Writing Co-Lab

The very best stories are often highly constructed, although they may appear perfectly natural. We will pick them apart, learn by dissecting literature with an eye for how a story is built and the choices the author made to create their work. This class will focus on close reading of passages from short stories and novels, including Jhumpa Lahiri, Claire Keegan, Ocean Vuong, Truman Capote, and many more. We will read these passages closely and examine them on the sentence level. What is working here and why? We will focus on the prose: the paragraph, the sentence, the word, the letter, and even the phoneme. We will talk about the speeds and flows of narrative time (scene, summary, gap), as well as the texture of language, voice, rhythm, and musicality, among other things. Along the way, I will also provide writing prompts to help you put into practice some of the craft tips and tricks we will be talking about in this class. This class is designed as a comprehensive deep dive to equip students with all the skills they need to approach future texts not only as readers but as writers.