Students at this level have a grounding in the tenets and technical terms that are the building blocks of The Writers Studio approach. Focus turns to enriching the work by creating an individual voice and tapping into an underlying emotion. This class asks students to recognize the specific qualities that make a narrative or poem engaging and entertaining to the reader. The goal of this class is to help students use a full range of techniques to create and sustain an effective artistic distance. In this level students begin to gain greater emotional freedom and depth in their work. Students at the Intermediate level are tapping into their personal material and beginning to work on completing stories and poems.

This class meets at The Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the Hudson Valley at 2021 Albany Post Road, Croton-on-Hudson, NY 10520.

If you have questions about the class, please email Nancy Matsunaga at [email protected].

Instructor

Writers Studio Teacher

Nancy Matsunaga

Nancy Matsunaga is a freelance writer and editor who studied comparative literature at Oberlin College and received her MA in teaching English as a second language. She has been teaching with the Writers Studio since 2007, and she was the founder and director of the Amsterdam branch of the school. Her stories have been published in the journals Calyx and American Writers Review and anthologized in The Writers Studio at 30. She was a finalist for the 2021 Chester B. Himes Memorial Short Fiction Prize and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. After ten years in Munich, she has recently returned to the New York area, where she is working on a novel and a book of short stories.

"Every week, I presented a new story. Finally something did click, the very thing that’s their specialty at The Writers Studio, emotional content. Before, my work was dead. When I brought in my breakthrough story, I felt I was carrying a weird animal in my bag. It was the first story I sold."

Jennifer Egan, former Writers Studio student, Winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

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