Authors on the Craft of Writing: A Rough Guide to the Mind and Heart
A Panel Discussion
Saturday, 26 Feb 2011 at 4:00 pm – Campanile Room, Memorial Union
Join us for a conversation with three authors who write from the trenches of experience, who treat landscape as a character and whose work wrestles with the mind and heart. Participants include the symposium keynotes. Pam Houston is the author of the collection of essays A Little More About Me and the award-winning Cowboys Are My Weakness. She is the director of creative writing at the University of California Davis. Peggy Shumaker is the Alaska State Writer Laureate. Her work includes the memoir Just Breathe Normally and six collections of poetry, including her latest, Gnawed Bones. Michael Perry is a humorist and author of the bestselling memoirs Population 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time and the newly released Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting. He is also a contributing editor to Men's Health. Part of the Symposium on Wildness, Wilderness & the Creative Imagination.The Symposium on Wildness, Wilderness, and the Creative Imagination is an environmental literary festival featuring readings, poetry performances, panel discussions, documentary films and book signings. All events are free and open to the public - no registration required. For more information, click here.
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This lecture was made possible in part by the generosity of F. Wendell Miller, who left his entire estate jointly to Iowa State University and the University of Iowa. Mr. Miller, who died in 1995 at age 97, was born in Altoona, Illinois, grew up in Rockwell City, graduated from Grinnell College and Harvard Law School and practiced law in Des Moines and Chicago before returning to Rockwell City to manage his family's farm holdings and to practice law. His will helped to establish the F. Wendell Miller Trust, the annual earnings on which, in part, helped to support this activity.
Cosponsored By:
- Bioethics Program
- College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
- Creative Writers’ Milieu
- Ecology, Evolution & Organismal Biology
- Geological & Atmospheric Sciences
- History
- LAS Miller Lecture Fund
- MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment
- Wallace Chair for Sustainable Agriculture
- Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)
Stay for the entire event, including the brief question-and-answer session that follows the formal presentation. Most events run 75 minutes.
Sign-ins are after the event concludes. For lectures in the Memorial Union, go to the information desk in the Main Lounge. In other academic buildings, look for signage outside the auditorium.
Lecture Etiquette
- Stay for the entire lecture and the brief audience Q&A. If a student needs to leave early, he or she should sit near the back and exit discreetly.
- Do not bring food or uncovered drinks into the lecture.
- Check with Lectures staff before taking photographs or recording any portion of the event. There are often restrictions. Cell phones, tablets and laptops may be used to take notes or for class assignments.
- Keep questions or comments brief and concise to allow as many as possible.