Getting Unstuck with Ramona Ausubel

Event date:
Saturday, May 30
Event time:
1:30pm-2:30pm
Location:
Brower Center, Goldman Theater
Audiences:
Booksales:
Tally Ho, in the lobby of the venue

Being a writer means coming up against self-doubt. But what if it doesn’t have to be so scary? What if the blank page felt more like an invitation than a cliff?

Does it sometimes seem like your novel is trying to kill you? Have you considered divorcing a story? Me too.

In this gathering we will work through a few exercises designed to bring joy and a sense of possibility and invention so that you and your writing will once again be besties (or at least unlikely to murder each other).

Based on my new book UNSTUCK: 101 Doorways Leading from the Blank Page to the Last Page (Tin House, 4/14/26)

Dan Alter

Dan Alter’s poems, reviews and translations have been published in journals including Field, Fourteen Hills, and Zyzzyva; his first collection My Little Book of Exiles won the 2022 Cowan Poetry Prize. A volume of translations Take a Breath, You’re Getting Excited, from the Hebrew of Yakir Ben-Moshe, was published by Ben Yehuda Press in September 2024, and Hills Full of Holes, a second collection of poems, by Fernwood Press in March 2025. He lives with his wife and daughter in Berkeley. He works at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at UC Berkeley.

2025 Writers’ Workshops

Speaker A Compass in the Wilderness: Poetry in the Age of Environmental Crisis