In Reading Like a Writer: Memoir we’ll study the opening of a different book each week, reading excerpts of recent work by Kathryn Schulz, Isaac Fitzgerald, Saeed Jones, Megan Stielstra, Emma Copley Eisenberg, and Esme Weijun Wang. How are these authors inviting us into their world? How do they balance the personal with the universal? What particularities of voice, style, structure, and awareness of their audience can we see them establishing from the very beginning of their work?
Along with discussion of these writers’ work, students will also have the opportunity to write to a prompt drawn from techniques in that week’s reading. What if we borrow Kathryn Schulz’s interest in etymology? Fitzgerald’s disarming humor? Jones’s poetry? In what ways do technique and style work together with a memoir’s subject matter? How can we, as authors, make conscious decisions to deepen our connection with readers?
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WHERE:
In-Person at 25 Sylvan Road South, Unit J, Westport, CT 06880
DATES:7 Tuesdays
March 14, 21, 28; April 4, off, 18, 25; May 2
TIME:
10:15am to 12:15pm EST
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LIMITED TO 7 STUDENTS
About the Instructor...
Amanda Parrish Morgan is the author of STROLLER (Bloomsbury 2022), of which The New Yorker wrote “the central strength of the book is not comprehensiveness but the way the stroller, and Morgan’s experience of her own strollering years, become an omnidirectional magnet, pulling disparate material into friendly proximity.”
Some of Amanda’s writing has appeared in The Rumpus, LitHub, Guernica, The Millions, n+1, Electric Literature, Carve, The American Scholar, The Ploughshares Blog, JSTOR Daily, The Washington Post, Real Simple, Women’s Running and ESPNW.
