Teaching
The Patience to Teach
Taken for Granite: My Life in Kayos By Ross Howell Ross followed a career in academic fundraising, public relations, book publishing, and marketing after receiving his MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He’s now freelancing non-fiction and fiction, and teaching at Elon University. He lives in Greensboro, NC, with his wife, Mary Leigh, English cocker spaniel [...]
Jane Smiley on Teaching Writing
Jane’s comments are excerpted from the transcript of our panel at the AWP conference in Chicago earlier this month, “Can the Creative Process Be Taught? Or Will Chicken Soup Do?” My life as a writing teacher has had three phases. The first one was when I was a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I [...]
Gifts from Down Under
The multi-talented Bill Manhire, author of the kickass intro to We Wanted to Be Writers, and director of the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand (among myriad other thriving pursuits) has a new book out next month. Co-authored with several fellow faculty members, The Exercise Book: Creative Writing Exercises [...]
THE BOOK, Reviewed
We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love and Literature at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop Eric Olsen and Glenn Schaeffer, Skyhorse Publishing, A Herman Graf Book 2011, 344 pages A Handbook for Young Writers (of All Ages) [...]
Three Rules for Teaching Writing
By Ross Howell Ross is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop re-entering teaching after a long interlude of doing other stuff. Teaching writing has been on my mind a lot lately. I’ll be leading a couple sections of Freshman Composition at Elon University in a few days. I’ve been scanning suggested textbooks, [...]
How Do You Know When You’ve Over-written?
A Useful Platitude By Ross Howell Ross Howell followed a career in academic fund-raising, public relations, book publishing, and marketing after receiving his MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1978. He’s now freelancing non-fiction and fiction full-time, and will be teaching at Elon University in the fall. He lives in Greensboro, NC, with his [...]
A Book That Taught Dan Guenther to Write
Dan Guenther is the author of four novels, most recently Glossy Black Cockatoos, the 2010 Colorado Authors’ League award selection for genre fiction. His collection of selected poems, The Crooked Truth, is the 2011 Colorado Authors’ League poetry award winner. A recent review on the Veteran Magazine blog “Books in Brief,” declares, “There is no mawkish [...]
How Important Is Rewriting?
By Ross Howell Ross Howell followed a career in academic fund-raising, public relations, book publishing, and marketing after receiving his MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1978. He’s now freelancing non-fiction and fiction full-time, and will be teaching at Elon University in the fall. He lives in Greensboro, NC, with his wife, Mary Leigh, [...]
A Book That Taught Geri Lipschultz to Write
The Book: Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle The Author: Vladimir Nabokov The Lessons: buoyancy, luminosity, linguistic intrigue, vocabulary, arrogance, to meld technique and passion, beauty Like a diver she reads, the fall haphazard or designed, selected by self or recommended by others. She is also thinking of herself, how to glean from the thing [...]
A Book that Taught Don Wallace to Write
This is the first post of a new weekly feature in which we review books—fiction, poetry, how-tos . . . all genres—that teach us something about writing. The Book: A Coffin For Dimitrios The Author: Eric Ambler The Movie: The Mask of Dimitrios (1945) dir. Jean Negulesco The Lessons: Pace, Setting, Character, Dialog, The Obvious [...]
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