D. A. Hosek

Just another writer

  • Residency day 8

    We’re just about done with the residency. We started with the genre workshop with Tibor Fischer and Corinna Vallianatos talking about beginnings of works. We workshopped a new piece that I wrote this week and despite it being relatively rough in my opinion was well-received by everyone else. I went for a walk after lunch…

  • Residency day 7

    The pacing of the residency is such that it kind of feels like it’s all coasting from here on. The morning seminar was “Anthology” with Denis Johnson in which we contributed poems that made us want to be a writer. I, being a fiction person, lied and chose “These Poems, She Said” by Robert Bringhurst.…

  • Residency day 6

    The seminar slots today were the conclusion of Heather Sellers’s three-part pedagogy workshop dealing this time with syllabus planning and interviewing for academic jobs. There were a number of good ideas offered up. Overall I found Heather’s seminars far more helpful than her books. Also on the docket today was the “wildcard workshop.” The idea…

  • Residency day 5

    The mid-point of the residency and the traditional morning-time reading and writing period. I got a bunch of work done including some work on the novel. After lunch we had first synthesis (it was interesting to see someone else’s take on the time). Interestingly, it seemed that most of the synthesis groups finished up early.…

  • Residency day 4

    The morning seminar was John Capouya talking about ways that as writers of fiction or narrative non-fiction we can employ some of the techniques of screenwriting. There’s a lot to be said for the highly formalized structures that screenwriters apply from the “save the cat” approach to making the protagonist sympathetic to the audience to…

  • Residency day 3

    Today started with a conversation with agent Chris Parris-Lamb.  It was a fairly well conceived presentation, although most of this was things that I already knew. A few choice quotes: Most important thing is to make the book as good as possible. Wait and take your time. Your query letter needs to be as well-written…

  • Residency day 2

    Don Morill’s seminar was “Sentences & Paragraphs as Aesthetic Performance.” There were some interesting thoughts on linguistic structure and how it can be enhanced, although perhaps the most interesting part of the seminar came early when he produced Su Hui’s “Star Gauge” Courtesy of some aspects of Chinese linguistic structure the above can be read…

  • Beautiful sentences

    And what Sunny would like to say, but doesn’t, is that she’s afraid that after living here she’ll go home no different. She’ll be the same as she was, and she won’t have learned anything about anything. Maile Chapman, Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto

  • Residency day 1

    And I’m back. Today I inaugurated a new tradition for the first day of the residency. Unlike past residencies, I managed to make it to the meet and greet not only on time, but a bit early. There was the usual mix of greeting the old and familiar and meeting the new and the strange.…