Mastering Sense of Place: a Multigenre Craft Seminar on Setting with Robert Anthony Siegel, Monday, August 4th, 2025
Live Seminar Via Zoom Monday, August 4th, 2025
Class will meet 7PM - 9PM Eastern
Any questions about this class? Use the Chat Button (lower left) to talk with us.
Instructor Robert Anthony Siegel is the author of a memoir, Criminals, and two novels, All Will Be Revealed and All the Money in the World. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian Magazine, The Paris Review, The Drift, The Oxford American, and Ploughshares, and has been anthologized in Best American Essays 2023, O. Henry Stories 2014, and Pushcart Prize XXXVI. He has been a Fulbright Scholar in Taiwan, a Mombukagakusho Fellow in Japan, a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and a Paul Engle Fellow at the Iowa Writers Workshop. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop.
Setting is the physical world your characters inhabit, the place where their stories play out. The temptation is to treat it like a simple container for the action, a stage set, but truly effective setting does many kinds of narrative work. It helps convince us of the physical reality of the story, its materiality, but it also expresses emotion, engages our senses, reveals character, shapes the action, and connects to theme, the big idea hovering unspoken behind events.
No problem! The session will be recorded and available to watch after the seminar concludes.
- An understanding of the many roles performed by setting
- Techniques for making your setting more effective
- A series of short descriptions of place that can be utilized in an ongoing project, or can become the basis of a new one
Open to all levels of experience and all genres. No preparation needed. Just come to class ready to write, explore, and share.
TESTIMONIALS:
"Full of richly drawn characters and jolting plot twists—Glasser’s time behind bars is especially chilling—Siegel’s debut novel works both as a parable of how quickly the high and mighty can fall, and as gripping drama. 'Money' well spent." -NEW YORK POST on ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD
"Early in this novel, there is a wonderful scene—rich with embarrassment—in which Louis Glasser, the altogether unlikely hero, helps his Harvard-educated son buy a new suit. The son’s fortunes founder, but that’s nothing compared to the perils that overwhelm his father—a lawyer who operates on the margins and becomes the target of a criminal investigation. Siegel’s … portraits (loving and otherwise) of the Glassers, New York prosecutors, and various lowlifes are right on the money." -THE NEW YORKER on ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD
"...Well-turned and elegant...Gloriously complex..." -ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION on ALL WILL BE REVEALED
"...A richly detailed and seedily seductive narrative." -PUBLISHERS WEEKLY on ALL WILL BE REVEALED
"Robert's unique skill as a teacher comes from his enthusiasm not only for talking, which is present in many talented professors, but for listening... He has a reputation for being the best kind of teacher: generous, knowledgeable, demanding, and always at the ready with excellent advice." -former student
"The level of discourse was challenging and interesting and I think part of the reason for that was the casual atmosphere of discussion, fostered by Robert. When people are allowed to speak in an open, non-threatening environment, wonderful things happen." -former student
ONLINE COURSE STRUCTURE:
Live Seminar Via Zoom Monday, August 4th, 2025. Class will meet 7PM - 9PM Eastern.
PAYMENT OPTIONS:
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Instructor: Robert Anthony Siegel
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Live Seminar Via Zoom Monday, August 4th, 2025
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Class will meet 7PM - 9PM Eastern
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Tuition is $75.
Contact us HERE if you have any questions about this seminar.