Monthly Reading for Writers [Monthly Single-Session, $30 suggested]
Instructor: Various Faculty | First Sunday of the Month | 6:00-7:30 PM ET | ONLINE
It’s a truism that one sure-fire way to improve your writing is to read more. We agree! But we also think that discussing what you read, with an eye toward form and technique, is even better.
Join us the first Sunday of every month from 6-7:30 PM for a discussion of short literary works, an in-session timed writing exercise to get you going, and a few prompts to take away. These meetings are not genre specific, and will range across personal essays, poetry, fiction, cultural critique and more. At each meeting, we’ll focus on a specific aspect of literary form or practice, and use prompts to get out of our own way and get to writing!
Sign up for the meetings that interest you, and come discuss! Some meetings will include longer readings, but we’ll narrow the focus for discussion down to a few pages. We’ll cover a wide variety of topics across practices and techniques, including how to: create a habit, use notes and fragments, write metaphorically, elevate your prose, “show don’t tell,” explore poetic form, find your identity and voice, develop characters, create plot, mobilize scale and point of view, argue convincingly, incorporate evidence and citations, use irony, and more.
You’ll receive access to the short works beginning two weeks before each meeting. We’ll spend ~45 minutes discussing the assigned work, ~15-20 minutes writing, and ~15-20 minutes discussing our experience of writing at each meeting.
November 5: Narrative Voice
How do authors create distinctive language, tone, and sense of personality in their writing? Voice is an important component of writing across genres, and writers can work for years to settle into a voice that becomes representative of their writing style. This generative workshop will explore how details like language, tone, and sentence structure contribute to our overall sense of an author's voice. Together, we will read Ilya Kaminsky's "We Lived Happily During the War" as well as an excerpt from Carmen Maria Machado's story "Help Me Follow My Sister into the Land of the Dead."
Provocations:
How do writers create a distinctive voice?
Where and how does personality enter a narrative?
What does it mean to develop your voice as a writer?
December 3: Beginning and Ending
The beginning and ending of a piece of writing have an undeniably important impact on the work as a whole--be it a novel, a poem, a short story, or an essay. How do we begin and end our own writing with intention? How can we use the beginning and ending of our work to shape the reading experience? This generative workshop will consider the beginning and end of Lauren Groff's "Ghosts and Empties" and "Yport," which bookend her short story collection Florida. We will use the information we find through close reading to inform our own work, and will use generative writing time to create our own intentional beginnings and endings.
Provocations:
When we open a story or a book, what are we inviting our readers into?
How can a beginning serve as a portal, and an ending as a crossing over?
What can we learn from the openings and closings of our favorite books?
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If at any point up to 48 hours before your first class session you realize you will be unable to take the class, please email us and we will reallocate your funds to a future class, to another student’s scholarship, or refund it. After classes begin, we are only able to make partial refunds and adjustments.