SOUL BONE℠ LITERARY FESTIVAL
List of Public MIU MFA Spring 2022 Residency Events

You can memorize all the bones in the body,
but which is the soul bone?

Writers imagine the unimaginable, know the unknowable, and say the unsayable. MIU is offering a series of MFA Residency events via Zoom as part of our Soul Bone℠ Literary Festival.

In our very first MFA residency, poet Rafael J. Gonzalez remarked: “Lorca said that the poet always yearns for silence” and distinguished between a “holy silence” that includes silence “before mountains, waterfalls, the holy beloved” and “unholy silence,” when we keep silent in face of injustice. We have not forgotten Rafael Gonzalez’ words. Writers imagine the unimaginable, know the unknowable, say the unsayable. Naming the unnamable and saying the unsayable is truthtelling, healing, transformational. This is what gives lifeblood to our writing and our world.

This year, we offer our Residency evening readings in affiliation with the Soul Bone℠ Literary Center and Festival. Our Literary Center is named Soul Bone℠ because it references Lorca’s duende, the unspeakable energies that arise from the soles of our feet and run through our spines, that make us feel physically as if the tops of our heads were taken off when we read or write (Dickinson), that connect heart and mind and senses or marry body and spirit, that spark the mystical and give life to our writing, yet that also speak out against injustice and include death and shadow.

Below find a list of our public evening events and day-time master classes and workshops open to the public.

You can find the SOUL BONE℠ LITERARY FESTIVAL EVENTBRITE SCHEDULE here. 

TUESDAY, Feb. 8

• READING
  with Poet, Fiction Writer, Memoirist, Essayist, and Literary Critic David Mura
  Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM CST Free Registration here.
  
  David Mura is a writer, memoirist, poet and performance artist who brings a unique perspective to our multi-racial and multi-cultural society. A third-generation Japanese-American, he has written intimately about his life as a man of color and the connections between race, sexuality and history. In public appearances interweaving poetry, performance and personal testament, he provides powerful insights into the racial issues facing America today. Mura's memoirs, poems essays, plays and performances have won wide critical praise and numerous awards. Their topics range from contemporary Japan to the legacy of the internment camps and the history of Japanese Americans to critical explorations of an increasingly diverse America.

WEDNESDAY, Feb. 9

• POETRY READING
  with Poets Kalpna Singh-Chitnis, Jennifer L. Knox, Nikki Wallschlaeger, and Rustin Larson
  Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM CST Free Registration here.

Kalpna Singh-Chitnis is a Pushcart Prize nominated Indian-American poet, writer, actor, and filmmaker. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Life and Legends and Translation Editor of IHRAF Literary in New York. She has published four books of poetry and her works have appeared in World Literature Today, California Quarterly, Indian Literature, Silk Routes Project (The University of Iowa), Life in Quarantine (Stanford University), and more. Her full-length poetry collection is called Bare Soul.

Nikki Wallschlaeger’s work has been featured in The Nation, Brick, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry, and more. She is the author of the full-length collections Houses (Horseless Press 2015) and Crawlspace (Bloof Books 2017). Her work has been featured in the Nation, Brick, American Poetry Review, Witness, Kenyon Review, and other literary journals. Her newest book of poetry, Crybaby, is published by Copper Canyon Press.

Jennifer L. Knox is the author of Crushing It (Copper Canyon, 2020),  as well as the collections Days of Shame and Failure (2015), The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway (2010), Drunk by Noon (2007), and A Gringo Like Me (2007), all published by Bloof Books. Her poems have appeared four times in the Best American Poetry series. Her work has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, the New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and McSweeney's.

Rustin Larson is a seven-time Pushcart nominee whose fiction has appeared in Delmarva Review, Wapsipinicon Almanac, and The MacGuffin. His poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Iowa Review, North American Review, and Poetry East. He is author of Bum Cantos (Blue Light Press), The Philosopher Savant (Glass Lyre Press), Crazy Star (Loess Hills Press), and numerous other books. He is also a core faculty member in our low-residency MFA in Creative Writing.

THURSDAY, Feb. 10

MFA MENTOR READING
with Jennifer Espinoza, Susan Daniels, Jennie Rothenberg Gritz, and Linda Egenes
Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM CST Free Registration here.

Tonight we host a reading with our four Spring '22 mentors: Jennifer Espinoza (poetry), Susan Daniels (fiction), Jennie Rothenberg Grtiz (creative nonfiction), and Linda Egenes (multi-genre).

Jennifer Espinoza is a trans woman poet living in California. Her work has been featured in Poetry, Denver Quarterly, American Poetry Review, Poem-a-Day, Lambda Literary, PEN America, The Offing, and elsewhere. Her full-length collection THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS was published by Civil Coping Mechanisms in 2016. She also is the author of I’m Alive / It Hurts / I Love It (Big Lucks 2019). She holds an MFA in creative writing from University of California Riverside.

Susan Daniels earned an MFA in Creative Writing: Fiction from Fairfield University and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing: Fiction from Bath Spa University. Her novel, The Genuine Stories, published by New Rivers Press, was the winner of the Fairfield University Book Prize. Her memoir, The Horse Show Mom’s Survival Guide: For Every Discipline, was published by The Lyons Press.

Jennie Rothenberg Gritz earned her MA in Journalism at UC Berkeley. She was a senior editor at The Atlantic before becoming senior editor at Smithsonian Magazine, where she edits features about science, history, and culture. Her writing has been published in The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, and The Lonely Planet travel series.

Linda Egenes has written over 500 articles and six books on green and healthy living. Her latest book, The Ramayana: A New Retelling of Valmiki's Ancient Epic--Complete and Comprehensive, co-authored with Kumuda Reddy, M.D., was published in 2016 with Tarcher Perigee (Penguin Random House). She is the author of Visits with the Amish: Impressions of the Plain Life (University of Iowa Press, 2010) and four other books.

FRIDAY, Feb. 11

• READING
  with Francesca Bell, Kate Gayle, and Tiffany Midge
  Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM CST Free Registration here.

Francesca Bell’s poems appear in magazines such as ELLE, New Ohio Review, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, and Tar River Poetry. Her translations, from Arabic and German, appear in Arc, Circumference | Poetry in Translation, Mid-American Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Waxwing. She is the author of Bright Stain (Red Hen Press, 2019), which was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Julie Suk Award.

Dr. Kate Gale is co-founder and Managing Editor of Red Hen Press, Editor of the Los Angeles Review.  She teaches in the Low Residency MFA program at the University of Nebraska in Poetry, Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction. She the author of The Loneliest Girl from the University of New Mexico Press and of seven books of poetry including The Goldilocks Zone from the University of New Mexico Press in 2014, and Echo Light from Red Mountain in 2014.

Poet Tiffany Midge is the author of several chapbooks and the full-length poetry collection Outlaws, Renegades and Saints: Diary of a Mixed-Up Halfbreed (Greenfield Review Press, 1996); The Woman Who Married a Bear. She published a memoir, Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese's (Nebraska Press), and her work has been published in North American Review, The Raven Chronicles, Florida Review, South Dakota Review, Shenandoah, Poetry Northwest, and more.

SATURDAY, Feb. 12

FICTION READING
with Karen Osborn and Susan Daniels
Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM CST Free Registration here.

Karen Osborn is the author of the novels, Patchwork, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Between Earth and Sky, The River Road, Centerville, winner of the Independent Publishers Gold Award, and most recently The Music Book. The New York Times has called her work, "psychologically sophisticated." She teaches fiction writing in the M.F.A. program at Fairfield University.

Susan Daniels earned an M.F.A. in Creative Writing: Fiction from Fairfield University and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing: Fiction from Bath Spa University. Her novel, The Genuine Stories, published by New Rivers Press, was the winner of the Fairfield University Book Prize. Her memoir, The Horse Show Mom’s Survival Guide: For Every Discipline, was published by The Lyons Press.

SUNDAY, Feb. 13

• READING
  with Debra Marquart and Sidney Wade
  Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM CST Free Registration here.

Sidney Wade is a poet, translator, and professor, plus an avid birder. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Houston. Her books of poetry include Bird Book (2017), Straits & Narrows (2013), Stroke (2008), Celestial Bodies (2002), Green (1998), From Istanbul (1998), and Empty Sleeves (1991).

Debra Marquart is our current Iowa Poet Laureate, a musician, poet, memoirist, and professor. Her poetry collections include Small Buried Things, Everything's a Verb, and From Sweetness. Her memoir, The Horizontal World: Growing up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere, received the 2007 PEN USA Creative Nonfiction Award.

TUESDAY, Feb. 15

• ANTHOLOGY READING:
  We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World
  (edited by Carolyn Holbrook and David Mura)
  Introduced by Carolyn Holbrook, with Anika Fajardo, Ezekiel Joubert III, Mary Moore Easter, and Mona Susan Power
  Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM CST Free Registration here.
  
  We are honored to host a reading of the anthology We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World, edited by Carolyn Holbrook and David Mura. Our readers tonight are Anika Fajardo, Ezekiel Joubert III, Mary Moore Easter, and Mona Susan Power. Carolyn Holbrook will introduce.
  
  The anthology We Are Meant to Rise is a brilliant and rich gathering of diverse Minnesota voices on the American experience of this past year and beyond. In this book, Indigenous writers and writers of color bear witness to one of the most unsettling years in U.S. history. Essays and poems vividly reflect the traumas we endured in 2020, beginning with the COVID-19 pandemic, deepened by the blatant murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers and the uprisings that immersed our city into the epicenter of worldwide demands for justice.
  
  "A powerful and passionate take on a fraught moment." —Publishers Weekly

WEDNESDAY, Feb. 16

• READING
  with Linda Noel and Kim Shuck
  Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM CST Free Registration here.

Linda Noel is a Native Californian of the Koyungkowi people from the Northern Sierra. She has been included in many anthologies and is Poet Laureate Emerita of Ukiah, California. She published the following volumes: Where You First Saw the Eyes of Coyote, Where You First Saw the Eyes of Coyote, and Mountain Stitch. Her work has been published in a variety of magazines, journals, and anthologies including The Dirt is Red Here, by Heyday Books.

Kim Shuck is Poet Laureate Emerita of San Francisco, her home. She is widely published in journals, anthologies and has also published a couple of books including Rabbit Stories and Deer Trails. She also teaches and does beading and basketweaving, including in the Oakland schools. In 2019 Shuck was awarded an inaugural National Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, and a PEN Oakland Censorship Award.

THURSDAY, Feb. 17

• READING
  with David Kirby and Barbara Hamby
  Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM CST Free Registration here.

Barbara Hamby is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Holoholo (2021), Bird Odyssey (2018) and On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems (2014), published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, which also published Babel (2004) and All-Night Lingo Tango (2009). She was a 2010 Guggenheim fellow in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in many magazines, including The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Yale Review, and The New York Times. 

David Kirby is the author of more than two dozen volumes of criticism, essays, children’s literature, pedagogy, and poetry. His numerous collections of poetry include The Ha-Ha (2003), short-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and The House on Boulevard Street: New and Selected Poems (2007), a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Florida Book Award. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Florida Arts Council.

FRIDAY, Feb. 18

• READING
  with Tom Centolella, Wally Swist, and Diane Frank
  Time: 7:00 PM - 9:30 PM CST Free Registration here.
  (NOTE: This event starts half an hour earlier than other events!)

Tom Centolella is the author of four books of poetry: Terra Firma (Copper Canyon Press), selected by Denise Levertov for the National Poetry Series and winner of the American Book Award; Lights & Mysteries (Copper Canyon Press), winner of the California Book Award from the Commonwealth Club; Views from along the Middle Way (Copper Canyon Press); and Almost Human (Tupelo Press), winner of the Dorset Prize.

Wally Swist is a poet whose most recent books include Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love, selected by Yusef Komunyakaa as a co-winner in the Crab Orchard Series Open Poetry Competition, and Winding Paths Worn through Grass, selected by Steven Schroeder and the Editorial Board of Virtual Artists Collective. His poems have appeared in many reviews, anthologies, and literary journals.

Diane Frank is author of eight books of poems, three novels, and a photo memoir of her 400 mile trek in the Himalayas. Her books While Listening to the Enigma Variations: New and Selected Poems and Canon for Bears and Ponderosa Pines were published by Glass Lyre Press. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she dances, plays cello, and creates her life as an art form.

SATURDAY, Feb. 19

• MEMORIAL READING of THE POETRY OF KAMILIAH AISHA MOON
  with Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Lynne Thompson, Danusha Laméris, Janlori Goldman, Nathan McClain, Tim Seibles, and maybe Rachel Eliza Griffiths
  Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM CST Free Registration here.

We are moved and honored to host a memorial reading featuring the poetry of Kamilah Aisha Moon. Kamilah Aisha Moon was the author of Starshine & Clay (2017), a CLMP Firecracker Award finalist featured on NPR's "All Things Considered" as a collection that captures America in poetry. She was also the author of She Has a Name (2013), a finalist for both the Audre Lorde and Lambda Literary Awards. Her work has been published widely, including in The New York Times, Best American Poetry, Harvard Review, Poem-A-Day, American Poetry Review and elsewhere.

For her memorial reading, we will be joined by some of her best friends, loved ones, and mentors: Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Lynne Thompson, Danusha Laméris, Nathan McClain, Tim Seibles, Janlori Goldman, and perhaps Rachel Eliza Griffiths.

Comments on the Event:

SUNDAY, Feb. 20

• READING
  with Danusha Laméris and Molly Fisk
  Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM CST Free Registration here.

Molly Fisk edited California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology, with a Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets when she was Poet Laureate of Nevada County, CA. She's also won grants from the NEA, the California Arts Council, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. She has widely published as a poet and memoirist. Her most recent poetry collection is The More Difficult Beauty; her latest book of radio commentary is Naming Your Teeth. 

Danusha Laméris is the author of The Moons of August (Autumn House, 2014), which was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press poetry prize. Some of her poems have been published in: The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, The SUN Magazine, Tin House, The Gettysburg Review, and Ploughshares. Her second book is Bonfire Opera. She is the 2020 recipient of the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award.

MIU Spring 2022 MFA Residency
Daytime Events

Some of our daytime residency class sessions are also open to the public, but by request only. Below find descriptions of some of our featured daytime events. Anyone can request a full schedule of public events, including daytime events, by emailing English@miu.edu and asking to be put on our public events guest list.

TUESDAY, FEB. 8

• NARRATIVE WORKSHOP
  Wants as Narrative with N. J. Campbell
  Time: 10 AM - noon CST (Event Link available by request)

N.J. Campbell is the author of Found Audio. He lives and writes in the midwest and is an alumnus of MIU. This master class focuses on how the mechanics of wanting can structure the whole of a narrative from tone and conflict, to plot and pacing, including a character's personal history, psychological make-up, and narrative trajectory. The concepts in this course will be explored through simple exercises and discussed. Participants may choose to approach the material in the course as generative or they may apply it to pre-existing narratives already in-progress.

• MASTER CLASS with DAVID MURA
  Race & Craft
  Time: 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM CST Free Registration here

In today's master class, poet, writer, educator, and critic David Mura will talk about race and craft, using material from his latest book, A Stranger's Journey: Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing published by the University of Georgia Press. Long recognized as a master teacher at writing programs like VONA, the LOFT, and the Stonecoast MFA, David Mura has written a book on creative writing that addresses our increasingly diverse American literature. Mura argues for a more inclusive and expansive definition of craft, particularly in relationship to race, even as he elucidates timeless rules of narrative construction in fiction and memoir. His essays offer technique-focused readings of writers such as James Baldwin, ZZ Packer, Maxine Hong Kingston, Mary Karr, and Garrett Hongo, while making compelling connections to his own life and work as a Japanese American writer.

Mura poses two central questions: The first involves identity: How is writing an exploration of who one is and one's place in the world? Mura examines how the myriad identities in our changing contemporary canon have led to new challenges regarding both craft and pedagogy. Like Toni MOrrison's Playing in the Dark or Jeff CHang's Who We Be, Mura's book breaks new ground in our undrestanding of the relationship between the issues of race, literature, and culture. Today's master class will examine race, identity, and narrative craft in a vital discussion of our time. The book's second central question involves structure. Mura will return tomorrow with another master class on narrative structure and craft.

• MASTER CLASS plus Q & A
  Writing, Publishing, and Other Questions with DANIEL M. LAVERY
  Time: 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM CST Free Registration here

In this hour, we are rejoined by Daniel M. Lavery, who also read with us in our last residency. Lavery was the “Dear Prudence” advice columnist at Slate, and is the cofounder of The Toast and the New York Times bestselling author of Texts From Jane Eyre and The Merry Spinster. He also wrote the memoir Something that May Shock and Discredit You published by Simon and Schuster. In this hour, he is going to talk about his professional journey and allow a Q & A on the topic of writing and publishing.

WEDNESDAY, FEB. 9

• MASTER CLASS
  Narrative Structure with DAVID MURA
  Time: 10 AM - noon CST Free Registration here

In today's master class, poet, writer, educator, and critic David Mura is back to talk about narrative structure, using material from his latest book, A Stranger's Journey: Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing published by the University of Georgia Press. Yesterday, Mura explored race, craft, and identity. Today, Mura dives into the book's second central question, which involves narrative structure. How does one tell a story? Mura provides clear, insightful narrative tools that any writer can use, taking in techniques from fiction, screenplays, playwriting, and myth. Through this process, Mura candidly explores the newly evolved aesthetic principles of memoir and how questions of identity occupy a central place in contemporary memoir.

• EXPLORING WOMEN'S VOICES WITH CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI
  Reading, Master Class, Q & A
  Time: 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM CST Free Registration here

This afternoon, another headliner of our residency, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, will join us again to read from her work, talk about craft, and answer your questions. The theme of her reading this time is Women's Voices. This talk will also expand to underrepresented narratives of characters of non-binary gender.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an award-winning and bestselling author, poet, activist and teacher of writing. Her work has been published in over 50 magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly (Links to an external site.) and The New Yorker, and her writing included in over 50 anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, O.Henry Prize Stories and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her books have been translated into 29 languages, including Dutch, Hebrew, Bengali, Russian and Japanese; many have been used for campus-wide and city-wide reads. Several of her novels have been made into films and plays.

Born in Kolkata, India, she now teaches in the nationally ranked Creative Writing program at the University of Houston, where she is the McDavid Professor of Creative Writing. Two of her books, The Mistress of Spices and Sister of My Heart, have been made into movies by filmmakers Gurinder Chadha and Paul Berges (an English film) and Suhasini Mani Ratnam (a Tamil TV serial) respectively. A short story, "The Word Love," from her collection Arranged Marriage, was made into a bilingual short film in Bengali and English, titled Ammar Ma. All the flims have won awards.

• MASTER CLASS
  Writing for Radio: Observations from a Working Poet with MOLLY FISK
  Time: 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM CST (Event Link available by request)

How to say what you want while keeping it short, easy to pronounce, and not profane? Molly Fisk edited California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology, with a Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. She has published numerous volumes of poetry and memoir. She has written weekly commentary for her local community radio station's News Hour since 2005. That is, as of today, 542 three-minute essays, some of which she's collected into four books. Radio is excellent training in revision and a regular deadline teaches you how to stop being a perfectionist and just get it done, both wonderful tools for every writer. In this hour, Molly will share what she learned about writing by writing for the radio.

THURSDAY, FEB. 10

• MASTER CLASS
  Showing Through Telling: Crafting Dialogue for Your Story with ERIC BOYD
  Time: 10 AM - Noon CST (Event Link available by request)

"When's it?"
"Thursday the tenth at 10."
"Tenth at ten. That's easy. I dunno, though..."
"Why?"
"I might not be around."
"You're still..?"
"Yeah."
"No no no, come to the class."
"I won't be back!"
"It's on Zoom."
"Where'm I Zooming from? His bathroom?"
"That would be hilarious. Just run a shower and wear earbuds."
"Until she comes home, hears the shower while he's in his skivvies cooking breakfast."
"'Skivvies'?"
"Y'know, underwear."
"I've never heard that word... Anyway pleaseee; I don't want to be the only one there."
"Jeez alright, what's it on?"
"Dialogue."
"Like people talking?" "Exactly."

Eric Boyd lives in Pittsburgh and is working on a novel. His writing has appeared in Guernica, PEN America Journal, Flock, Mayday, and more. He is the editor of The Pittsburgh Anthology (Belt Publishing). After attending MUI, Boyd received an MFA at The Writer's Foundry in New York.

• MASTER CLASS
  Nature, Poetry, and the Language of Spirit with WALLY SWIST & DIANE FRANK
  Time: 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM CST Free Registration here

This afternoon we dive deeply into the relationships between nature, poetry, and the language of spirit with Wally Swist and Diane Frank. Poetry is the language of the soul. It's a powerful technique to access your inner wisdom and express it with power and beauty. We'll explore what is going on inside of you in terms of your poems and your writing. We'll also be exploring:

- How to go beyond description with poems inspired by the natural world.
- Wildness, meditative silence, leaping and light.
- How to write a poem that is larger than you are.
- Writing techniques to make your language sing.

Diane Frank and Wally Swist will share poems that embody these ideas, along with poetics and writing techniques to write transcendent poems that explore the natural world, with a Q&A. We will each offer a writing prompt, followed by a 15 or 20 minute writing session. The master class will conclude with an open mic where poets can share the poems they have just written.

Wally Swist is a poet whose most recent books include Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love, selected by Yusef Komunyakaa as a co-winner in the Crab Orchard Series Open Poetry Competition, and was also the winner of the 2018 Ex Ophidia Press Poetry Prize for his collection A Bird Who Seems To Know Me: Poems Regarding Birds and Nautre, as well as his six volumes of poems published by Shanti Arts, including Evanescence: Selected Poems. His poems have appeared many reviews, anthologies, and literary journals.

Diane Frank is author of eight books of poems, three novels, and a photo memoir of her 400 mile trek in the Himalayas. Her books While Listening to the Enigma Variations: New and Selected Poems and Canon for Bears and Ponderosa Pines were published by Glass Lyre Press. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she dances, plays cello, and creates her life as an art form.

FRIDAY, FEB. 11

• MASTER CLASS
  Writing about Family or Not, and When with MOLLY FISK
  Time: 10 AM - Noon CST (Event Link available by request)

We must write about what presents itself to us: that's our contract as writers. But whether we take our work public is a big question, and no one else can decide it for you. Molly Fisk is with us again today to address the real complexities of writing about family. When is it advisable to do so, and when is it not? What snags and sensitivities or issues can you run into? What are the ethics of writing about family? From her own experience, Molly Fisk will give you great pointers on this topic. Ahead of this session, please be sure to read her article for Harper's Bazaar about her famous uncle, "John Updike, His Stories, and Me.”

• PRESENTATION: RED HEN PRESS
  Getting a Foot In: How to Find a Home for Your Work with Kate Gayle and Francesca Bell
  Time: 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM CST Free Registration here

Today we are lucky to have with us poet Francesca Bell and poet and founding editor of Red Hen Press, Kate Gayle, who will present Red Hen Press to you and talk about publishing in Books and Literary Magazines. The mission of Red Hen Press is to publish works of literary excellence, to foster diversity, and to promote literacy in our local schools. We seek a community of readers and writers who are actively engaged in the essential human practice known as literature.

SATURDAY, FEB. 12

• MASTER CLASS
  Fragmentary Writing with DEBRA MARQUART
  Time: 10 AM - Noon CST Free Registration here

This morning, we offer you a master class on fragmentary writing by poet and memoirist Debra Marquart. She will talk about callaging, weaving, braiding, mosaic, and other techniques you can use in lyrical writing. References will be Jane Alison's book, Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative  (Links to an external site.)and Terry Tempest Williams' Finding Beauty in a Broken World (Links to an external site.).

Debra Marquart is our current Iowa Poet Laureate and a professor of English at Iowa State University. She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment at Iowa State University and the Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA Program at University of Southern Maine.  Marquart's work has received numerous awards and commendations, including the John Guyon Nonfiction Award, the Mid-American Review Nonfiction Award, The Headwater's Prize, the Shelby Foote Prize for the Essay from the Faulkner Society, a Pushcart Prize, and a 2008 NEA Creative Writing Prose Fellowship among others. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including The North American Review, Three Penny Review, New Letters, River City, Crab Orchard Review, Narrative Magazine, The Sun, Brevity, The Normal School, Orion, and Witness.

Marquart’s memoir, The Horizontal World: Growing up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere, received the "Elle Lettres" award from Elle Magazine, a New York Times Editors’ Choice commendation, and the 2007 PEN USA Creative Nonfiction Award. Marquart is also the author of two poetry collections—Everything's a Verb and From Sweetness—and a collection of interrelated short stories, The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories, which draws on her experiences as a female road musician. She has released two CDs with her rhythm & blues project, The Bone People, and continues to perform solo as a singer/songwriter.

Marquart’s latest book, a poetry collection, Small Buried Things, is forthcoming from New Rivers Press in 2015. She is currently at work on a nonfiction book, “The Listening Room: Notes on a Life in Music,” which is an acoustic ecology, an autobiography of catastrophe, a meditation on the pleasures and privileges of being a singer, and a chronicle of a life filled with making and listening to music.

• MASTER CLASS
  The Art of the Sentence with KAREN OSBORN
  Time: 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM CST Free Registration here

Karen Osborn is the mentor of our mentor, Susan Daniels. She is with us today to probe into the art of the sentence, that vital building block of any writing in any genre.

Karen Osborn is the author of the novels, Patchwork, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Between Earth and Sky, The River Road, Centerville, winner of the Independent Publishers Gold Award, and most recently The Music Book. In reviews, she's been compared to Ian McEwan, Jodi Picoult, and Russell Banks. The New York Times has called her work, "psychologically sophisticated" and The Washington Post has said her writing is "an extraordinary effort to engage the American condition as we find it now." She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts with her husband and teaches fiction writing in the M.F.A. program at Fairfield University.

SUNDAY, FEB. 13

MASTER CLASS:
"Making Kin" with DEBRA MARQUART
Time: 10 AM - Noon CST Free Registration here

This morning we have a second mater class with Debra Marquart. She will talk about "Making Kin" in relation to writing. Making Kin is a book by Donna Haraway, an ecofeminist scholar. How do you write about nature by embodying it, by entering into the skin of "critters" and beings that in our modern world far too often are cast off as "inanimate" and not sentient? How do you imbue the universe of your stories with animate life, attributing consciousness? From the article: "More recently, Haraway has waded into the lively debates surrounding the Anthropocene, which she considers “both too big and too small” a concept to explain the perilous state of our planet. She has coined not one, but two words to describe this historical epoch: the “Chthulucene” breaks down the hierarchy between the human and nonhuman worlds, while the “Plantationocene” connects the climate crisis to specific economic and political practices of exploitation." Marquart explores the impact of Haraway's work on eco writing. Haraway talks about "tentacular thinking": "Tentacular thinking suggests the breaking of the binary through bodily practices and networks composed by trajectories, patternings and lines. The tentacular tangles the string(s) to collectively think and make kin with unknowns in storytellings that have been told and yet to come." This is the subject of this master class.

• MASTER CLASS / WORKSHOP
  Scavenging for Information: Looking for Poems in all the Weird Places with FRANCESCA BELL
  Time: 2:30 PM - 4:30 PM CST Free Registration here

In these two sessions, poet Francesca Bell will outline different ways in which you can incorporate current news and/or science and other information into your poems or writing through research, weaving, braiding, and other techniques. Bell’s poems appear in many magazines including ELLE, New Ohio Review, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, and Tar River Poetry. Her translations, from Arabic and German, appear in Arc, Circumference | Poetry in Translation, Mid-American Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Waxwing. She is the co-translator of Palestinian poet Shatha Abu Hnaish's collection, A Love That Hovers Like a Bedeviling Mosquito (Dar Fadaat, 2017), and the author of Bright Stain (Red Hen Press, 2019), which was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Julie Suk Award. She is a translation editor at the Los Angeles Review

SATURDAY, FEB. 19

• MASTER CLASS
  Writing Pedagogy with Iowa Poet Laureate DEBRA MARQUART
  Time: 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM CST Free Registration here

In this session, Iowa poet laureate Debra Marquart will talk about writing pedagogy, offering informed, creative approaches to teaching creative writing.

Debra Marquart is our current Iowa Poet Laureate and a professor of English at Iowa State University. She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment at Iowa State University and the Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA Program at University of Southern Maine.  Marquart's work has received numerous awards and commendations, including the John Guyon Nonfiction Award, the Mid-American Review Nonfiction Award, The Headwater's Prize, the Shelby Foote Prize for the Essay from the Faulkner Society, a Pushcart Prize, and a 2008 NEA Creative Writing Prose Fellowship among others. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including The North American Review, Three Penny Review, New Letters, River City, Crab Orchard Review, Narrative Magazine, The Sun, Brevity, The Normal School, Orion, and Witness. Marquart’s memoir, The Horizontal World: Growing up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere, received the "Elle Lettres" award from Elle Magazine, a New York Times Editors’ Choice commendation, and the 2007 PEN USA Creative Nonfiction Award. Marquart has also released two CDs with her rhythm & blues project, The Bone People, and continues to perform solo as a singer/songwriter.

SUNDAY, FEB. 12

• FICTION MASTER CLASS & WORKSHOP
  The Anatomy of a Scene with SUSAN DANIELS
  Time: 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM CST Free Registration here

Susan Daniels will break down the anatomy of a scene in this session. How is a scene structured? What are its component elements? How do you craft a memorable scene that works on the level of plot, character, setting, point of view, dialogue, and more?

“The scene is the most vivid and immediate part of story, the place where the reader is the most emotionally involved, the part that leaves the reader with images and a memory of the action.” – Sandra Scofield

Scenes are essential components of narrative craft, moving the story arc forward by showing pivotal changes in the in the lives of the characters. In this seminar, we will discuss the elements of scene making and examine various scenes from literature (and cinema) with an eye to technique and effect.

Susan Daniels earned an M.F.A. in Creative Writing: Fiction from Fairfield University and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing: Fiction from Bath Spa University. Her novel, The Genuine Stories, published by New Rivers Press, was the winner of the Fairfield University Book Prize. Her memoir, The Horse Show Mom’s Survival Guide: For Every Discipline, was published by The Lyons Press.

For more information on MIU’s MFA in Creative Writing, directed by Nynke Passi with assistant director, Ben McClendon, please visit our website here.

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