Eric Olsen

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Born
in Oakland, CA, The United States
June 25

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May 2011

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I was born and raised in Oakland—go A’s! California. I'm a journalist, editor, and occasional novelist. My sixth non-fiction book, We Wanted to be Writers: Life, Love, and Literature at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, was released August 1, 2011. It's a series of conversations about writing, the creative process, the lit biz, and more with nearly 30 classmates and teachers at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in the mid-70s. Among them are TC Boyle, Jane Smiley, John Irving, Sandra Cisneros, Allan Gurganus, Michelle Huneven, Joe Haldeman, and Jayne Anne Phillips. My co-editor is Glenn Schaeffer.

As a journalist I write mostly about culture, also health, fitness, sports, and medicine. But I'll write about anything if it's interesting, and I have. For
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We Wanted to be Writers: Life, Love, and Literature at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop

In the intercepts that comprise We Wanted to be Writers, Glenn Schaeffer and I and our fellow Iowa workshoppers discuss what we learned in the Workshop back in the mid-‘70s — and what we didn’t learn, but wish they had — and what we learned in the decades after about life, art, the creative process, teaching, the lit biz, and much more. Our goal is to provide advice and counsel and analysis, maybe

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Published on February 10, 2020 18:15
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“Your willingness to explore or confess all that you know about life emotionally. You must render yourself open, maybe painfully so, and deeply interpretive toward your own experience. Writing becomes a personal forensic. Experience, not belief or intellectual conviction, by turns prodigal and indecent and subliminal: that’s what you transfigure and clarify into story. 2.  Your realization of oppositional or pivotal conflict through dramatic dialogue, never exposition, and the nemesis gets the better lines, as in real life. 3.   Your discovery of a resolution that won’t be the same as the one you envisioned when you began.”
Eric Olsen, We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love, and Literature at the Iowa Writers' Workshop

“Howard Gruber, a psychology professor at Rutgers, said, “One thing creative people have in common is energy. You frequently find that creative people go for a lot of walks.” “When I sit around with other poets and we talk about the times we feel like writing, often it’s after having done something physical,” Marvin told me. “One of the secrets of life is oxygen; the more you have, the better able you are to do everything, even write a poem.”29”
Eric Olsen, We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love, and Literature at the Iowa Writers' Workshop

“Writer’s block comes from one’s wanting only to write good stuff. Well, the good stuff and the bad stuff are all part of the stuff. No good stuff without bad stuff.”
Eric Olsen, We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love, and Literature at the Iowa Writers' Workshop

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