The Practical Writer is a four-week seminar and writing workshop meeting twice a week that is centered around a series of obstacles.
At its core, writing is the process of confronting various challenges. The first and constant challenge is this: how does a person translate a feeling—the sense of a story— into something legible made of language and narrative and sound?
In the course of trying to solve that first problem, other problems arise. There is the problem of beginnings, and of endings, and the horizonless problem of the middle. There is the challenge of maintaining spontaneity in a sentence that may have been worked over many times. There is the problem of dialogue, of exposition, of imagery, of pacing. There is the question of conveying large emotions—grief, love, depression, elation, frenzy. There is the endless problem of how we spend our time when we are not writing and how that spent time will or won’t leak back into our work.
Each week we will focus on one or a few of these challenges through reading assignments and “writing restraints.” In class, we will discuss the readings and share some of our work aloud. Together we will investigate the practicalities, impracticalities, concerns, and rituals that may influence, galvanize or otherwise challenge a writer.
We will read book excerpts and short stories from writers that may include but are not limited to Yukiko Motoya, Jean Rhys, John Edgar Wideman, James Baldwin, David Markson, Derek Parfit, Jacques Lecoq, John Berger, Chinelo Okparanta, Virginia Woolf, Diane Cook, Ken Sparling, Marguerite Youcenar, Sara Manguso, Lydia Davis, Will Eno, Grace Paley, and Robert Walser.
ABOUT CATHERINE LACEY
Catherine Lacey is the author of three novels: Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, and Pew. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Playboy, and in her collection Certain American States. Lacey is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and was named one of Granta Magazine’s Best of Young American Novelists.