Begins Thursday, January 9th, 2025

The class will meet weekly via Zoom on Thursdays, 7:00PM  - 9:00 PM 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, and a BA from Harvard.

In this fully online Zoom class, we will greet the new year in the best way possible, reading three classic essays in three weeks, one per week. Each class will begin with discussion, then move on to a brief craft talk highlighting the essay’s construction. We will end with an in-class writing exercise that we can share with the group—and store away in our notebooks as the seed of a new essay.

“Storytelling Lab” is an ongoing series of Zoom classes focused on deepening our understanding of craft through close reading. Whether the focus is fiction or nonfiction, each course contains new reading and new craft lessons, so students can take “Storytelling Lab” as often as they wish; they will always find fresh insights, as well as a vibrant community of craft-oriented readers dedicated to “reading like a writer.”

COURSE OUTLINE:

• Week 1 - January 9: Thinking about ourselves by looking at nature—“Living Like Weasels,” Annie Dillard
• Week 2 - January 16: Using place to mark the passage of time—“Once More to the Lake,” E. B. White
• Week 3 - January 23: Defining an emotion—“On Joy,” Zadie Smith

COURSE TAKEAWAYS: 

• Critical reading skills.
• Insights into essay construction, including conflict, scene, exposition, irony, and subtext.
• Three short in-class writing exercises that can become the bases of future essays.

ONLINE COURSE STRUCTURE:

This class meets weekly via Zoom. Come prepared for a super fun class with live interaction on Zoom each week and plenty of writing, reading, and talking!

PAYMENT OPTIONS:

Tuition is $225 USD. You can pay for the course in full or use Shop Pay or Affirm to pay over time with equal Monthly Payments. Both options are available at checkout.

• Instructor: Robert Anthony Siegel
• Class Starts Thursday, January 9th, 2025
• The class will meet weekly via Zoom on Thursdays, 7:00PM - 9:00 PM Eastern.
• Tuition is $225 USD.

Contact us HERE if you have any questions about this class.