The Writers Studio

Learning to read prose and poetry as a writer is a necessity for students who are serious about their work. In the Writers Studio Craft Class teachers and celebrated authors guide students in identifying techniques at play in contemporary and classic literature. Each week we pinpoint the specific ways a writer has constructed a narrator with a distinct voice, and conclude the class with 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 advanced writers working on novels, memoirs, short stories, and poems use their weekly exercise as a prompt to more deeply explore material or a specific character in a longer work in progress.

Craft Class meets via Google Meet once a week for eight weeks during the school’s four sessions. Whether or not you attend the Craft Class via Google Meet, a recording of the class is emailed to you the day after the class. Students are also invited to subscribe to the podcast where recordings are added each week, if that is their preference. Many students take the class asynchronously and watch or listen to it at their convenience.

Writers Studio teachers and guest teachers such as Edward Hirsch, Jonathan Santlofer, Ellen Bass, Cornelius Eady, Tina Chang, Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, and Carl Dennis enjoy discussing the technical aspects of that week’s readings, and students who publish often tell us which exercises inspired aspects of their novels, poems, and memoirs.

Craft Class is open to students in all levels as well as writers who are not enrolled in a writing workshop. All students begin taking Craft Class when they enter their third term of Level 3 (Online or NYC); their fourth term of Advanced Poetry or Advanced Memoir; or when they begin taking Advanced Workshop (Tucson, San Francisco, or Hudson River Towns). Over the years the reading list for this class has included the short stories, novels, poems, and memoirs of a wide array of venerable and up-and-coming authors including fiction writers Lucia Berlin, Bonnie Jo Campbell, John Cheever, Anton Chekhov, Toni Morrison, J.D.Salinger and Colson Whitehead; poets Elizabeth Bishop, Rita Dove, Jorie Graham, Pablo Neruda and Adam Zagajewski, and memoirists Jill Bialosky, Annie Ernaux, Natasha Trethewey and Audre Lorde.

Interested in past Craft Class recordings? The Writers Studio Craft Class Archive includes 30 years of recordings of Craft Class lectures taught by Philip Schultz, various Writers Studio teachers and distinguished authors. Purchase recordings here.