How I Write

The How I Write Series

Host Hilton Obenzinger brings faculty and advanced writers from across the disciplines to explore the nuts and bolts, pleasures and pains, of all types of writing.

In conversation with his distinguished guests, Hilton examine writers' habits, idiosyncrasies, techniques, trade secrets, hidden anxieties, and delights.

We will discuss how a writer generates ideas, sustains large-scale projects, combines research with composition, overcomes various impediments and blocks, and cultivates stylistic innovations.

Writing communities share experiences (even bad ones), so that all writers can learn and grow; Stanford is an exceptionally rich community for gaining such insights.

Next Event

How I Write: A Conversation with Susan Krieger

              

Lecturer and Sociologist, Feminist Studies, Stanford University

Wednesday, April 25th, 2012
   7:30 p.m.
 Geology Corner (Bldg. 320), Room 105
 FREE and open to the public

Susan Krieger is the author of Traveling Blind: Adventures in Vision with a Guide Dog by My Side (2010). This book is a romance, a travel adventure, an emotional quest, and a deeply reflective description of coming to terms with lack of sight. It reveals the invisible work of navigating with a guide dog while learning to perceive the world in new ways. Krieger’s writings are highly personal and in recent years have focused on disability.

During this conversation, we will ask Krieger about her innovative writing in the social sciences, including her latest work in progress, The Art of the Intimate Narrative: Unconventional Academic Writing. Her other books include Things No Longer There: A Memoir of Losing Sight and Finding Vision (2005), The Family Silver: Essays on Relationships among Women (1996), Social Science and the Self: Personal Essays on an Art Form (1991), The Mirror Dance: Identity in a Women’s Community (1983), and Hip Capitalism (1979).

 Krieger is a sociologist and lecturer in the Program in Feminist Studies at Stanford.

  

Read more about this event at Stanford Continuing Studies. 

Archive

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More than two dozen How I Write conversations are now available via Stanford on iTunes. See and hear guests from bass guitar star Victor Wooten to chemist Richard Zare, from acclaimed essayist Rebecca Solnit to theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind.

Selected Transcripts

Transcripts are available for selected How I Write conversations.

All "How I Write" Authors

A complete list of How I Write guests from 2002 to the present.

 

Press

"How I Write" has been featured in The Human Experience: Inside the Humanities at Stanford:

Each quarter Obenzinger invites someone who writes, including all types of experienced writers in all sorts of genres and forms, to share their writing style, habits, pleasures and pains with an audience. Over the years, Obenzinger has heard it all, from a scientist who quotes Shakespeare in research articles to a novelist who only writes while wearing her favorite cowboy hat. As peculiar as some of these quirks may sound, Obenzinger has discovered that there are all kinds of ways to write, and he shares this mantra with the undergraduates who turn to him for assistance when tackling, what for many is their first long-form writing project, their honors theses. In addition to fiction writers, writers from a wide range of fields, including political science, engineering, poetry and human biology have taken part in “How I Write” events. Past guests have included Stanford President John Hennessey, English professor and director of American Studies Shelley Fisher Fishkin and political science professor Terry Karl. Other speakers have included scientists such as Richard Zare and computer scientist Eric Roberts.

Read more at The Human Experience.

 

For more information about Writing Center events, please contact HWC Administrative Coordinator Vania Sciolini (vsvania@stanford.edu).