Craft Class Taken with a Workshop - Summer 2024

The Writers Studio’s Craft Class is an eight-week course that meets weekly during the school’s four sessions. All students begin taking it when they enter their third term of Level 3 or Advanced workshop, but it’s also open to students in Level 1 and 2, and even to those who aren’t enrolled in a workshop.

This class, an integral part of The Writers Studio approach to creative writing, teaches students how to read fiction and poetry as writers. By identifying and closely studying the techniques at play in published work — both contemporary and classic — students discover how literary writers have achieved their artistic goals. In the process, students greatly expand their own knowledge of the writer’s craft, which improves their own writing and sharpens their critical skills. We are never content talking in a general way about the power or prowess of a particular celebrated author. We do something much more useful: we pinpoint how that author’s paragraphs or stanzas were put together to achieve such power. We look at how the narrative or verse moves forward, who the narrator is, what is stated directly and what is left out and why, and how the narrator’s tone plays against the underlying emotion.

The Craft Class meets weekly via Google Meet and is taught by various Writers Studio teachers and the occasional author as guest teacher, with participation by advanced Writers Studio students. Each craft class includes suggested exercises based on the narrative technique studied that week. These exercises form the basis for the work students bring into their respective workshops. More senior students working on novels, memoirs, short stories and poems use their weekly exercise as a prompt to more deeply explore material or a specific character or section in a longer work in progress.

Over the years, the reading list for this class has included the short stories, novels and poems of a wide array of venerable and up-and-coming authors, including fiction writers Isaac Babel, Lucia Berlin, Bonnie Jo Campbell, John Cheever, Anton Chekhov, Juno Diaz, Julia Glass, Clarice Lispector, Thomas Mann, Gabriel García Márquez, Lorrie Moore, Toni Morrison, Akhil Sharma, Gary Shteyngart, Colson Whitehead and John Updike; poets Kim Addonizio, Yehuda Amichai, Elizabeth Bishop, Rita Dove, Jorie Graham, Pablo Neruda, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, James Tate, Walt Whitman, James Wright, and Adam Zagajewski.

If you cannot attend the Craft Class via Google Meet, a recording of the class is emailed to you the day after the class. In addition, you have the option of subscribing to the podcast where recordings are added each week of the term.

Craft Class Reading List Summer 2024

Tuesdays 6:30 – 8:00pm EDT

Our dedicated Bookshop store, already populated with the current Craft Class reading list (except Sixty Poems by Charles Simic ) is here.* You can also purchase Craft Class books from the Strand Bookstore in NYC or Amazon. Links for the Strand and Amazon are included in the list below.

April 16: Leila Chatti, Deluge (Copper Canyon Press) Taught by Lisa Bellamy

Strand: Deluge

Bookshop.org

Amazon: Deluge

April 23: Elissa Altman,Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing (Ballantine Books) Taught by Lesley Dormen

Strand: Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing

Bookshop.org

Amazon: Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing

April 30: Michael Waters, Sinnerman (Etruscan Press) Taught by Michael Waters. Discussion led by Peter Krass

Strand: Sinnerman

Bookshop.org

Amazon: Sinnerman

May 7: Peter Orner, Maggie Brown and Other Stories (Back Bay Books) Taught by Cynthia Weiner

Strand: Maggie Brown and Other Stories

Bookshop.org

Amazon: Maggie Brown and Other Stories

May 14: Charles Simic, Sixty Poems by Charles Simic (Mariner Books) Taught by Philip Schultz

Amazon: Sixty Poems by Charles Simic

May 21: Jamel Brinkley, Witness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Taught by Jamel Brinkley. Discussion led by Kathie Jacobson

Strand: Witness

Bookshop.org

Amazon: Witness

May 28: Hervé Guibert, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (Semiotext(e)) Taught by Sylvie Bertrand and Scott Hunter

Strand: To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life

Bookshop.org

Amazon: To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life

June 4: Pushcart Prize 2024, Poetry: “Ballad That Ends With Bitch,” by Diane Seuss; “Two People,” by James Longenbach; “A Potato on the Table,” by Mary Ruefle; “Blue,” by Erin Wilson; Prose: “A Place I Didn't Try to Die In Los Angeles,” by Jenny Catlin; “Dreaming of Water With Tiger Salamanders,” by Sam Keck Scott, Taught by Marie Kilroy

Strand: Pushcart Prize 2024

Bookshop.org

Amazon: Pushcart Prize 2024

*The Writers Studio receives a small referral fee when you purchase through Bookshop or click through Amazon-linked titles. This does not affect the price you pay for the books.

Suggested Reading List

Fiction: Javier Marias, The Infatuations; Paul Beatty, The Sellout; John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead; Tommy Orange, There, There; Jenny Erpenbeck, Go Went Gone; Mohsin Hamid, Exit West; Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Friday Black; Bernadine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other: A Novel; Xuan Juliana Wang, Home Remedies; Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous; Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, The Discomfort of Evening; Richard Powers, The Overstory; NoViolet Bulawayo, Glory; Janet Malcolm, Still Pictures (a memoir); Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth

Poetry: Kevin Young, Brown; Nick Laird, Feel Free; Jericho Brown, The Tradition; Victoria Chang, Obit; Diane Seuss, frank: sonnets; Rodney Jones, Alabama; Mosab Abu Toha, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear