Iowa

How Writers Write Fiction 2015

September 24, 2015 By Mark Leave a Comment

This year’s free fiction MOOC from the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program is just beginning, and you can register here.

(Look for the ‘Sign Up’ link on the right side of the header.)

More info on the course here. Info on IWP MOOC’s past, present and future, here.

If you’re interested in the approach that the IWP takes to writing, and you would like to put together a workshop where you are, you should also check out the new MOOCpacks, which are designed with that goal in mind.

The MOOCpacks are available to anyone, anywhere in the world who wishes to use them in a group study, classroom, or workshop setting. The MOOCpacks provide course content and teaching tools for your use, but you can structure your group in any way you would like.

If it works in Kazakhstan, it should work anywhere. More about MOOCpacks here.

— Mark Barrett

2015 Iowa Poetry Writing MOOC

April 19, 2015 By Mark Leave a Comment

Several of the busted links I recently splinted together involved last year’s poetry and fiction MOOC’s from the University of Iowa. In tracking down those errant U of I pages — or at least the most recent placeholders — I ran across mention of this year’s free offerings.

Fortuitously, the 2015 version of How Writers Write Poetry just opened for registration on April 13th, after an initial delay. Registration will close on June 1st.

Having weathered an avalanche of entrepreneurial hyperbole about MOOC’s coming from Silicon Valley and its academic proxies, I think it is a good sign that the University of Iowa is continuing to make these courses available. The bottom line with any MOOC — as with anything else in life — is that you’re only going to get out of it what you put into it. For people in far-flung locations around the globe, however, having access to such experiences could be life changing.

— Mark Barrett

2 University of Iowa Creative Writing MOOC’s

May 17, 2014 By Mark Leave a Comment

Two free creative writing MOOC’s are now open for registration at the University of Iowa. The first course, How Writers Write Poetry, begins June 28th. The second course, How Writers Write Fiction, begins September 27th. Both courses run six weeks.

One of the great obstacles in learning to write, compared with most of the arts, is that it’s impossible to observe another writer’s process. You can watch a sculptor sculpt, you can watch a painter paint, you can follow a photographer and observe the composition of endless images, but when it comes to writing it’s all cerebral except for the tap-tap-tapping of keys. After hours you can learn to drink by hanging out with writers, you can learn to do drugs, you can even learn to be a cynical, jaded hater, but when it comes to craft and technique there’s nothing to note except perhaps a preference for hardware or software, as if that ever meant anything.

Whether you’re merely curious about how writers write or you’re worried that you’re doing it wrong, these courses are an invaluable opportunity to check in with people who, somehow, despite the odds, found their way. And as I’ve mentioned before, that’s literally — if not literarily — half the battle.

Spread the word. Enjoy.

— Mark Barrett

2 Literary University of Iowa MOOC’s 4U

March 2, 2014 By Mark 2 Comments

Like many institutions of higher learning, the University of Iowa (my alma mater) has begun offering Massive Open Online Courses. Given that Iowa is home to both the Iowa Writers Workshop and the International Writing Program it’s not surprising that the initial offerings play to those strengths.

The first course, which began in mid-February but is still open for registration, features an in-depth look at Whitman’s A Song of Myself. If you’re interested in poetry, the roots of modern poetry, American history, the roots of American individualism, or Whitman himself, you can’t go wrong here.

The second course, which begins in June, is called here, or run this search. The original site/pages seem to have been relocated at least once, making them hard to find.

— Mark Barrett

My Fiction Workshop Fortunes

July 26, 2010 By Mark 2 Comments

The capacity to tell stories is an accident of birth for me. I was born thinking this way. There was no point in my life when I did not think about stories and causal events, about humorous and dramatic ways in which events could be told, and about how a blank page could be filled with wonder. If I have wandered far and wide, and been driven, seduced or called away from writing in my life, I have always returned to a string of authorial stepping stones that connects my past with the future before me.

Actually becoming a writer — by which I do not mean a professional, but rather a practicing writer — is a combination of accident and intent. The more things go in your favor, the easier it is to harness gifts and put words to a page. The more things go against you, the more you must overcome. Whatever obstacles I’ve faced in life, I was born with a number of storytelling gifts. I also happened to be born and raised in a town that is home to a school that values fiction writing. That I neither knew nor cared about these things until I went to college is yet more evidence that the fates were being kind.

My Home Town School
By nature I am not a particularly adventurous person. I have tended most of my life to look before I leap, even when others have counseled that he who hesitates is lost. So it should not come as a surprise that when I finally decided to go to college, after considerable academic carnage in my high school career, I had no thought of going anywhere except to the school in my home town. It wouldn’t have mattered what college it was, or what town I had been born in: that’s what I would have done at that point in my life, and probably for a decade after. (It’s true that my grandmother, father, mother, aunt and uncle also went to the same university, but that’s not why I went. I went because it was familiar and close.)

That I was born in and grew up in Iowa City, Iowa, is an accident. That Iowa City is the home of the University of Iowa, which is the home of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is also an accident. I planned none of it, yet when I finally decided to wade into storytelling, after more academic carnage in college, the Workshop was there. [ Read more ]

The Ditchwalk Name

August 22, 2009 By Mark 5 Comments

Naming a web site used to be easy. You thought of the name you wanted, you registered the name, you put up your site.

Then came the speculators. Search for your domain name of choice today, or your second choice, or third, or tenth, and you’re likely to discover that the name has already been registered by someone who has no intention of ever using the domain to establish a web site. Rather, they hope to sell you the name for a vastly inflated price and turn a profit in doing so. Because domain names are based on language, and there are a finite number of words in any language, the speculators know that if they buy up the most common words and phrases, someone will inevitably come knocking….

In the parlance of business, this is called ‘making a market’ for a commodity — in this case, domain names. Other well known examples of this entrepreneurial spirit include Enron’s electric power market, oil topping $140 a barrel and driving gas prices past $4.00 at the pump, and those sexy real-estate-backed derivatives that were based on inflated mortgage values, leading to the housing crisis and the worst American recession in seventy years. (Your free markets in action.) [ Read more ]