I'm looking forward to participating in this reading with these amazing writers through Cambridge Writers' Workshop in support of the Black Visions Collective. I'll be sharing a collaborative work with composer/musician Rafaele Andrade from a larger project we've been working on. It will be streaming on Facebook Live--see link below.
Though we're not traveling to Granada this summer for obvious reasons, I'm teaching a couple of classes for the next two Saturdays, 3:30-5:30 EST. Class 2. Hopscotching Across Languages: Drawing Inspiration from Spanish Language Literature in Translation It is a given that writers must learn to read closely, with attention to nuance and craft, to […]
So happy to be celebrating the five-year anniversary of the debut event at the Word Barn. https://www.facebook.com/events/378410973141778 For this reading, we will gather - spread out and distanced in our meadow - to listen to the poems & stories of six writers - four of whom originally read and helped launch the very first Silo […]
So excited to be in conversation with Kerri Arsenault about her extraordinary, many-faceted book Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains, through the Bookery in Manchester. Stay tuned for more information.
I get to talk to Kerri Arsenault about her superb book Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains, which is a searing exploration of the legacy of pollution in her hometown, but also so much more: a multifaceted, layered look at how we wound up at this crossroads as a society, and how we might begin […]
Sometimes writers avoid research, while others might lose themselves in it, using it as a sneaky way to avoid the actual writing. In this class, we’ll aim to navigate between these extremes and find ways to use research to make your writing come more alive. We’ll explore how to take an expansive view of […]
In this class, we'll see how understanding a bit more about the brain can boost our own fiction writing. We'll revisit staple topics like detail, conflict, figurative language, character, dialogue, and point of view from this vantage point, learn how we can tap into the dreaming brain for inspiration, and even look at writer's block and hypergraphia (the compulsion to write) from a fresh angle. Through the lenses of neuroscience and neuropsychology, we'll also explore issues such as empathy, Theory of Mind, and memory. We'll look at writing from Garth Greenwell, Sheila Heti, Eduardo Halfon, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, and Valeria Luiselli.
Students will walk away from this class with array of practical techniques for their writerly toolkits: new ways of playing with metaphor, approaching dialogue, rendering internal monologue, and transforming life experience into fiction.
In our attention-span-challenged times, it takes a certain nerve to write long sentences, yet recent Booker longlisted books include Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones, and Lucy Ellman's Ducks, Newburyport, all of which revel in them. How do we explain this? Sentence length can seem almost accidental, a byproduct of style or point […]
As writers, we are encouraged to read widely, across genres and boundaries, yet only 3% of work published in English is that in translation, according to the University of Rochester. Where does that leave us as writers who wish to experience and learn from other places, which might offer alternative literary traditions, writing techniques, and […]
Playing with Perspective Saturday, April 17, 2021 12:00 PM 4:00 PM Online (map) A Fiction Workshop Level: All Levels Point of view is fundamental to fiction. It shapes everything else about a story, from believable characters to the unfolding of plot, and ultimately a reader’s sense of the work’s overarching vision and concerns. But beyond […]