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Writing MOOCs from U of Iowa

Megan McShea linked to this—the University of Iowa has released a bunch of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Course) about writing. They include a class for teens on poetry, a couple years worth of study on how writers write poetry and fiction, a deep dive into Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” and a class focused on women writers. Each course is packaged with an overview and a syllabus. There’s a lot to be explored.

Iowa does this “in order to support education for all… Using a MOOC-Pack, anyone can lead a writing class or a study group.”

Within the classes there’s a talk by Kate Greenstreet about how she comes up with her poems using a tool she calls “The Epic.” (It’s cool; her basic practice is to write things down on whatever scrap of paper she has at hand and then entering them into a Word doc, and filtering / editing the fragments. “Occasionally something great happens just by itself,” she says in the video.)

Angela Flournoy, author of book-I-liked The Turner House, teaches “How Writers Write Fiction 2015“—and I was going to share the intro video to this MOOC here, but the privacy settings only let you watch them within Vimeo.

So instead, as long as we’re talking about videos, is this a good time to revisit the YouTube collection Megan McShea put together for her book of poetry, A Mountain City of Toad Splendor?

 

Adam Robinson
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About The Author

Adam Robinson

Adam Robinson lives in Atlanta and runs Publishing Genius Press. He is the author of two poetry collections, Adam Robison and Other Poems and Say Poem.

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