🗓 9 classes from January 29 - March 25

🕰️ 2-hour sessions, Mondays 6pm-8pm

🗺 Location: 61 Felix St., Brooklyn, NY

💰 Tuition: Sliding scale of $50-$300

✍️ Class size: 12

📋 Application: https://forms.gle/w5z45xWgqFKVnrmx6* Deadline: January 8

*One person (that I know of) has had trouble with this form. It’s worked for others. In the case that you click submit and it looks like nothing has happened, please email me your responses directly at [email protected].

About the class

This is a course about writing enjoyably and telling great stories. It starts from the suspicion that those two things could be connected.

Our primary aims will be:

• to develop strength and vision as writers;
• to foster a vibrant and happy community of practice;
• to delight, terrify, and bewilder one another with the figments of our imaginations.

There are three main ways this class will differ from (and perhaps complement) the traditional university or grad school creative writing workshop.

1. Strong focus on generation & process (as opposed to evaluation & revision)

Most workshops ask students to submit their work three or four times over the course of the semester, and spend the majority of class time engaged in critiquing that work. An alien anthropologist observing such a course could get the impression that students were being trained in the critical evaluation of stories, rather than in storytelling itself.

Critiques can be essential, of course, at the right time and from the right collaborator. But since most stories demand multiple, sometimes radical revisions, workshop critiques often come unhelpfully early in the iterative process, exposing the writer to doubts before they quite know what they’re making. The expectation of early critique can subtly disincentivize the stuff we really want to see: stories that startle us, that venture into the unknown, that reveal the world anew or explore morally challenging situations.

In other words, a lot of writing education implicitly discourages mistakes—when what many writers would benefit from, especially in the drafting stage, is to be supported in making more.

In this class, we will encourage and support mistake-making as much as possible, by doing quite a lot of writing together, and by discussing it in a form that focuses on the creative process more than critique. (More on this further down.)