Spring ’26 Soul Bone℠ Literary Festival -
Fall 2026 MIU MFA Residency Videos

Our online Soul Bone℠ Literary Festival pairs writing and craft with creative process, consciousness, discussion of the more ineffable aspects of the creative life such as the role of intuition in writing, and the intersection of writing with personal transformation and healing. It promotes the kind of writing and creative work that comes from 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 (Emily Dickinson); that connect heart and mind and senses or marry body and spirit; that culture empathy; that reconnect us to earth and nature and each other; that spark the mystical soul and give life to our writing; and that include death and shadow.

Our online Soul Bone℠ Literary Festival pairs writing and craft with creative process, consciousness, discussion of the more ineffable aspects of the creative life such as the role of intuition in writing, and the intersection of writing with personal transformation and healing. It promotes the kind of writing and creative work that comes from 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 (Emily Dickinson); that connect heart and mind and senses or marry body and spirit; that culture empathy; that reconnect us to earth and nature and each other; that spark the mystical soul and give life to our writing; and that include death and shadow.

Residency Library

Below you can find the videos of our Fall ‘26 Literary Festival for use of students enrolled in MIU’s MFA in Creative Writing! Enjoy.

An important note on the ethics of the use of our program's Vimeo library

You are all free to use our Vimeo library as our students. However, please DO NOT share these links with friends, online on social media, in classes you may teach or attend elsewhere, or in other places. This material is for your private educational use ONLY as students of our MFA program. It's not for distribution of any kind.

Many of our guest speakers and faculty expressly have not given permission to have their materials shared beyond their live sessions and beyond the MFA classroom supervised by our MFA faculty within the residency course. Quite a few of our writers have asked for contracts or have expressed clearly via email that they don't want their material shared beyond the classroom to guarantee this privacy. Writers visiting us may share or read new work, which they don't want to have end up in unforeseen places, which might count as "publication" without their knowledge. Our literary guests have been paid one-time speaker fees; not fees that allow us to publicly share their work long-term. Our students and event visitors, including all of you, may also not want to have your words and questions or shares be distributed beyond the classroom as you read out loud your vulnerable freewrites and prompts in the workshop sessions.

In short: All distribution of any material from this course has to go through me to guarantee the privacy and rights of our visiting authors and also of you, as our students, as you share in the classroom. If you have any question, please talk to me. I know the back stories on each guest and am managing this situation ethically toward our guests in a manner that benefits all of you as our students at all times.

Thank you so much for your conscientiousness! Feel free to contact me at 641-451-4854 or npassi@miu.edu or at soulboneliterary@gmail.com if you have any questions.

Nynke

Week One: Aug. 17 - 23, 2026

Monday, Aug. 17, 2026

Day time onboarding and introduction events in our Zoom room, The Library. Please check your schedules in the Canvas course shell.

• MFA Faculty READING - LIVE EVENT
  with Jennifer Espinoza and Nynke Passi
  Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM CT
  Location: The Library

Tonight we’ll open our MIU MFA Showcase with a reading with some of our core MFA faculty: Jennifer Espinoza and Nynke Passi, the MFA program director.

Nynke Salverda Passi is the director of this MFA program and co-chair of MIU’s English dept. She was born and raised in the Netherlands. Her work has been or will be published in Tupelo Quarterly, CALYX, Gulf Coast, Poetry Breakfast, Life & Legends, and more. Her poetry has been anthologized in Pandemic Puzzle Pieces and River of Earth & Sky (Blue Light Press), Carrying the Branch: Poets in Search of Peace (Glass Lyre Press), and Oxygen: Parables of the Pandemic (River Paw Press). Together with Rustin Larson and Christine Schrum, she edited the poetry collection Leaves by Night, Flowers by Day.

Jennifer Espinoza is author of the poetry collection THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016) and I’m Alive / It Hurts / I Love It (Big Lucks 2019)., plus I Don’t Want to Be Understood (Alice James Books, 2024). She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of California at Riverside. Her most recent publication is “Everybody at the Same Time is Beginning to Understand There is No Such Thing as a Self.” in Gulf Coast. She has years of experience teaching and mentoring in creative writing at the graduate level and was a full-time faculty at MIU for several years.

• Video will be uploaded here after the reading. •

Tuesday, August 18

Morning onboarding and introduction events in our Zoom room, The Library. Please check your schedules in the Canvas course shell.

• GENERATIVE WORKSHOP
  A Fish Leaps, A Cricket Sings: Imagery & Sensory Detail in Haiku
  with Mel McCuin
  Time: 1:00 - 3:00 PM CT (NOTE: This session starts at 1 PM instead of 1:30 PM CT!)

In this generative workshop, MIU faculty and undergraduate program director Mel McCuin will deepen the coversation on the image by looking in-depth at the haiku. To create vibrant haiku, a writer must use language that appeals to the five senses: sight, taste, touch, sound, and smell. In this workshop, participants will explore the role of sensory detail in poetry and craft three to four haiku. 

Melanie McCuin received her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Northern Arizona University in 2014. She currently teaches composition and creative writing at Maharishi International University where she is our new undergraduate program director. Her writing has appeared in The Salt River Review, The Gila River Review, The Blue Guitar, and Unstrung. Her most recent work can be viewed in the June 2022 issue of Salamander and at howweare.org, a website devoted to the reflections of musicians, artists, and writers during the Covid-19 pandemic. Mel also creates video poems.

• Video will be uploaded here after the event. •

• PANEL and Q&A - REPLAY LIVE (followed by live discussion)
  Knowing the Unknowable: Intuition and Risk in Poetry and Prose
  with Kelli Russel Agodon, Susan Rich, Mona Power, Jennifer Espinoza, and Nynke Passi
  Time: 7:30 - 9:30 PM CT

Event from Spring 2024.

We don’t talk enough about the power of accessing the intuitive mind to deepen our creative process and work. Drawing on an inclusive feminine perspective and Indigenous wisdom, panelists chart their personal journeys into the mysterious wilderness of the imagination where we know the unknowable, where poems and stories sing in the trees of our bones, where passions ignite and dreams call from subconscious depth, offering metaphors as gifts. How can meditation, mindfulness, yoga, and self-care open us to silence so we listen and hear? 

In this panel, we’ll dialogue about our risky, glorious relationship with our intuition. Panelists share tools to facilitate creative and emotional risk taking and connection to intuition to help us hear our inner voices and peel back deeper layers of ourselves. Our panel represents an inclusive feminine perspective and honors Indigenous approaches to finding new ways of seeing and other ways of being as writers. Tonight we will hear from Kelli Russel Agodon, Susan Rich, Mona (Susan) Power, Jennifer Espinoza, and Nynke Passi.

Susan Rich is the author of eight books including Blue Atlas (forthcoming from Red Hen Press), Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems (Salmon Poetry), Cloud Pharmacy, The Alchemist’s Kitchen, named a finalist for the Foreword Prize and the Washington State Book Award, Cures Include Travel, and The Cartographer’s Tongue, winner of the PEN USA Award. Along with Brian Turner and Ilya Kaminsky, she edited The Strangest of Theatres: Poets Writing Across Borders (Poetry Foundation). She has received awards and fellowships from Fulbright Foundation, PEN USA, The Times Literary Supplement of London, Peace Corps Writers, Artist Trust, CityArtists, and 4Culture.

Mona Susan Power is the author of three books: The Grass Dancer (a novel), Roofwalker (a story collection), Sacred Wilderness (a novel), and A Council of Dolls (a novel). The Grass Dancer was awarded a PEN/Hemingway prize in 1995 and Roofwalker a Milkweed National Fiction Prize in 2002. Her new novel, A Council of Dolls, is a finalist in the 2024 Minnesota Book Awards. Her short stories and essays have been widely published in journals, magazines, and anthologies including: The Best American Short Stories of 1993, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The Southern Review and Granta. Her fellowships include an Iowa Arts Fellowship, James Michener Fellowship, Radcliffe Bunting Institute Fellowship, Princeton Hodder Fellowship, USA Artists Fellowship, Loft McKnight Fellowship for 2015-16, and Native Arts and Cultures Fellowship for 2016-17. She is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Kelli Russell Agodon is the author of four collections of poems, including the award-winning Dialogues with Rising Tides (Links to an external site.), which was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2021. She is the cofounder of Two Sylvias Press as well as the Co-Director of Poets on the Coast: A Weekend Retreat for Women. Agodon lives in a sleepy seaside town in Washington State on traditional land of the Chimacum, Coast Salish, S'Klallam, and Suquamish people. She is an avid paddleboarder and hiker. She teaches at Pacific Lutheran University’s low-res MFA program, the Rainier Writing Workshop.

For bios of Nynke and Jennifer, see first event on the page.