Begins Monday, November 6th, 2023

Class will meet weekly on Monday afternoons via Zoom, 12:00PM - 2:00PM Eastern Time.

We will skip the week of Thanksgiving and conclude class on December 18th.

Open to All writers!

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

Taught by Yara Zgheib, a reader, writer, traveler, and lover of art and jazz. She was born in Beirut and has pieces of her heart in Paris, London, Boston, and one particularly beautiful, one-road Tuscan village. Yara is the author of The Girls at 17 Swann Street (St. Martin’s Press, 2019), No Land to Light On (Atria Books, January 2022), and a forthcoming third novel, Why Paris. (with a period), which will be published by Harper Collins in 2024.

Get to know Yara in our Meet the Teaching Artist series.

This course will explore the deep and fertile connection between writing and the arts; music, painting, and cinema; to identify the rich and varied tools and techniques a writer can learn from these mediums to elevate their craft. 

Painting vivid images, mastering rhythm in language, movement in narrative, capturing angles and light in a scene; using examples from jazz, Cubism, Jean-Luc Godard films, and writing by some of the great literary modernists of the twentieth century, such as James Joyce and Mavis Gallant, as well as contemporary authors such as Zadie Smith and Helen Oyeyemi, this course will explore the aesthetic possibilities for writing that comes alive: words you can see and hear, smell, touch, and feel.

Over the course of six weeks, writers in this workshop will study the techniques used in film, painting and photography, music, and literature (with a dabble in poetry) to make sensations and emotions real. Each session will focus on one medium, beginning with an explanation of the main techniques with examples, followed by case studies of their application in writing. Students will be assigned (enjoyable) reading, viewing, and listening materials ahead of each class, and we will discuss when and how to use these tools in our own writing.

Students will be given the opportunity to work on their own writing project (new or in-progress) throughout the course, with a portion of each class and the final session dedicated to workshopping excerpts with the instructor and peers. The project will serve as the canvas for applying the theories learned in each class.

SESSIONS

Session I
Course Overview: What makes writing vivid, and how do words on a page become colors and tastes, sounds and scenes in a reader’s mind? What makes Proust’s madeleine melt in your mouth? What makes you hear the train barreling toward the platform just as Anna Karenina jumps? Why does Emma Bovary’s suicide break your heart, again and again?

Session 2
Imagery: From Da Vinci to Monet to Picasso, to writing a sunset.
Student projects.

Session 3
Movement: From the Lumière brothers to Godard, Truffaut, Pixar, to writing a street fight.
Student projects.

Session 4
Rhythm: From Beethoven, Debussy, to Chet Baker and Dizzy Gillespie, to writing sentences that just dance.
Student projects.

Session 5
Case Studies: Studying the greats: Mavis Gallant, James Joyce, Zadie Smith and (yes) the poets.
Student projects.

Session 6
Project Presentations

COURSE TAKEAWAYS:

• Mastering imagery: painting a scene, choosing your words.
• Conveying emotion: perspective and point of view to draw your reader in.
• Movement and pacing: exploiting the power of rhythm in a sentence to drive a narrative forward.

ONLINE COURSE STRUCTURE:

Class will meet weekly on Monday afternoons via Zoom, 12:00PM - 2:00PM Eastern Time.

• Instructor: Yara Zgheib
• Class Starts Monday, November 6th, 2023
• Class will meet weekly on Monday afternoons via Zoom, 12:00PM - 2:00PM Eastern Time.
• We will skip the week of Thanksgiving and conclude class on December 18th, 2023.
• Course is fully ONLINE.

Instructor Yara Zgheib is a reader, writer, traveler, lover of art and jazz. She was born in Beirut and has pieces of her heart in Paris, London, Boston, and one particularly beautiful, one-road Tuscan village.

She is the author of No Land to Light On (Atria, 2022), which has been longlisted for the 2023 Dylan Thomas Prize and selected as a Simon and Schuster Pick and Indie Book Read. Lauded as a “masterful story of tragedy and redemption” written in “soul-searing prose,” the novel was chosen by The Washington Post, The L.A. Times, and Newsweek as one of the top books of 2022.

Yara’s debut novel, The Girls at 17 Swann Street (St. Martin’s Press, 2019), was a People Pick for Best New Books, a Barnes and Noble pick for Best Books of 2019, and a BookMovement Group Read.

She is currently at work on her third novel, Why Paris. (with a period), which will be published by Harper Collins in 2024, as well as a musical with composer Alex Wakim and the Music Theater Factory of New York. Her poetry has been transformed into two musical albums, Dust and Ions (2020) and City Rhapsodies (2022).

Her essays and stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, The Huffington Post, The Four Seasons Magazine, HOLIDAY, Lithub, The European, and others. Also, every Thursday, she publishes an essay on The non-Utilitarian: thoughts on life, art, and things neither practical nor useful - like love and fresh water.

Yara is represented by Ms. Janet Silver at Aevitas Creative Management. Read more at Yara's website.