The Free Gen with Jing Jian

Co-sponsored by PorchLight and Iowa City Poetry, the Free Generative Writing Workshops provide a space for career writers, curious beginners, writers of all income levels and stages of life. Our goal is to make it easy to meet and learn from some of the most talented writer/teachers living in or passing through Iowa City. Every month a new writer leads a generative workshop, presenting a prompt inspired by their own preoccupations, passions, or interests. It has been an adventure, and we are continually inspired by the creative concentration of participants, and the powerful beginnings the workshop generates.

JJ immigrated from Wuhan, China to the U.S at age 13. She is a graduate of MIT and the fiction program at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Her obsession is unreliable narrators who are forced into understanding their own unreliability. JJ is also a pole dancer, a burlesque performer, a standup comedian, and a software engineer. She’s working on her first novel.