Here She Comes: Chi Li's Come and Go
Course Description
“来来往往” 来了 著名作家池莉，将在美国爱荷华大学，为我们进行在线授课。主题为：奥秘——小说写作以及小说与影视改编。时间是2014年10月27（周一）、10月29（周三）和10月31（周五），上午八点。第一课：动笔的奥秘；第二课：改编的奥秘； 第三课：成为作家的奥秘。 池莉将以她的小说《来来往往》为蓝本，与我们探讨和分享文学写作与影视艺术的奥秘，每堂课你都有机会提出你的问题并获得她的解答。 期待同学们阅读小说并准备好自己的提问。
In Fall 2014, prominent Chinese writer and IWP Fall Residency participant Chi Li will lead a class for students of writing, television, and film at Beijing Normal University and Sichuan TV and Film College (Beijing and Chengdu, China). Titled, "The Secrets: How to Write a Novel and How to Adapt for the Big Screen," the class will allow participants to explore the secrets of literary writing and adaptation with Chi Li's novel, Come and Go. Students have the chance to read the novel before the class and ask Chi Li specific questions during each session for a prompt response. The class session themes created and facilitated by Chi Li will included Secrets of Starting to Write, Secrets of Adaptation, and Secrets of Becoming a Writer.
Instructor
CHI LI (池莉, China) is regarded as the leader of the “New Realism” trend in contemporary Chinese literature. Her many novels include Zi mò hóngchén [Purple Street, Red Dust] (1995), Yī dōng wú xue [A Winter without Snow] (1995), Zhēnshí de rìzi [Days of Realness] (1995), Wuyè qi wu [Midnight Dance] (1998), Xìyāo [Skinny Waist] (1999), and Lì [Grown Up] (2013). Several titles became popular TV serials and films, among them the award-winning Life Show (2002). In Fall 2014 she completed the IWP Fall Residency.
Electric Bodies: An Introduction to Form and Craft
Course Description
As an introduction to fiction and poetry, Electric Bodies will bring aspiring young writers at a high school level together from Moscow, Russia, Smolensk, Russia, and Des Moines, Iowa to write, share, and discuss their writing with one another through online video and forum.
Thinking about embodiment is crucial for writers. Dramatists, when they think about stage blocking, have to consider how a body moves through the world. Fiction writers must also think about blocking as well as action (performed by bodies) and description (of bodies). Writers of science fiction must question what a living body is or can do as they seek to bring extraterrestrial or robotic characters to life. Poets must also consider the body of the speaking subject: What body speaks the "I" of the poem? What body does the "you" of a poem call forth? This course will explore these necessary questions and more.
The primary course content will be provided through prerecorded video talks given by successful authors. In these talks, authors offer writing tips to the students. The course instructors will lead online conversations with the students about the videos and provide writing assignments.
The students will be invited to write creative pieces, and then to share and critique those pieces with their fellow students, in an international discussion community on a private course discussion forum. The students are able to discuss the class topics and their writing with one another and the instructors 24 hours a day in the forum. The course will run from November 12, 2014 to December 16, 2014.
Instructors
Mary HICKMAN is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she received an Iowa Arts Fellowship. Her poems have been published in Boston Review, Colorado Review, jubilat, the PEN American Poetry Series, and elsewhere. She is the author of This Is the Homeland (Ahsahta Press, 2015) and teaches creative writing at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Van CHOOJITAROM is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He attended the University of Chicago and subsequently resided in a Buddhist monastery in Thailand. He currently teaches fiction writing, with a concentration on science fiction and fantasy, at the University of Iowa.
Narrative Witness 2014: Caracas-Sarajevo
Exchange Overview
In summer 2014, a new creative collaboration will bring together emerging and established writers and photographers in Caracas, Venezuela and Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Led by writer Stacy Mattingly and photojournalist Elizabeth Herman, Narrative Witness will begin in June with 22 writers and photographers meeting online in a live video seminar.
As the exchange continues throughout the summer, the participants will meet online for weekly workshops of writing and photography. Participants will be encouraged to produce new pieces in response to the work of their peers, ultimately building a new international creative community between the two cities.
The participants are encouraged to write in whichever language they prefer, which will result in pieces produced in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, Spanish, and English. Translators Mirza Purić and Mariela Matos Smith will translate the work to English in real time, allowing all of the participants to be involved in the workshops. The collected work from the exchange is currently being showcased on the new “Collections from the IWP Experience” website at iwpcollections.org.
Instructors
Elizabeth D. Herman is a Boston-born freelance photographer and researcher currently based in New York. She spent 2011 in Bangladesh as a Fulbright Fellow, researching how politics influence the writing of national histories in textbooks. She has spent the past four years working on A Woman’s War, a photography and oral history project that explores the experiences of female combatants and the impact that war has had on them, both during and after conflict, taking the project to five countries on three continents. The work has been the recipient of various scholarships and awards. Since moving back to the U.S., Elizabeth has been freelancing for a number of national and international news outlets, and served as the International Picture Intern at TIME Magazine. She graduated from Tufts University with a B.A. in Political Science and Economics in 2010. While at Tufts she received Highest Thesis Honors in Political Science for her research on representations of 9/11 in history textbooks worldwide. Her work has been exhibited in a number of group shows in the U.S., as well as at a solo show at United Photo Industries in NY and at Shadhona Studios in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Stacy Mattingly is the founder of the Sarajevo Writers’ Workshop, a bilingual group of poets and prose writers in Bosnia and Herzegovina. She holds an MFA in fiction from Boston University, where she was a Marcia Trimble Fellow, a Leslie Epstein Global Fellow, and recipient of the Florence Engel Randall Graduate Fiction Award, and where she has since taught creative writing. She has been a collaborative writer with, among others, Ashley Smith, on a New York Times bestseller, and has just completed a first novel, set in the Balkans.
Every Atom: Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself"
This course is now closed, but can be accessed for free online.
In February 2014, the International Writing Program will open its literature MOOC, Every Atom: Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself." This MOOC offers an opportunity for the interactive study of the Whitman poem. Every Atom is taught by Christopher Merrill, IWP Director and University of Iowa Professor of English, and Ed Folsom, a preeminent Whitman scholar. This MOOC is freely available to everyone in the world.
Course Description
Every Atom: Walt Whitman’s "Song of Myself" takes a collective approach to a close reading of America’s democratic verse epic, first published without a title in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass and later titled Song of Myself in the 1881 edition. The poem expresses not only Whitman’s all-encompassing poetic vision, but also a radical imagining of a new kind of democracy for America and elsewhere. Published on the eve of the U.S. Civil War and revised during and after the war, Song of Myself ultimately teaches us not how to participate as individuals in a society, but how the “I” is never individual. To that end, Every Atom takes place as a conversation among multitudes: a renowned poet and translator, Christopher Merrill; a preeminent Whitman scholar, Ed Folsom; and you, along with many others who enter into a spirited exchange about how this challenging and mind-altering poem accretes new meaning for every reader.
Through reading "Song of Myself," we’ll touch on such topics as democracy, sexuality and the body, science, politics, nature, and the cosmos. These topics will arise through a reading of the poem as well as through exploring the historical and textual matters surrounding it. Further, we’ll think about the problems of translating the poem as it moves into other languages and contexts.
Online resources such as The Whitman Archive and The Whitman Web will help us navigate our course. We encourage you to participate in this course at whatever level you prefer; there are no requirements. We also wish to draw a range of readers, from those unfamiliar with American poetry to those who are looking to approach this modern classic from a new direction. Please join us as we “tramp a perpetual journey” of reading and thinking “onward and outward”––together.
IWP Online Campus
The IWP Online Campus, a MOOC outreach initiative, provides the IWP's creative writing and literature MOOCs as MOOCpacks, online toolkits that feature all of the course content and various teaching tools for use in a study group or workshop setting. As part of the IWP's commitment to global accessibility for educational resources, the kits are designed to be used by anyone, anywhere in the world who wishes to lead a local group; no prior teaching experience is necessary. If you are interested in using this MOOC to lead a local study group or workshop, visit our IWP Online Campus page for more details.
Advanced Nonfiction Seminar
Course Description
The idea of nonfiction is simple: tell the truth. But as anyone who has ever attempted it knows, telling the truth can be a lot more complicated than it looks. How do you write a scene if you can’t remember exactly what everyone said? How do you spend only a paragraph describing a character you’ve known for 30 years? How do you pace a story that has spanned your entire life? In this course, we’ll explore in detail both how nonfiction is crafted and the forms it can take, and our essential goal will be to understand the literary techniques employed by nonfiction writers as well as the vast array of nonfiction produced by these techniques. To this end, we’ll be looking at short works of nonfiction from around the world, across the genre and throughout history. We’ll be reading a few canonical authors such as Montaigne and Sei Shonagon, as well as more contemporary writers like Joan Didion, Julio Cortázar, and Eliot Weinberger, and we’ll use these works as the basis for our own short weekly writing experiments. Students will finish the course by using the techniques they’ve learned to write their own full-length work of nonfiction. The course will run from May 10, 2014 to June 28, 2014.
Participants
Fifteen writers hailing from Argentina, Bangladesh, Egypt, Germany, Japan, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Nigeria, Pakistan, Singapore, South Africa, Turkey, and the United States were selected from a pool of 187 applicants to participate in the seminar.
Instructor
Cutter WOOD received his MFA from the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. His work has appeared in such publications as Harper’s and the L Magazine. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.