Begins Monday, July 10th, 2023

Class will meet weekly on Monday nights via Zoom, 6PM - 8PM Central.

Open to All writers!

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

Taught by Madeline Vosch, a writer and translator. She writes fiction and essays, and is currently working on a memoir. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Offing and Heavy Feather Review, among others. She was an Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellow and the winner of the Ploughshares Emerging Writer's Contest in nonfiction in 2021.

How we write about class is concerned with how we imagine class. What are the markers of socioeconomic class that show up in literature? How do we describe and depict class, and what assumptions are bound up in this? Is it in the scenery, in the characters? Is it in how people relate to one another?

This course approaches class as something that appears throughout texts, not just in relation to where a character works or the material conditions of their lives. Class, intertwined with race, sex, and gender, affects how characters and narrators relate to and describe the world, each other, themselves.

But unlike some other markers of identity, a character can change their class status. Beyond class being a category in flux, characters, narrators, and people can endeavor to hide their class status from others in the text—or even from the reader.

Though this course takes class as its broad subject area, we will spend the majority of our time focusing on poverty and working-class narratives. How is poverty imagined in literature, and what does that say about how we conceptualize poverty? How does poverty affect characters? What assumptions do we bring to a text about poverty?

COURSE TEXTS:

• Without a Net, second edition, edited by Michelle Tea
• Trash by Dorothy Allison
• Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson
• Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
• Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
  

**Students will be expected to have read Without a Net for the first class.**

COURSE TAKEAWAYS:

• Students will understand how class shows up in literature, even when it goes unmentioned or unmarked.
• Students will gain an awareness of how class changes across time and space, in a character's life, and how that affects their relationship to the world.
• Students will gain tools to think critically about class as a category of unfixed identity.
• My personal goal as an instructor is to help empower and encourage students, especially low-income students, to feel confident in writing about class
  

COURSE EXPECTATIONS:

Students will be expected to have read all the assigned materials before our class meetings. Note that our discussion of Pachinko will be broken up over two weeks to give students enough time to read the entire novel. Students will have optional creative writing prompts throughout the course, but they are not required to complete these.

Participants must have access to the five assigned books, either as physical copies or e-books.

COURSE SKELETON:

Week 1: Without a Net, second edition, edited by Michelle Tea

Week 2: Trash, Dorothy Allison

Week 3: Jesus' Son, Denis Johnson

Week 4: Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward

Week 5: First half of Pachinko, Min Jin Lee

Week 6: Second half of Pachinko, Min Jin Lee

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!

• Instructor: Madeline Vosch
  
• Class size limited to 15 writers
• Class Starts Monday, July 10th, 2023
  
• The class will meet weekly on Monday nights via Zoom, 6PM - 8PM Central.
• Course is fully ONLINE.

Instructor Madeline Vosch is a writer and translator. She writes fiction and essays, and is currently working on a memoir. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Offing and Heavy Feather Review, among others. She was an Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellow and the winner of the Ploughshares Emerging Writer's Contest in nonfiction in 2021.