WEDNESDAY, February 15, 2:30-3:30 p.m., Hagerty Lounge 
“Are We There Yet? Process vs. Productivity in Writing the Novel” by Judith Claire Mitchell
There were twenty-four years between the publication of Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize winner Gilead and her previous novel Housekeeping; twelve years between Edward P. Jones' Pulitzer winner The Known World and his previous book Lost in the City; ten between Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex and The Virgin Suicides. What is it about the novel that takes so darned long? And what impels novelists to see their visions through even when it takes a decade or longer to do so? Drawing from personal experience as well as the experiences of other writers, Judith Claire Mitchell, author of the novel The Last Day of the War, will discuss common stumbling blocks encountered in completing this often unwieldy form and various practical ways to overcome them.
Judith Claire Mitchell is the author of the novel The Last Day of the War. Her short stories and poetry have appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies including Prairie Schooner, StoryQuarterly, The Iowa Review, and Best of the Fiction Workshops. A former recipient of the James C. McCreight Fiction Fellowship and a Michener-Copernicus Society of America Fellowship, she is currently a professor in the English Department of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she co-directs the Program in Creative Writing and directs the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.
WEDNESDAY, March 14, 2:30-3:30 p.m., Hagerty Lounge
“Poetry & Film” by Shane Book
What can poets learn from film? This talk will examine cinematic structures and poetic strategies in an effort to investigate how two seemingly disparate practices—that of motion-picture making and that of poetry writing—engage and inform one another.
Shane Book is poet and filmmaker. His first collection, Ceiling of Sticks (University of Nebraska Press, 2010) won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize. His short film Dust, based on a poem in the book, was nominated for Best Narrative at the 2011 Diamond Screen Film Festival. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. His work has appeared in fifteen anthologies and over forty magazines in the U.S., U.K., and Canada. His honors include a New York Times Fellowship in Poetry, Fellowships to the Flaherty Film Seminar and the Telluride Film Festival, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and a National Magazine Award.
WEDNESDAY, April 11, 2:30-3:30 p.m., Hagerty Lounge
“’Male’ Writing versus ‘Female’ Writing: Some Perspective on Politics, Gender, Identity, and the Act of Writing Consciously” by Samina Ali
In an interview with Royal Geographic Society, V.S. Naipaul, Booker Prize winner, claims that women writers are no match for men. Women writing, he states, is "too sentimental" and has a "narrow view of the world." He goes on to state that he can "read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not." In a talk that challenges Naipaul's claim, novelist and memoirist Samina Ali will read a few paragraphs of fiction and nonfiction writers' works without revealing the writer's gender, asking audience members to deconstruct the writing to see how it works on multiple levels: character, plot, dialogue, description, place, and setting. Is the passage "too sentimental" or "narrow" or in other ways stereotypically “male” or “female”? Do women writers confine themselves to the domestic sphere while men conquer politics and economics, the world? How would Toni Morrison (also Nobel Prize winner), J.K. Rowling or Gloria Steinem answer these questions? Finally, as perhaps most tellingly, what do our answers mean? As a Muslim woman of Indian descent who grew up in the Midwest, Ali will take on these questions and talk about her own writing process as well, how she has consciously used gender and identity to her advantage in her work.
Samina Ali was born in Hyderabad, India and raised both there and in the United States. Her debut novel, Madras On Rainy Days, was awarded the Prix Premier Roman Etranger 2005 Award by France and was also chosen as the finalist for both the PEN/Hemingway Award in Fiction as well as the California Book Reviewers Award. Poets & Writers magazine named Madras as one of the Top 5 Best Debut Novels of the Year in 2004. Ali speaks regularly at colleges across the country and has traveled internationally with the U.S. State Department. She has written for Self and Child magazines, The San Francisco Chronicle and The New York Times.
