Class Description
Everyone urges you to read like a writer, but what does that mean? It means looking for ideas to challenge and for techniques to steal. And for six weeks, that’s what we’ll be doing. We’ll read some of the most successful contemporary and classic stories and ask why they work, and more important, how we can use these same narrative techniques in our own writing. We will read selectively from Francine Prose’s book Reading Like a Writer and from works by such writers as:
- E.B. White
- Martha Gellhorn
- Susan Sontag
- Donald Barthelme
- Chimamanda Adichie
- Gary Lutz
- Gish Jen
- Italo Calvino
- Sandra Leong
We will also do short weekly writing exercises in which you take these narrative voices for a little joyride. By the end of the course, you’ll have a lot of practice taking apart narrators and stories in order to discover what makes them work. You will also have a collection of narrative exercises that you can expand into stories. Please bring a copy of Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose to the first day of class.
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. After registering, a yellow Resources tab will appear in this section containing a link to join class. Please note that you will need to be logged into view the Resources tab.
Zoom Participation:
In our experience, the intimate nature of a writing workshop benefits from on-camera participation. Students are of course welcome to turn their camera off whenever they need to, but it is a community norm for cameras to be on most of the time. You can learn more about using Zoom here.
Zoom Accessibility:
You can enable closed captioning at any time during the meeting by clicking the CC button at the bottom of the screen. If you'd like to access the transcript after class, please make sure to let your instructor ahead of time that you'd like a copy.