Overview
The 12th session of BTL: Peace and the Writing Experience, the first BTL virtual session (due to the COVID-19 Global Pandemic), was an overwhelming success. 50 participants (42 young writers and 8 “chaperone” educators) from 19 countries and the U.S. came together for creative and cultural work that many reported to have changed their lives.
BTL: Identity and Belonging, its second full session, also took place virtually. The core instructors were Poupeh Missaghi and José Olivarez and the program included writing workshops, literature seminars, and special events, which were implemented via multiple online platforms, and which were designed to maximize community-building and intercultural exchange. The session provided opportunities for large, small-group, and paired-off dialogue; time for introspection; and at every turn, BTL staff and the trusted instructors were providing guidance, care, and creative enrichment.
An overview of BTL’s transition to a virtual format: Writing workshops and literature seminars lasted 1 hour and 45 minutes, and each day began with a “Daily Meeting,” similar to the face-to face format. In this first fifteen minutes of each day, participants took turns sharing details about where they lived and their local cultures, and projects and activities they were involved in. Regional variations in pizza, pets, and descriptions of cherished time recently spent outdoors after months being inside due to the pandemic were popular topics that connected participants across distances. In total, participants spent approximately 4 hours a day engaged with the BTL activities. Writing was shared via private BTL groups in Write the World, an online global creative writing platform for teens.
In total, participants attended one virtual pivot town hall meeting, one orientation, one introduction, six youth writing workshops, five chaperone writing workshops, four literature seminars, five special seminars, one conversation table, one film screening, one open mic event, one faculty reading webinar, and one graduation event. Each participant contributed one piece of writing produced during the session to the camp anthology and received the collection of work as a PDF, rather than the hard copy usually distributed, and The Writing University website featured a video gallery of participants’ digital storytelling projects.
2020 Session dates & Anthologies:
Between the Lines: Identity and Belonging: June 20 – July 4, 2020
Read the session Anthology.
Between the Lines: Peace and the Writing Experience: July 11 – July 25, 2020
Read the session Anthology.
Shared Experiences
“BTL has given me a lot! It has given me the tag of an "Alumni." It has given me confidence, courage, power, friends, faculty, cultural ideas, enchantment, and tears of happiness! It's so hard to say goodbye to this program! I'm [i]n tears right now, so... Would love to be a part of it once more (only if it was possible). I owe a lot to you. I LOVE YOU, BTL! YOU HAVE MY HEART!!”
“I would say, I have accomplished more than what I had expected. My goals were to just show my face and smile and write. I was an extremely introverted person, always shy, especially on virtual platforms. Now I see myself speaking up, putting my opinions and explaining those – it's just amazing! Thanks to BTL for allowing me to step out of my comfort zones and helping me to realize my potentials!”
“My relationship with writing has improved vastly since beginning BTL. I was so scared to share my work or put my story ideas out there in case they didn't work IRL the way they worked in my head, but now I wouldn't hesitate to share my roughest drafts with my BTL community… Now, I really feel confident and proud calling myself a writer.”
“My most favorite thing is getting to know the instructors! They all come from different and various backgrounds with all sorts of histories, and it's heart-warming getting to meet someone who you want to be in the future...”
“[I]t was also the first time I was able to participate in discussions of race/cultural backgrounds and margin/center ideas. It was a really respectful and open environment, so all of the discussions felt safe.”
“[I]t was one of the first times I heard people talk about Eid, not from a religious light (although I haven't really heard that either) but before that I hadn't really heard people casually talking about Muslim holidays as much.”
“BTL is the best thing that's ever happened to me I would forever recommend it.”
Meet the Instructors
Rumena Bužarovska is a fiction writer and literary translator. An author of four volumes of short stories translated into more than ten languages, her book My Husband has been adapted into three stage productions in Ljubljana, Belgrade and Skopje. A 2018 resident of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, she is a professor of American literature and translation at the Ss Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje. She is the co-author and co-organizer of the women’s storytelling initiative PeachPreach. (IWP Fall Resident ’18, BTL faculty ’20, ’21, 22 North Macedonia)
Vladimir Poleganov is the author of one collection of short stories, The Deconstruction of Thomas S (2013, St. Kliment Ohridski University Press) and one novel, The Other Dream(2016, Colibri), which won the Helikon Award for Best Fiction Book of the Year in 2017. His short stories have appeared in various literary magazines in Bulgaria and abroad. “The Birds”, a short story, was featured in Dalkey Archive Press’ anthology Best European Fiction 2016. In 2016, he participated in the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. This was followed by residencies in Shanghai and Sun Yat-sen University in China. He has translated novels by writers such as Thomas Pynchon, George Saunders, Octavia E. Butler, and Peter Beagle into Bulgarian. In 2020, his translation of George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo won the Association of Bulgarian Translators Prize. He is currently working on a PhD in Bulgarian literature at Sofia University where he also teaches courses on creative writing and fantastic literature. (IWP Fall Resident ’16, BTL faculty ’20, ’21, and 22 Bulgaria)
Shandana Minhas, is an award-winning Pakistani writer. Her first novel, Tunnel Vision, a first person meditation on life as a woman in a man’s world was published in 2007 and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. It was later translated into Italian as Pakistan Graffiti. Her second novel, Survival Tips for Lunatics, was published in 2014. A “bitingly funny” adventure in which a bickering couple accidentally leaves their two sons behind on a camping trip in Pakistan’s turbulent Balochistan province, it became the first children’s book to win a general fiction prize in the region, taking the Karachi Literature Festival fiction prize in 2015. Her third novel Daddy’s Boy – an “amorality tale” - was published in 2016 by 4th Estate. Ms Minhas has also written for stage, screen and opinion pages. Her short fiction has appeared in literary magazines, and been adapted for cinema. She still lives in Karachi where she co-founded, in 2016, the indie press Mongrel Books. (IWP Fall Resident ’13, Pakistan)
Mary Hickman was born in Idaho and grew up in China and Taiwan. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow. Hickman is the author of two books of poems, This Is the Homeland (Ahsahta Press, 2015) and Rayfish (Omnidawn Publishing, 2017), which won the James Laughlin Award, given by the Academy of American Poets and chosen by Ellen Bass, Jericho Brown, and Carmen Giménez Smith. An assistant professor at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln, Nebraska, she also teaches in (and loves!) the University of Iowa International Writing Program’s Between the Lines exchange program. (BTL Faculty ’15, ’16, ’17, ’20, ’21, 22 U.S.)
In addition to the main faculty, the following guest instructors were engaged to lead special seminars:
- Razi Jafri and Joumana Altallal – Visual and Poetic Documentary Workshop
- Kiki Petrosino – White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia Author Reading and Q&A
- Marwa Helal – What are you going to do with all that IDENTITY Workshop
- Lauren Haldeman – Making Poetry Films: A Digital Storytelling Workshop
- Caroline Meek, ICRU Fellow ‘18 & ‘19, with BTL Alumni – Beyond BTL
- Razi Jafri and Justin Feltman – Hamtramck USA filmmakers Q&A
Special thanks to Sean Zhuraw, Delaney Nolan, Gabriela Claymore, and Gyasi Hall for providing support to students, faculty, and staff communicating in the digital format.