Reading Starts Tuesday, November 5th, 2024

Live Seminar via Zoom November 12th, and 19th (note: no Zoom meeting on November 5th...this is when you start reading!)

Any questions about this class? Use the Chat Button (lower left) to talk with us.

Instructor Eugenie Montague’s debut novel, Swallow the Ghost ("bold and bewitching. . . a brain-teasing triumph that will reward multiple readings," Publishers Weekly, Starred Review) will be published by Mulholland Books in August 2024. She received her MFA in fiction from the University of California, Irvine. Her short fiction has been published by NPR, Mid-American Review, Faultline, Day One, and Flash Friday, a flash-fiction series from Tin House and the Guardian Books Network, and was selected by Amy Hempel for The Best Small Fictions (2017). She currently lives in El Paso, Texas with her family.

Learn more about Eugenie in our Meet the Teaching Artist series.

The class will be meet twice, with a start date the week before the first online class so you can have a chance to read the novellas before each live class on 11/12 and 11/19.

To read like a writer is to attend a magic show and keep your eyes on the magician’s hands—to resist being caught up in the illusion in order to understand how the illusion is being built. Of course, a text is always more than the sum of its parts; it’s always a little bit magic.

As Madison Smartt Bell notes, once a thing is dissected, it stays dead; “[i]t take[s] more than reassembling the components to make it live and breathe again.”

And yet, studying the how—reading like a writer—helps us in (at least) two ways.

First, we learn by dissection, even if we can’t perform resurrection when it’s over; we start to understand how a specific story is built.

Second, as described by Garth Greenwell (though surely not as articulately as he does it), the more we read, the more we try to understand how other stories work, the more access we have to this understanding when we sit down to the blank page.

The intuition that kicks in—in that part of our brain we don’t have conscious control over—incorporates our study, similar to how when an athlete practices the same shot over and over, they can make it in that split second when it counts. Or, as Bell states, “[o]nce fully known, these elements of craftmanship become reflexive. They are not the property of either conscious or the unconscious mind but of both….you can use them without thinking about them, to make your imagination more mobile and ultimately more free.”  

The tools of crafts or rhetorical strategies or elements of fiction—whatever we might call them—available to a writer are virtually unlimited. For starters, you can talk about point-of-view, plot, angle of vision, structure, form, dialogue, tone, imagery, patterns of imagery, “chords,” triangulation (or other shapes), ellipsis (what we leave out or what characters do not say); dramatic tension, theme, symbolism, pacing, irony, juxtaposition, repetition, parallel structure, use of the body, language, punctuation, diction, rhythm, sentence structure, setting, objects, outer story, inner story, action, scene, turns, conflict, description, style, story rules, voice, characterization, character codes, character objectives, wants, and interiority.

In this class, we are primarily interested in these tools/elements for how they create a single effect: how they are used by the authors to create stories flushed through with menace or threat, how they write stories that unsettle or disturb.

Laura van den Berg talks about how “weather” is made on a page. As in the physical world, a storm doesn’t simply appear; certain conditions need to exist.

We are going to try to determine what conditions exist in these stories to make the wind start banging against the windows.  

COURSE OUTLINE:

Start reading on November 5th. Our two Zoom meetings will take place on November 12th and 19th from 7PM - 9PM Central.

In the first live class on Tuesday, November 12th, we will briefly review these tools/ elements/ strategies and then apply them to a couple short pieces from Christine Schutt’s Pure Hollywood. Following the process laid out in Madison Smartt Bell’s Narrative Design: Working with Imagination, Craft, and Form, we will take one or two very short stories (under 1000 words) and go through line by line, paying particular attention to how the texts work to unsettle, disturb or destabilize; then we'll start in on Ogawa's novella, The Diving Pool, looking very closely at a few particular sections. 

In the second live class on Tuesday, November 19th, we will continue this analysis with selections from Ogawa’s novella Pregnancy Diary, as well as one of Schutt’s longer stories, The Hedges. These texts hum with threat and/or menace; we will try to locate what is causing those vibrations. These are two very different—and excellent—writers and the way they unsettle and disturb is also distinctive—so looking at them in concert and keeping a close focus on this particular effect will be immensely instructive in showing us the range and variability of the tools available to us when we sit down to the page. 

The class will be meet twice, with a start date the week before the first online class so you can have a chance to read the novellas before each class.

A NOTE ON THE READING:

You need to purchase or reserve from your library Christine Schutt's Pure Hollywood (we'll most likely read The Dot Sisters, Where you Live? When you Need Me?, and The Hedges) as well as Yoko Ogawa's The Diving Pool (most likely The Diving Pool and A Pregnancy Diary). 

Ogawa's novellas are about 50 pages each, and Pure Hollywood is a slim, but powerful, book. We'll be covering about 150 pages of text in class so we can focus on close reading.

Eugenie will provide various pdfs of interviews/ articles that seem relevant (not required), as well as a “Literary Terms” definition sheet, which includes basic definitions and some additional thoughts by me when relevant.

COURSE TAKEAWAYS:

• What it means to read like a writer.
• Practice reading like a writer in class on two flash pieces; then individual practice on longer pieces, followed by a class discussion to reinforce the skill;
• Introduction to Narrative Design by Maddison Smartt Bell and his process of annotating each line of a story, followed by analysis of bigger elements of fiction (tone, character, plot et cetera).
• Introduction or deeper reading of Schutt and Ogawa who can be returned to for study again and again without exhausting what can be learned there.
• Basic definitions of a number of literary devices as well as deeper analysis of specific ones as they come out in these stories