Four Stories in Four Weeks: Start the New Year with a Creative Explosion. Robert Anthony Siegel, Instructor.

IOWA SUMMER WRITING FESTIVAL 

Fall 2023–Winter 2024 

Four Stories in Four Weeks: Start the New Year with a Creative Explosion (Four-Week Workshop) 

Robert Anthony Siegel, Instructor 

Dates/Time 

Course Description 

Just getting started on a new story can feel intimidating. Where do you begin? How do you deepen and explore? How do you keep your creative momentum up? And how do you challenge yourself to keep growing as a writer?   

This class is designed to help you start four new stories in just four weeks. Each week, we will use a series of guided exercises to start a brand-new story, one that offers interesting technical challenges and opens new artistic horizons. By the end of every class, students will have a good start on a new story and a rough outline of how it continues. 

The course includes a 30-minute one-on-one Zoom conference with the instructor focusing on one of the story beginnings you generate in class, with an eye toward how best to complete the piece.   

This course welcomes writers at all levels of experience. No preparation needed. Just come to class ready to write, explore, and share. 

Takeaways:  

Week 1: A love story   

Week 2: A hate story   

Week 3: A story that starts with a character rant  

Week 4: A story told in fragments 

Instructor 

Robert Anthony Siegel is the author of a memoir, Criminals, and two novels, All Will Be Revealed and All the Money in the World. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian Magazine, The Paris Review, The Drift, The Oxford American, and Ploughshares, and has been anthologized in Best American Essays 2023, O. Henry Stories 2014, and Pushcart Prize XXXVI. He has been a Fulbright Scholar in Taiwan, a Mombukagakusho Fellow in Japan, a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and a Paul Engle Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a BA from Harvard. 

Registration & Fees 

The fee for this course is $450. Payment in full is required to register. 

Registrations are accepted on a first-come, first-served basis.

Class size is limited to 12.

Note: Your credit card payment will be processed by an external provider and will appear on your credit card statement as “UI Writing—Magid Center.” 

Refund & Cancellation Policy 

If you need to cancel your enrollment, please let us know as soon as possible. We can only offer full refunds if you cancel one week prior to the start of class. After that, before the start-date of class, we can offer a 50% refund. We cannot refund day-of cancellations, and we cannot refund or partially refund registration fees once the class has begun. 

Terms & Community Policy 

1.  The Iowa Summer Writing Festival is a program for adults. You must be at least 18 years old to enroll in Festival workshops. 

2.  The Iowa Summer Writing Festival is a community built on an assumption of shared enterprise, in the spirit of mutual respect. We reserve the right to a) revoke the registration of or b) dismiss from the program any person who disrupts the learning/working environment of others. Participants in the Festival are subject to all University of Iowa policies governing conduct in our community, whether online or in person. 

Questions? 

Contact the Iowa Summer Writing Festival: iswfestival@uiowa.edu. Phone: (319) 335-4160. 

Our small staff is out and about. If you phone and we miss you, please leave a detailed message!