University of Iowa

Hope Edelman

Hope Edelman is the author of eight nonfiction books, including the bestseller Motherless Daughters and the eBook Boys Like That: Two Cautionary Tales of Love. Her articles and essays have appeared in numerous publications, ranging from The New York Times, Writer’s Digest, and Real Simple to The Iowa Review, Brevity.com, and Assay. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year designation, as well as honors from the Medill Hall of Achievement at Northwestern University and The University of Iowa Alumni Fellows program. Hope lives with her husband and two daughters in Los Angeles, where she is working on a new book about the long tail of grief. This is her 19th summer teaching in the Festival. 

 

 

Instructor Events

The Story beneath Your Story: A Memoir-in-Progress Workshop

Weeklong June 09 to June 14 2019
Instructor(s): 
Hope Edelman

Memoirists face two important tasks: First, to tell the plotted story of action, and second, to tell the story of one’s own change and growth over time. That second story, the emotional arc, conveys the author’s larger message, elevating one person’s experience from the unique and personal to the universal and shared. It reveals what your story is truly about. But how do we extract that deeper message from a story, and articulate it to readers in a meaningful way?

Time and Place: What Happened, Where and When

Weekend June 15 to June 16 2019
Instructor(s): 
Hope Edelman

“You couldn’t write a story that happened nowhere,” Eudora Welty has famously said. Every story takes place somewhere. But too often, writers don’t allow for or don’t recognize how important Place is to their stories. The same is true for Time, which is overlooked even more often. This workshop acknowledges that narratives unfold within a context of geography, time period, and culture. What happened to you in the past probably could not have happened to you quite that way at any other time or in any other place.