Class Description
"The moment was all. The moment was enough," Virginia Woolf wrote in The Waves, bringing everything down to the pocket-sized glory of appreciating a single fine point of experience. Woolf was a master of the moment, and this seminar asks you to concentrate on this smallest of units in your writing and inhabit it. The moment can take the form of a thought, a dream, a fantasy, an epiphany, an observation, or a philosophical, religious, or scientific meditation that begins with a second and stretches out to form what Woolf called "a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope" over a series of pages. We will treat the moment both as an end in itself and as a way to illuminate your characters' outer or inner landscapes. The aim of this class is to give "the life of the mind"—reflection, realization, memory, mirage, wonder, or faith—a place to expand in your writing. The class is appropriate for all kinds of creative writers, from novelists who want to get into the heads of their protagonists, to memoirists who need to spend time contemplating a particular event, to essayists who wish to unravel a twist, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant.
This class will be divided into part lecture, with analysis and discussion of writing by Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Vladimir Nabokov, Eudora Welty, Frank Conroy, Paul Harding, Ethan Canin, and Teju Cole, and part workshop, in which you will experiment with moments, turning points, and consciousness to produce new scenes and passages.
Scholarships
Format/Location
Thanks to the excellent literary citizenship of our donors, scholarships are available for all GrubStreet classes. To apply, click the gray "APPLY FOR SCHOLARSHIP" button. In order to be considered for a scholarship, you must complete your application at least one week before the start date of a class. Please await our scholarship committee's decision before registering for the class. We cannot hold spots in classes, so the sooner you apply, the better. Scholarships cannot be applied retroactively.
For more detailed information about GrubStreet scholarships, including how to contribute to scholarship funds for other students, click here.
This class will take place using Zoom videoconferencing. Please visit the Resources tab to access the video-conference link.
Zoom Participation:
Students are not required to turn their camera on, but are encouraged to participate any way they feel comfortable through functions such as the live chat, emoji reactions, and unmuting the microphone. Learn more about using Zoom here.
Zoom Accessibility:
We ask that instructors enable closed captioning and send a transcript of the session after class. You can also enable closed captioning at any time during the meeting. If your instructor forgets to send the transcript, just send ’em an email!
