Writing Interiors: An All Genre Workshop

Elizabeth Alexander writes in Black Interior about her mother's shelves, “I call the six shelves together an altar…the power of precious objects put together to add up to more than their mere sum; the power of the stories behind each object; the power of family… The living room is where she reveals who we are.” How we decorate our interior houses is how we view our interior selves, and to explore this interior is to tap into a pool of creative energy. The vivid descriptions of our houses are a space for recovery and rediscovery as we form intimate relationships with our past selves. In this workshop, we will be examining how brilliant novelists, poets, and essayists like Toni Morrison, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Cornelius Eady, to name a few, have used interiority to represent interior selves to push their writing forward. During the first three sessions, we will discuss established writers' techniques for composing interiority and generate new writing that invokes the intimate self. The last session will focus on workshopping our pieces and reflecting on how to craft our own interior spaces.

Instructor

Glen Waters (he/him) is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He was born in Dallas, Texas, and graduated from Georgetown University with English Honors, receiving the Emilia Ferrara Award for Best Creative Writing Thesis. Glen is a Napa Valley Writers Conference John Leggit scholarship recipient, Kansas University Black Book Interactive Project Intro to Digital Humanities Fellow, and adjunct professor at the University of Iowa. Glen’s work can be found in Stephen F. Austin’s Journal of Multicultural Affairs. Currently, he serves as a council member of Iowa City Poetry and is the editor of Black Poetry Review.