There are powerful stories among us, all we have to do is listen. Join us for an Arts Festival event with stories from Iowa's newest book, We the Interwoven: Volume 2, untold stories from the heartland of living between two worlds.
Join us for a powerful panel of diverse community members and early readers as they discuss the newest volume of We the Interwoven, a collection of stories from immigrants and bicultural residents living in our state. Together as a panel and an audience, we'll explore ideas, challenges, and hopes for the next chapter in the story of our towns, our state, and ultimately our country.
Join the Iowa Writers’ House at Prairie Lights on June 29th at 11am for the first event in our state-wide launch for We The Interwoven Volume 2, stories of living between two worlds written by Iowa immigrants and bicultural residents from across the state of Iowa. In this event, our 2019 writers will be sharing their work with the community for the first time.
Our workshop on Editing Your Own Work with Elisabeth Chretien on March 24th has sold out, but anyone who was interested in this workshop and didn't get an initial spot, the next session will be on Sunday May 19th! Thanks to those of you who asked to be waitlisted and to Elisabeth who offered to teach again! We’ll learn how to look at our writing at the sentence level, the scene level, and the universal level and how those three levels affect each other.
The Iowa Writers' House is honored to announce that on May 5th at 12:30pm, We The Interwoven: An Anthology of Bicultural Iowa will be featured at the Blue Met Festival at Hotel 10 in Montréal, Canada.
Self-publishing as a business has blossomed since the advent of e-books, but it can still be a difficult world to explore and thrive in for a beginner. Join Alex Penland and explore software like Scrivener and Calibre, review options for distributing both hardcopies and e-books, and address the way to get one’s work out while maintaining an affordable budget. If you have a completed manuscript or an idea you know you want to see on the page, sign up and get your own stories into the world.
The podcast industry is taking off. With over 68 million Americans listening to podcasts on a monthly basis, podcasting is now considered one of the most accessible and digestible ways to engage with stories and ideas. We will start by brainstorming your unique podcast idea. Is it educational? Entertaining? And what story do you want to tell? We’ll workshop your potential audiences, your defined elevator pitch, and your storytelling format. Finally, we’ll work our way toward the production process, plus publication and promotion of your show.
What are writers always telling us they need?
Dedicated time to write. A space without distraction. A regular writing practice. We're excited to announce a new program to support our writing community in just this very way: Zen Write Nights.
Come spend an afternoon with professional developmental editor Elisabeth Chretien and learn about the different types of editing and strategies to look at your own work with an editor’s eye. We’ll learn how to look at our writing at the sentence level, the scene level, and the universal level and how those three levels affect each other.
The difference between creative nonfiction and fiction relies on the existence of fact. But what is fact? When we write creatively, we bring our own point of view to the story. We fill in details that our memories might not have filed away. In affect – We lie. But our lies can be truer than the straight facts. In this weekend course, Tim Bascom helps us release our restraint and worries about factual accuracy so that we can free ourselves to explore creative options. Come prepared to play with the truth and to expand the nonfiction horizon.
What are writers always telling us they need?
Dedicated time to write. A space without distraction. A regular writing practice. We're excited to announce a new program to support our writing community in just this very way: Zen Write Nights.
In this unique mash-up, author and pie maker Beth M. Howard will incorporate a pie class into workshop as a way for us as writers to face and overcome our fears, let go of perfection, and gain the confidence to share what we've created. Her passion is contagious and you will come away infused not only with the courage to tell your stories, but with your own pie to share.
Take a break from it all and join award-winning spiritual writer Lori Erickson as she re-imagines writing not as a world of solitude, but instead as a sacred place of self-discovery. As anyone who’s sat staring at a page or a computer screen waiting for inspiration can attest to, writing can be a lonesome practice. But that solitude also has great spiritual potential. Join us in this workshop to learn how to access inner inspiration and self discovery through your writing.
In this weekend experience, internationally acclaimed author Debra Landwehr Engle helps us explore ways to reimagine ourselves and our lives through writing, and to maintain our own light in today's world. We'll discuss how to view the world with new eyes, move beyond judgement, uncover the resolutions of our spirit, and write our best selves into being.
What are writers always telling us they need?
Dedicated time to write. A space without distraction. A regular writing practice. We're excited to announce a new program to support our writing community in just this very way: Zen Write Nights.
What are writers always telling us they need?
Dedicated time to write. A space without distraction. A regular writing practice. We're excited to announce a new program to support our writing community in just this very way: Zen Write Nights.
How do you get started as a freelance writer? Is it possible to turn freelancing into a full-time job? Nicole Dieker is in her seventh year of full-time freelancing, and she’ll teach you everything she knows about how freelancers make money: how to pitch (even when you don’t have clips); how to build a freelancer schedule that combines writing, pitching, networking, and administrative work; and how to grow your earnings over time.
In this class we’ll use fun, easy, foolproof writing exercises to turn our travel stories into writing that’s fresh, exciting, and surprising…And we’ll talk about how to use writing as a life tool that can turn every trip we go on, whether it’s exciting and wonderful or not so wonderful, into a transformative experience, for us and our readers, allowing us to make the most of our travels through life.
In this half-day workshop, we’ll talk about the practice of poetry, read some sample poems, and do a bit of writing in the form of an exercise or two designed to generate first drafts. The workshop is open to all, regardless of experience with poetry.
How can women find a frame that fits our unruly experiences of self and body? How do we milk the interruptions, the stolen moments common to our experience as writers? How can we begin to make and break our own rules? This class will be multi-genre, and generative, though time will be allotted to workshop pre-existing pieces.
What are writers always telling us they need?
Dedicated time to write. A space without distraction. A regular writing practice. We're excited to announce a new program to support our writing community in just this very way: Zen Write Nights.
In this course, we will start by looking carefully at some selections by writers who succeed at bringing historical persons, places, and real-life situations to new life in their fictional or nonfictional worlds. Then we’ll write exercises aimed at freeing ourselves to imagine what it must have been like to be Great-Aunt Gladys, for example, growing up in rural Georgia in 1938. We’ll write ourselves into our characters as they encounter specific situations within the world we have re-created for them.
In “The Searchers,” author and publisher Robert James Russell will not only work through what it means to be a storyteller, but how to find the story worth telling—keeping ourselves and our readers engaged. As writers, it’s easy to forget that we are storytellers—take away social media and publication fanfare, and what we’re left with, at a most basic level, is our desire to tell a story we feel is important and necessary.
In this workshop, Rebecca Entel will not only go over some basics of storytelling, but will offer practice in bringing fictional characters to life through point of view, detail, and dialogue.
What are writers always telling us they need?
Dedicated time to write. A space without distraction. A regular writing practice. We're excited to announce a new program to support our writing community in just this very way: Zen Write Nights.
This reading will feature the 2018 Bicultural Iowa Writing Fellows, with their collection “We The Interwoven: An Anthology of Bicultural Iowa.”
The Iowa City Book Festival annual book fair is the place to meet and mingle with Iowa City's network literary organizations. Join us at the Iowa Writers' House table for swag, signings, and to get all the information on our fall programs.
This course will outline all of the available paths to publication for both fiction and nonfiction writers, offer the pros and cons of each, and give you actionable next steps for whichever path you choose.
As part of International Welcoming Week Iowa City, join us for a reading of stories written by immigrants and first generation Iowans in the recently published collection, We the Interwoven: An Anthology of Bicultural Iowa as well as a reception and exhibition of artwork from visual artist Maegan Tyrell’s “Photovoice Project.”
The Witching Hour is hosting a fundraiser at the Iowa Writers’ House this Wednesday, September 12th from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. Please consider attending this event. Your support will help us produce an amazing festival and continue the annual tradition of exploring the unknown, celebrating the creative process, and discussing new work.
