Tim Bascom is the author of a novel, a collection of short fiction, two collections of essays, and two prize-winning memoirs about years spent in East Africa as a youth: Chameleon Days and Running to the Fire. His essays have been selected for the anthologies Best Creative Nonfiction and Best American Travel Writing. His short fiction has appeared in journals such as Zone 3, Front Range Review, and Flint Hills Review, winning the Briar Cliff Fiction Prize. Bascom received his MFA from the University of Iowa and taught creative writing for 20 years at a college level, also leading writing workshops annually for 15 years as part of the Iowa Summer Writing Festival in Iowa City. He currently directs the Kansas Book Festival, and his seventh book—The Boundless Game: Soccer Stories from Across the Street to Around the World—will be released in March, 2026, by the University Press of Kansas.

I am willing to tailor what is needed based on funding that is possible, but here is what I usually charge:
Primary Performance Fee: $250 for one-hour presentation
Workshop Fee: $300 for two-hour session, $600 for full day workshop (typically two sessions and a group critique session)

Travel and lodging fees to be negotiated separately per project

I am a skilled, experienced guest author, having presented from my books at universities, libraries, churches, retreat centers, and major writing conferences. I have also led dozens of related workshops. One of my main themes is the importance of connecting across cultures. Another is the importance of memory and, with it, the stories that give us a sense of identity. And I’m glad to talk about family or parent-child relations. Here is a list of four presentations that would be possible:

Program #1 (based on my 2025 collection of short stories Continental Drift): Border Crossings: Fictional and Real
Program #2 (based on my forthcoming 2026 book The Boundless Game): A Kansan, Soccer, and the Wide, Wide World
Program #3 (based on an earlier essay collection titled Climbing Lessons): Formed by Family
Program #4 (based on my memoirs Chameleon Days and Running to the Fire): The Stories We Become

When speaking as an author, I tend to read short selections, knowing that attention can lag with longer excerpts. I give context and often accompany the readings with visual PowerPoint imagery, and I aim to generate discussion, inviting responses from the audience and saving time for question-and-answer at the end.

I love to lead workshops on writing and have done that in many settings with both youth and adults. I can work with novices on single starter scenes in their memory-based, narrative essays, as I have done with high school students at an writing festival I began in Iowa. I can help more-advanced students to experiment with new forms: not just narrative but reflective, braided, segmented, lyric, etc. I can tackle specific sub-genres of creative nonfiction: such as memoir, travel writing, or the essay of social witness. And I can help participating writers to understand why and when some inventive imagination is necessary with fact-based writing. Possible workshop titles include “Larger than Life: Writing a Memoir About More than the Self,” “An Enormous Eye: Writing the Reflective Topical Essay,” “The Journey Within: Travel Writing and Transcendence,” “Here and Now: Writing about Place,” “Formed by Family: Writing about Those Who Shape Us,” “and “Necessary Lies: the Freedom to Invent in Creative Nonfiction.”