

Thomas K. Dean
Amber Dermont
Janet Desaulniers
Kelly Dwyer
Hope Edelman
Josh Emmons
Jill Esbaum
Sarah Fay
Hugh Ferrer
Katie Ford
Geoffrey Forsyth
Cecile Goding
Douglas Goetsch
Sands Hall
Christine Hemp
Jim Heynen
Rick Hillis
Charles Holdefer
Richard Jackson
Rebecca Johns
Cheryl Fusco Johnson
Wayne Johnson
Daniel Khalastchi
Carolyn Lieberg
BK Loren
Peter Markus
Fritz Mc Donald
James McKean
Gordon Mennenga
Sharelle Byars Moranville
Michael Morse
Marc Nieson
Shannon Olson
Diana Ossana
Lon Otto
Juliet Patterson
Kiki Petrosino
Mark Jude Poirier
Leslie Carol Roberts
Anjali Sachdeva
Sarah Saffian
Sam Samuels
Sandra Scofield
Mary Kay Shanley
Robert Anthony Siegel
Carol Spindel
Karen Subach
Mary Swander
Mary Vermillion
Kris Vervaecke
Ashley Warlick
Michelle Wildgen
Bart Yates

James McKean

James McKean

Memoir: Pieces for the Whole
One-Week Workshop
July 19–24

Biography

Memoir: Pieces for the Whole
One-Week Workshop
July 19–24

If a “memoir” is one’s whole story, where do we start? This workshop is based on the less daunting premise that memoir writing starts with a compilation of many pieces—episodes or anecdotes or stepping stones or moments held in memory, what Annie Dillard calls those “fragmentary patches of color and feeling”—and that each piece deserves attention to its own structure and language. Designed for those who are in the process of sketching out those pieces, this workshop will provide a sympathetic and informed audience. We will look for form inherent in the material, narrative potential, vividness of detail and language, and threads that might suggest ways of weaving small pieces into a larger memoir. We will spend some time looking at short nonfiction examples to discover the possibilities of form. But the majority of the workshop will be given to reading your work. Please bring two short pieces of your work in progress, a variety of questions, and curiosity about how all this is done.

Biography

James McKean (M.F.A., The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop; Ph.D., The University of Iowa) writes nonfiction and poetry. He teaches writing and American literature at Mount Mercy College and has taught writing at Columbia Basin College and The University of Iowa. His first book of poems, Headlong, won the Great Lakes Colleges New Writer Award in Poetry, and his second, Tree of Heaven, won an Iowa Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, Prairie Schooner, and The Southern Review. His nonfiction has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Gray’s Sporting Journal, The Iowa Review, and The Best American Sports Writing 2003. His memoir, Home Stand, was published by Michigan State University Press in 2005.

 

 

 

 




 

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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 19, 2009