To borrow a cliché, let's go down the rabbit hole. But on the way down, let's observe the dirt, the worms, the twists, the darkness, the sacred and the profane. For a writing project, whether a short story or a novel, trope can be an entry point. Think: a locked room mystery, dark academia, a midlife crisis. Similarly, on the sentence level, cliché can be relatable and point the writer in the direction of deeper truth. Finally, identifying generic language and abstraction can guide revision. This session will draw from popular novels and explore how literary writers use character and voice to successfully subvert trope and cliché to create meaning.

This lecture will mine the logic behind the common assumption that a poem cannot be translated, and will argue instead for what is gained in translation (answer: all of literature as we know it). Through considering the work of Sir Robert Wyatt, Federico Garcia Lorca, Lady Gaga, Sofia Coppola's horrendous film Lost in Translation, and others, we'll move from the question "Can a poem be translated" to the question "Can a poem avoid translation?" to the question "Can a poem even be written in the first place (without translation)?"

We often want memoirs to read similarly to the way memories play in our heads, but memories contain lots of implicit details that can be easy to overlook. Fabrics, textures, colors, and smells can help position the reader in seemingly forgotten time and space. Finding and using these details to our advantage can add significantly to the landscape of a scene. This presentation addresses the questions: What are some ways we can adjust our mindset to focus on these details? When interviewing people about the past, how do we get details that help fill out a scene? What goes into interview and research prep? What are some useful go-to interview tactics and questions? How do we locate and use digital archives, and what tools can we use to help expedite the interview and research process?

If you want your fiction to be read, you must make it as unputdownable as possible. As Shirley Jackson writes in Garlic in Fiction, “The reader is, after all, a kind of silent partner in the whole business of writing, and a work of fiction is surely incomplete if it is never read. The reader is in fact the writer’s only unrelenting, genuine enemy. He has everything on his side; all he needs to do is close his eyes and any work of fiction becomes meaningless.” So how can you keep a reader reading? While the first draft is for you, revision is all about the reader. You must revise ruthlessly until you’ve made your story as surprising, seamless, and vivid as it can be. Revision is my favorite part of the writing process, but it can also seem daunting. Rather than telling myself that I have to “make it better,” I approach revision in stages that allow me to uncover new meanings, gain a deeper understanding of my characters and, finally, say exactly what I want to say. In this talk, I’ll share some revision tips and some of my own revision practices. My aim is to encourage you to write what you really want to write in the most effective way possible.

The weeklong session for the week of July 16, 2023 to July 21, 2023.