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 Night.
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.
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.
These readings focus on the Bicultural Iowa Writers’ Fellows's final collection, WE THE INTERWOVEN. There will be a reading and a signing at the Des Moines Arts Festival, Sunday, July 24th, 2018. This is a free event, not including a copy of the book.
These readings focus on the Bicultural Iowa Writers’ Fellows's final collection, WE THE INTERWOVEN. There will be a reading and a signing at the Des Moines Arts Festival, Sunday, July 24th, 2018. This is a free event, not including a copy of the book.
To bring writers of all genres and forms together by exploring a sense of observation and become more comfortable with integrating research and personal narratives into your creative work.
Join us for a special community writing event at the Iowa Writers' House in partnership Honoring Your Wishes and Iowa City Hospice. Inspired by the themes of love, forgiveness, and gratitude, the Love Letters Project invites writers to gather together for a special afternoon of community writing.
The event is free and open to the community. Spaces are limited and seats are available on a first come first served basis.
In this workshop, award-winning fiction writer Calla Devlin will explore how to tackle that big idea and what it takes to finish a novel-length work, from outlining a first draft to putting the finishing touches on a manuscript ready for submission.
Portland-based indie press YesYes Books presents a reading by Khadijah Queen, Kayleb Rae Candrilli, and KMA Katherine Sullivan.
FREE and open to the public.
Literary magazines and independent publishers from across the country, and right here in Iowa City, will set up shop at The Mill in Iowa City for the 8th year in a row, representing some of the most exciting work in publishing today.
Learn how to take and give advice, how to write for your reader, and how becoming a good critic makes you a better editor of your own work.
A graphic memoir can be the ultimate way to “show rather than tell.” In this workshop, we’ll learn about graphic novels and focus on the unique ways images can help tell a story.
The solitude of the writer has great spiritual potential. In this course, you’ll explore ways to stay spiritually centered as a writer, regardless of your subject matter.
Maybe you have a brilliant idea for a non-fiction story or perhaps there is an essay, hidden like a jewel in your files, the only trouble is, you don’t know how to get published. This intensive three-hour course, is designed to take you from idea, to pitch, to publication.
This workshop will help you better understand how different types of journeys take shape on the page, giving you the foundations to master the art of plot.
To develop a story, sometimes you need to write to discover the world around the plot, the history of characters, the provenance of an object, in other words, sometimes you have to write a lot that won’t go directly on the page but will flavor everything that does.
In this class, we’ll learn how to capture in writing the places and the people we know intimately in order to create the specificity that all readers desire. We’ll reexamine familiar places for new inspiration, look for the totems they offer us to work with, and inhabit the characters of these settings by writing from their points of view. For outside inspiration, we’ll read authors who have mastered the art of place. It’s time to see the extraordinary in the ordinary and start writing with purpose and urgency, right here and right now.
In this course, Andrea leads us through a reflective journey into the self; guiding creative methods of self-authorization and purpose finding. The participants will learn ways to translate complex emotions associated with significant events in their lives into a written form of storytelling that is safe, supportive and appropriate for a broader public.
She discusses how individuals can anticipate narrative arcs that allow us to live as the characters we wish to become. Such public forms of writing are crucial as a way to bear witness both to the mercies and the travesties of the everyday world—it can help others learn the language necessary to give voice to their own experiences.
