SOUL BONE LITERARY FESTIVAL
List of Public MIU MFA Fall 2021 Residency Events

• Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni • Eugenia Kim • Mark Spragg • Virginia Korus Spragg • Debra Marquart • Vince Gotera • Nicole Walker • Joshua Jennifer Espinoza • Zoë Estelle Hitzel • Daniel M. Lavery • Diane Frank • Prartho Sereno • Erin Elizabeth Smith • Sara Henning • Steven Schneider • Diane Thiel • Daniel Tobin • Christine Schrum • Rustin Larson • Linda Egenes • Dylene Cymraes • Sundress Publications • Blue Light Press •

Our Fall Soul Bone Festival has a dual focus: creativity and narrative. We start with the heart of writing — the creative process itself. Poet Alan Shapiro said that writing allows us to focus on the “right here, right now, the deep joy of bringing the entire soul to bear upon a single act of concentration. In that extended moment, opposites cohere: the mind feels and the heart thinks, and receptivity is a form of fierce activity. Quotidian distinctions between mind and body, self and other, space and time, dissolve.” In seminars, craft classes, panel discussions, and writing exercises, we’ll also explore the fundamentals of narrative with a special emphasis on transformational storytelling and approaches to crafting works of lasting value. Guests will offer evening readings, teach master classes on various aspects of craft, and lead advanced workshops in three genres.

Soul Bone Literary Festival Dates: August 16 - 29, 2021.

Below find a list of our main events.

MONDAY, Aug. 16

• STORYTELLING WORKSHOP
  Stories in the Round: Awakening Personal Narratives
  with Dylene Cymraes
  Time: 2:30 PM - 4:30 PM CDT

As writers, we live for stories. Using the power of oral story tradition, in a time-honored method called Story Circles, we have a chance to be heard, listen deeply, and share perspectives. Story Circles can be a place of inspiration, empowerment, and connection. Learning to use this method can open enormous potential for a writer to discover and develop personal narratives. In Stories in the Round: Awakening Personal Narratives, participants will get an introduction to Story Circles, exploring the themes of Belonging and Othering.  

Dylene Cymraes is an author, writing mentor, editor, and facilitator. She has edited and contributed to more than fifty screenplays, published five novels and two non-fiction books. Her work appears in the American Journal of Poetry, the Telepoem Booth Project, and Sink Hollow, among other places She holds a graduate in Communication and Storytelling Studies at East Tennessee State University.

TUESDAY, Aug. 17

• UNSILENCING THE WORKSHOP 1
  Traditional vs Alternative Workshop Models
  Time: 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM CDT

Almost everyone knows the traditional workshop model pioneered by the Iowa Writers' Workshop whereby you sit in silence while everyone else in the room discusses your work as if you weren't even there. In a close-knit cohort, with a solid foundation in respect and trust, this model can work exceedingly well. However, it can also be experienced as crushing, nightmarish, or as a form of silencing. This can be especially true for minority writers and female writers who may be describing experiences outside the norm. Being told to be quiet while others discuss your work, while these others may not have a sufficient or clear understanding of your personal journey or of your work's (and for that matter, your life's) context, does not promote an excited engagement with the revision process, which always is our aim. This workshop examines alternatives. What other ways are there to pry open a work and listen to what it really wants to say and be and convey?

• UNSILENCING THE WORKSHOP 2
  Alternative Workshop Models
  Time: 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM CDT

In the second hour, we deepen the discussion on alternative workshop models. What models exist that undo the silencing of the traditional workshop, helping diverse writers' voices shine? What models exist that allow you to be part of the conversation about your work, instead of a mere witness to it? Both this and the previous session come with handouts and reading assignments. They are offered in preparation for the workshop in the last weekend of the residency as well as the semester's mentorship workshops. Today's resources remain relevant throughout every semester of this MFA program. In all of your mentorships, you are allowed to pick your own favorite models for workshopping your work. Today, we'll present you a variety of options.

• NARRATIVE WORKSHOP
  with Stuart Tanner
  Time: 1:30 PM - 2:30 PM CDT

In this narrative workshop, professor Tanner, a BBC documentary filmmaker and author, will shed light on plot, theme, and elements of story. He will also touch upon speculative fiction, which is his niche. He is a faculty in the Cinematic Arts and New Media department at MIU, plus the former chair of Media & Communications. For over a decade, he's been teaching narrative in fiction and film. He will bring his narrative expertise in this workshop. He also is an acclaimed producer and director of documentary films for the BBC, National Geographic, the Discovery Channel, and others. His projects and awards include Saving The Disposable Ones (2011), a documentary that takes you to the heartbreaking streets of inner-city Columbia, where Father Gabriel Mejia, a Catholic priest, is transforming the lives of thousands of children by providing shelter, love and Transcendental Meditation; Time Team; Children of Vengeance; Profits of Doom; The Mahogany Trail; and Death on the Silk Road, a documentary on the effects of nuclear testing in China, which won the Rory Peck Award for Journalism in 1999.

• NARRATIVE MASTER CLASS & WORKSHOP
  Writing the Short Story 1 (of a 3-part series)
  Time: 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM CDT on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday afternoons

In this threee-part series, novelist and memoirist Susan Daniels will break down writing a short story. You will have a chance to begin writing your own. This is the first session in a 3 part series hosted every day in this same time slot between Tues, Aug. 17 - Thurs. Aug. 19. Susan will teach you basics of craft and give you opportunity to write. By the end of this 3- session workshop, you will have a working draft of a short story.

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.

• READING
  Narrative Poetry
  with Steven Schneider, Diane Thiel, and Daniel Tobin
  Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM CDT

This evening, our special guests poets Steven Schneider, Diane Thiel, and Daniel Tobin will read you their narrative poetry. Narrative poetry tells a story; it falls in the borderlands between genres: fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. In our program, we strongly encourage the exploration of cross-genre works. These three very prominent poets and critics will read from their own narrative poems as well as discuss the importance of this trend in contemporary letters. You will be treated to an inspiring evening of how storytelling in verse can transform consciousness and open new vistas of thought and creative expression.

Steven P. Schneider is a poet, scholar, and critic. He is the co-creator, with his artist wife Reefka, of two bilingual, ekphrastic exhibits and books: Borderlines: Drawing Border Lives / Fronteras: dibujando las vidas and The Magic of Mariachi / La Magia del Mariachi. He is also the author of the poetry collections Unexpected Guests.

Diane Thiel is the author of ten books of poetry, nonfiction and creative writing pedagogy. Her new book of poetry Questions from Outer Space is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in Spring 2022. Her earlier books include Echolocations (2000), which received the Nicholas Roerich Prize from Story Line Press, and Form and Myth (Story Line Press, 2001).

Daniel Tobin is the author of eight books of poems, including From Nothing (Four Way Books, 2016), and Blood Labors (Four Way Books, 2018), as well as The Stone in the Air (Salmon Poetry, 2018). Among his awards are The Robert Penn Warren Award and creative writing fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

WEDNESDAY, Aug. 18

• GENERATIVE WORKSHOP
  The Generative Tarot: Implementing Tarot in Writing Practice
  with Zoë Hitzel
  Time: 10 AM - 12 PM CDT

This morning we offer a generative workshop, an opportunity to play with language, ideas, form, and your own mind creatively. You receive exercises and prompts, and you respond. That is all you have to do. There is no right or wrong way. You can experiment, make mistakes, fall flat on your face, get up, and try again. You can drop down deep, "scale the depths of your being from which your very life springs forth," as poet Rainer Maria Rilke called it, and find the wilderness of your own creative imagination where thoughts roam free and you’ll never know what you will find. Zoë Estelle Hitzel, our Fall creative nonfiction mentor, will be with us to lead you in a generative workshop that revolves around Tarot. Have fun!

• AN AFTERNOON WITH NOVELIST CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI
  Reading, Master Class, Q & A
  Time: 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM CDT

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, will join us to read from her work, talk about craft, and answer your questions.

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.

• PANEL: SAYING THE UNSAYABLE
  with novelists Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Eugenia Kim, and Mark Spragg
  Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM CDT

Tonight, three novelists will discuss the more ephemeral, intangible aspects of writing and the creative process. What are the mysterious and mystical aspects of the writing life? What is it like to write from a basis of spirituality, silence, a shedding of ego, a sense of flow and taking dictation while writing, a sense of synchronicity? These three writers all have a meditation practice that is core to their lives as creatives, either Transcendental Meditation or another form of meditation. How does that help the creative life? How deeply can we fall into substrata of our own awareness, and how does our writing change when we let go of ego? How do we express the mystical through character, plot, and story?

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 and The New Yorker, and her writing has been included in over 50 anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, O.Henry Prize Stories and the Pushcart Prize Anthology.

Eugenia Kim has published short stories and essays in journals and anthologies, including Asia Literary Review and Raven Chronicles. Two of her novels are The Calligrapher's Daughter and The Kinship of Secrets. She received fellowships at Yaddo, Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and elsewhere.  She teaches at Fairfield University’s low-residency MFA Creative Writing Program.

Mark Spragg is the author of Where Rivers Change Direction and the novels The Fruit of Stone and An Unfinished Life, which was chosen by the Rocky Mountain News as the Best Book of 2004. Mark also has an extensive history as a screenwriter, writing the scripts for movies such as An Unfinished Life and Everything that Rises.

THURSDAY, Aug. 19

MASTER CLASS
Narrative Poetry
with Professor Steven Schneider
Time: 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM CDT

This Master Class on Contemporary Narrative Poetry will focus on the significance of narrative or story telling in contemporary poetry and the wide variety of forms in which it manifests. The first hour will present an overview and in the second hour we will focus on the Prose Poem. Participants are expected to read in advance the four handouts on the Prose Poem for this Master class. Each student should bring to the class a Prose Poem they admire and if time permits one of their own prose poems. 

Professor Steven Schneider is the editor of The Contemporary Narrative Poem: Critical Crosscurrents published by the University of Iowa Press and is the author of four collections of poetry and the editor and author of three scholarly books on Contemporary Poetry. He is Professor Creative Writing at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and an elected member of the Texas Institute of Letters.

• FICTION and CREATIVE NONFICTION READING
  with novelists Eugenia Kim & Susan Daniels
  Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM CDT

Tonight we host two novelists, Eugenia Kim and Susan Daniels, for a reading. These two authors are friends as well as mentor/mentee. Their creative relationship is an inspiration, and we are so glad to have them with us!

An MFA graduate of Bennington College, novelist Eugenia Kim has published short stories and essays in journals and anthologies, including Asia Literary Review and Raven Chronicles. She teaches at Fairfield University’s low-residency MFA Creative Writing Program. Her novels are The Calligrapher's Daughter and The Kinship of Secrets.

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.

FRIDAY, Aug. 20

• MASTER CLASS with EUGENIA KIM
  Eight Aspects of Writing Character
  Time: 10 AM - 12 PM CDT

Character. It is the touchstone of literature, be it fiction, creative nonfiction, and sometimes poetry. Literature is character-driven because it is through character that we follow the story, from protagonist (the narrator in creative nonfiction), antagonist, to secondary and walk-on characters, and it is through character that the story grows to universality. How does one effectively write a memorable character? I will present eight aspects of writing character, from point of view, to character’s desire, to dialogue, to image and physicality, and more. Short exercises will reinforce key elements of writing character, and extended exercises will be provided in handouts to try out on your own.

Eugenia Kim’s debut novel, The Calligrapher’s Daughter, won the 2009 Borders Original Voices Award, was shortlisted for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was a Washington Post Best Historical Novel and Critic’s Pick. Her second novel, The Kinship of Secrets, was a Library Reads best book of November and Hall of Fame list for 2018, and an Amazon Best Book of the Month/Literature and Fiction. She is a two-time Washington DC, Council on the Arts and Humanities Fellowship recipient, and received fellowships at Yaddo, Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and elsewhere.

• PRESENTATION & WORKSHOP
  The Healing Power of Writing
  with Nynke Passi
  Time: 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM CDT

Diarist Anaïs Nin believed that we write to heighten our awareness of life, to console others, to expand our world. She said, “When I don’t write, I feel my world shrinking. I lose my fire and my color.” Poet Cristina Domenech spent years teaching poetry in the Argentinian prison system, her students inmates with little hope in life. Yet she observed that “all of us burn with happiness when we light the wick of the word.”

In this creative writing workshop, poet and writer Nynke Passi offers techniques to unleash the intrinsic healing power of words. The writer’s gift is to express what others most seek to hide. Franz Kafka considered words axes “for the frozen sea within us.” This makes writing a vulnerable, courageous, but also a thrilling and particularly transformational journey. Drawing on her Montessori background, Nynke works from a basis of creativity, helping you reconnect to that energized thrill of total immersion in the creative process—no boundaries, no sense of time or space, no worries about the opinions of others: just the joy of creating. When you let words come from that wild, deep place of connection with your soul-self, magic happens. Focus is not only on expressive writing, but also on elements of craft and technique that take you deeper, pushing you to see the world and yourself with new eyes, giving you a unique chance to edit your narrative. There is a difference between expressing and communicating. It brings relief to emote on the page, but craft and technique give you power to truly process your life experiences while evoking emotion in your reader. We will also discuss how we can develop a toolkit to deal with difficult, even traumatic, subjects in our writing. What are ways to balance and integrate when you feel too much and want to run away from your subjects and work? How do you avoid trauma triggers and burn-out, making your project cathartic?

• PRESENTATION
  Sundress Publications: Publishing with a Small Press
  with Erin Elizabeth Smith
  Time: 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM CDT

Today we have with us editor Erin Elizabeth Smith. Her press, Sundress Publications, is a non-profit literary press collective founded in 2000. Sundress is entirely volunteer-run, publishes chapbooks and full-length works in both print and digital formats, and hosts a variety of online journals. Their mission is to champion great work—especially by persons under-represented in literary publishing—and they welcome writers and artists regardless of race, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, disability, religion, class, veteran status, and educational background. Sundress Publications works closely with its authors, artists, and contributors, providing feedback and assistance through every stage of the publication process. Their aesthetic sensibilities run the gamut from traditional to innovative; they do not align themselves with a single school or style. They seek works in all genres by intelligent, creative humans that speak to other intelligent, creative humans. They are most interested in the overall effect created by the artist, how the parts act in concert to create the whole.

• READING
  with poets Erin Elizabeth Smith and Sara Henning
  Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM CDT

Tonight we are excited to host two poets and writers of high caliber, Erin Elizabeth Smith and Sara Henning, who will be offering a reading of their work.

Erin Elizabeth Smith is the author of three full-length collections, The Naming of Strays (Gold Wake 2011) and The Fear of Being Found, which was re-released by Zoetic Press in 2016. Her third collection, DOWN was released from Stephen F. Austin State University Press in 2020. Smith's poetry and nonfiction have appeared in Guernica Ecotone, Ecotone, Mid-American, 32 Poems, Mid-American, Florida Review, and Tupelo Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, and Willow Springs, among others. She earned her PhD in Creative Writing from the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi and is now a Distinguished Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Tennessee.

Sara Henning is the author of View from True North (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), co-winner of the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award and the 2019 High Plains Book Award. Her latest collection of poetry, Terra Incognita, won the 2021 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Ohio University Press. Her honors include the Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize, the George Bogin Memorial Award, the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, and awards from the Sewanee Writers' Conference and the Vermont Studio Center. Her work has been published in journals such as Quarterly West, Crab Orchard Review, Witness, Crazyhorse, Meridian, and the Cincinnati Review.

SATURDAY, Aug. 21

• PRESENTATION: with Iowa Poet Laureate Debra Marquart
  Exile & Belonging
  Time: 10 AM - 12 AM CDT

This morning, we offer you a presentation by poet and memoirist Debra Marquart. She will talk about her heritage and the themes of Exile & Belonging.

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 poetry collection, Small Buried Things, was published by New Rivers Press in 2015.

• PRESENTATION: Social Issues & Ethical Dilemmas in the Literary Arts
  Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion; Authenticity & Appropriation
  with Ben McClendon
  Time: 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM CDT and 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM CDT

What are diversity, equity, and inclusion, and why do they matter in the literary arts? What roles do these concepts play in literary theory and criticism? We’ll establish some guiding principles and open discussion to those who wish to share relevant experiences writing, workshopping, and/or publishing, with particular attention to how creative writing can be a vector for positive social change

• CONVERSATION with MARK SPRAGG
  For continuing students only (Spring '21 Cohort)
  Time: 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM CDT

In this session we’ll host an informal conversation with Mark Spragg and Nynke Passi, including a Q & A.

Mark Spragg, our headliner from last residency, is back to check on how all of you are doing with your writing, your goals and plans, and to ask you if you have any craft questions for him now that you have had immersive chance to dive into your own creative work in your first semester. For the next hour and a half to two hours, Mark will have a conversation with you about his and your work, writer to writer.

• READING
  with JOSHUA JENNIFER ESPINOZA, DANIEL M. LAVERY, ZOË ESTELLE HITZEL
  Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM CDT

Tonight we will hear a reading by three of today's most dynamic and contemporary LGBTQ authors, who will also join us tomorrow night (Sun. Aug. 21) for a panel discussion about diversity and creativity  All three authors write about identity and blend genres, forms, and sources to develop fascinating new hybrids and/or play in the borderlines between genres.

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza is a trans woman poet living in California. Her work has been published in The American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, West Branch, and Buzzfeed, among others. She is also the author of two poetry collections: I’m Alive / It Hurts / I Love It (2014; rereleased by Big Lucks in 2019), and THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS (CCM 2016).

Daniel M. Lavery is the “Dear Prudence” advice columnist at Slate, the cofounder of The Toast, and the New York Times bestselling author of Texts From Jane Eyre and The Merry Spinster. His most recent book is the memoir Something that May Shock and Discredit You published by Simon and Schuster.

Zoë Estelle Hitzel is a poet, essayist, and educator who writes about her trans experiences. She reads tarot professionally, plays in a blues band, Deadwood, and makes tea every morning for her girlfriend in Columbia, Missouri. She earned her MA in Creative Writing studying poetry at Northern Arizona University and her MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Oregon State University. Her writing has appeared in Uproot, The Fourth River, Blue Lyra Review, entropy, and elsewhere. We are thrilled to have Zoë as the creative nonfiction mentor in our MFA this Fall!

SUNDAY, Aug. 22

• MASTER CLASS:
  with screenwriter Virginia Korus Spragg
  Variations on Theme
  Time: 10 AM - 12 AM CDT

This morning you have a master class on theme and plot in narrative with Virginia Korus Spragg. If you want to learn about crafting story, Virginia Korus Spragg can teach you a great deal. We are lucky to have her with us today!

Virginia Korus Spragg is a screenwriter with two produced credits: AN UNFINISHED LIFE (directed by Lasse Hallström, with Jennifer Lopez, Robert Redford, & Morgan Freeman), and AS COOL AS I AM (directed by Max Mayer, with Claire Danes, Sarah Bolger, & James Marsden). An Unfinished Life was after the novel of the same name written by her husband, Mark Spragg. Virginia Korus Spragg also writes the Substack newsletter "The Pixar Algorithm," which teaches character and story though the deconstruction of Pixar movies.

• PRESENTATION: Social Issues & Ethical Dilemmas in the Literary Arts
  Toward an Inclusive Canon
  with Ben McClendon
  Time: 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM CDT

What is the role of reading and literary studies in creative writing? How do the texts we read shape our writing and contextualize the work we produce? Literature does not exist in a vacuum, created from within constellations of cultural forces and intersectional identity, both a product of a culture and commentary on it. We will discuss the myth of political neutrality, what constitutes positive representation, and how what we choose to read shapes our writing.

• LGBTQ AUTHOR PANEL
  Creativity & Diversity
  with Daniel M. Lavery, Zoë Estelle Hitzel, and Joshua Jennifer Espinoza
  Time: 7:30 PM - 9:45 PM CDT

Tonight we will have a panel discussion with three dynamic and contemporary LGBTQ authors, who also joined us last night for a reading: Daniel M. Lavery, Zoë Estelle Hitzel, and Joshua Jennifer Espinoza.  All three authors write about identity and blend genres, forms, and sources to develop fascinating new hybrids and/or play in the borderlines between genres.

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza is a trans woman poet living in California. Her work has been published in The American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, West Branch, and Buzzfeed, among others. She is also the author of two poetry collections: I’m Alive / It Hurts / I Love It (2014; rereleased by Big Lucks in 2019), and THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS (CCM 2016).

Daniel M. Lavery is the “Dear Prudence” advice columnist at Slate, the cofounder of The Toast, and the New York Times bestselling author of Texts From Jane Eyre and The Merry Spinster. His most recent book is the memoir Something that May Shock and Discredit You published by Simon and Schuster.

Zoë Estelle Hitzel is a poet, essayist, and educator who writes about her trans experiences. She reads tarot professionally, plays in a blues band, Deadwood. She earned her MA in Creative Writing studying poetry at Northern Arizona University and her MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Oregon State University. Her writing has appeared in Uproot, The Fourth River, Blue Lyra Review, entropy, and elsewhere.

MONDAY, Aug. 23

• READING
  MENTOR READING plus Q & A
  with Sasha Kamini Parmasad, Zoë Estelle Hitzel, Rustin Larson, and Ben McClendon
  Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM CDT

This evening, your semester mentors, Sasha Kamini Parmasad (fiction), Zoë Estelle Hitze (creative nonfiction)l, Rustin Larson (multi-genre), and Ben McClendon (poetry), will give a reading of their work and will be available for a Q & A about their creative process, their writing background, their books. Mentors will also touch on their pedagogical approach in teaching their mentorships.

TUESDAY, Aug. 24

This evening we offer you a poetry reading with three top Iowa poets: Debra Marquart, Vince Gotera, and Rustin Larson.

Debra Marquart is our current Iowa Poet Laureate. Her 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. She is the author of two poetry collections—Everything's a Verb and From Sweetness. Marquart’s latest book, a poetry collection, Small Buried Things, is forthcoming from New Rivers Press in 2015.

Poet Vince Gotera was born and raised in San Francisco and lived in the Philippines for part of his childhood. In his narrative poems, Gotera engages themes of family life and romantic love and uses vivid imagery and a range of formal and metrical constraints. He is the author of the poetry collections Dragonfly (1994) and Fighting Kite (2007) and the critical volume Radical Visions: Poetry by Vietnam Veterans (1994). He is the editor of North American Review and has served as an editor of Asian America. In 1997, Gotera and Nick Carbó founded FLIPS, a listserv for Filipino/a literature and arts. Gotera’s honors include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Mary Roberts Rinehart Award in Poetry, and a Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry.

A graduate of the Vermont College MFA in Creative Writing, Rustin Larson was an Iowa Poet at The Des Moines National Poetry Festival, and a featured poet at the Poetry at Round Top Festival. He is a poetry professor and MFA mentor at Maharishi International University, a writing instructor at Kirkwood Community College, and has also been a writing instructor at Indian Hills Community College. His poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Iowa Review, and North American Review. He published numerous books of poetry, including Pavement, Library Rain, Crazy Star, and Lost Letters & Windfalls, and The Wine-Dark House. He is the editor of the poetry anthology Conestoga Zen. Rustin was our Spring '21 poetry mentor and is our Fall '21 Multi-Genre mentor.

WEDNESDAY, Aug. 25

• CREATIVITY PANEL
  with Loretta Diane Walker, Diane Frank, Prartho Sereno
  Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM CDT

Our MFA uniquely teaches creative writing from a basis of creative process and consciousness. Tonight we are going to dig into the mechanics of creative process with Blue Light Press' two founding editors, Diane Frank and Prartho Sereno, as well as Blue Light Press author, Lorettta Diane Walker. Poet and MFA faculty Rustin Larson will moderate.

Panelists will talk about their own creative process, how their creativity is influenced by their practice of Transcendental Meditation, and what methods they use for diving deep within to explore the "wilderness of the imagination," as novelist Arundhati Roy calls it. We are very excited to present you this dynamic panel.

THURSDAY, Aug. 26

• READING
  Blue Light Press Pandemic Poetry Anthology Reading
  with Diane Frank, Prartho Sereno, and guests, including Loretta Diane Walker
  Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM CDT

Tonight we offer you a poetry reading of the new Blue Light Press anthology Pandemic Puzzle Poems, which is coming out this Fall. Editors are Diane Frank and Prartho Sereno.

Tonight, Diane and Prartho will bring along some guests, poets published in the anthology. Loretta Diane Walker is one of them. The anthology speaks of the experience of living through the pandemic from the view point of contemporary poets.

On the page of this anthology you will find poems by Jane Hirshfield, Ted Kooser, Dorianne Laux, Stephen Dunn, Naomi Shihab Nye, Thomas Centolella, Marsha de la O, Terry Lucas, Barbara Quick, Melissa Studdard, Loretta Diane Walker, Marge Piercy, and many more poets who will delight and amaze you - some well known and others who also deserve to be read. Every poem in this book has a gift. "To write a single poem is a selfless act and a minor miracle. In times of trouble people often turn to poems, and poems often turn into prayers." - Joseph Zaccardi

FRIDAY, Aug. 27

• READING
  with Rustin Larson, Christine Schrum, and Linda Egenes
  Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM CDT

Tonight, we feature three authors who have a special connection to our university for a prose reading of fiction and creative nonfiction (with perhaps a bit of poetry sprinkled in): Rustin Larson, Christine Schrum, and Linda Egenes. You are in for a treat!

A graduate of the Vermont College MFA in Creative Writing, Rustin Larson is a poetry professor and MFA mentor at Maharishi International University. His poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Iowa Review, and North American Review. Among his books are the poetry collections Library Rain (Conestoga Zen Press, 2019); Pavement (Blue Light Press, 2017); The Philosopher Savant (Glass Lyre Press, 2015); Bum Cantos, Winter Jazz, & The Collected Discography of Morning (Blue Light Press, 2013); The Wine-Dark House (Blue Light Press, 2009); and Crazy Star (Loess Hills Books, 2005).

Christine Schrum is a Vancouver Island writer who is inspired by landscapes—both interior and exterior. Her travel writing has appeared in Smithsonian Magazine, and her creative nonfiction essays have appeared in Grain, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Globe and Mail, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and The Rumpus. Her poetry appears in EVENT (forthcoming, December 2017), A Verse Map of Vancouver, Quills Canadian Poetry, Sulphur III, and other publications, She holds an MA in Professional Writing from MIU.

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 by TarcherPerigee, an imprint of Penguin Random House. She is the author of Visits with the Amish: Impressions of the Plain Life (University of Iowa Press, 2010). Linda is a mentor in our MFA program.

SATURDAY, Aug. 28

• MASTER CLASS with Iowa Poet Laureate Debra Marquart
  Eco Writing
  Time: 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM CDT

Iowa poet laureate Debra Marquart will talk with you about eco writing, one of her chief subjects, plus a subject of focus at her MFA program at Iowa State University (in Ames, IA).

Debra Marquart is our current Iowa Poet Laureate. 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 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, Crab Orchard Review, Narrative Magazine, The Sun, Brevity, and Orion. 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.

• READING with Nicole Walker & Debra Marquart
  Eco Writing
  Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM CDT

Tonight's reading focuses on eco writing. We have with us two ecologically minded authors, Nicole Walker, and Debra Marquart, who will share their work with us. There will be time for a Q & A at the end of the evening.

Nicole Walker is the author of Processed Meat: Essays on Food, Flesh, and Navigating Disaster, The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet and  Sustainability: A Love Story and A Survival Guide for Life in the Ruins. Her previous books include Where the Tiny Things Are, Egg, Micrograms, Quench Your Thirst with Salt, and This Noisy Egg. Her work has been published in Orion, Boston Review, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, The Normal School and other places. She curated, with Rebecca Campbell, 7 Artists, 7 Rings—an Artist’s Game of Telephone for the Huffington Post. A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and is noted in multiple editions of Best American Essays. She’s nonfiction editor at Diagram and Professor at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Debra Marquart's brief bio is offered above on this page.

SUNDAY, Aug. 29

READING with Nynke Passi
Women's Voices
Time: 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM CDT

Nynke Passi will be hosting "Women's Voices." She will be offering you a reading of herown work, time for Q & A, and at the end of the session also a writing prompt to connect you to the female in your own voice. This session will explore a range of themes that are part of the female perspective, from childhood to sexuality to motherhood, domestic violence, childlessness, silencing and suppression, mother/daugther relationship, father/daughter relationship, female empowerment, and more. The session will only dive into a small part of the range of the female experience. We will continue the "Women's Voices" series with a wide range of exploration of female identity, sexuality, and experience, including indigenous, Black and LGBTQ voices, also trans voices.

Nynke Salverda Passi is a poet, writer, and teacher born and raised in the Netherlands. Her work has been published in literary magazines such as CALYX, Gulf Coast, Poetry Breakfast, Red River Review, Ilya’s Honey, Ink, and more. Her poetry has been anthologized in Carrying the Branch: Poets in Search of Peace (Glass Lyre Press), River of Earth and Sky: Poems for the 21st Century (Blue Light Press) and Pandemic Puzzle Pieces (Blue Light Press). Her essay ‘Oom Ealse and the Swan’ was a finalist in the category of creative nonfiction in the 2014 Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize of The Missouri Review. She is the co-chair of MIU's English department and director of this MFA program. She also runs The Soul Ajar, a center for writing, creativity, and healing.

• OPEN READING
  For and with all of you!
  Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM CDT

Tonight welcome our students to take the stage and share with us some of their work. We look forward to hearing your voices, and we hold a safe space for YOU. Welcome to the stage! This is the beginning of your life as a writer. We are so excited that you are embarking on this journey with us and can't wait to watch you grow and transform in our program.