Literary rapture

Flash sale for upcoming writing

Hi folks,

My online writing seminar, The Creative Word, starts in less than 48 hours. I am offering a “late bird” sale… 25% off of of Tier One (auditing) and Tier Two (workshop participant) until Sunday morning at 10 am.

Virginia Woolf

We will be studying and writing creative nonfiction, looking at some of my favorite works by authors including Virginia Woolf, David Foster Wallace, Joan Didion, Geoff Dyer, and Joyce Johnson (my mother). All info is here.

David Foster Wallace

We will meet every Sunday for the next six weeks, from noon to 3 pm EST. Each week, we will explore a different element of writing. There will be weekly short assignments. We will also read excerpts from course participants.

Virginia Woolf

If students are deeply engaged in writing something, they can share that with the class instead of doing the exercises. But I think the exercises will be very helpful for people in improving and deepening their writing practice.

Geoff Dyer

Lately, I have been feeling the importance of recovering interiority, nuance, ambiguity, and the depth dimensions of the self, particularly in response to a culture that is increasingly superficial yet overwhelmingly distracting, where social media seems to turning people into narcissistic self marketers or parody of themselves. Many of the writers I love can, at times, be grumpy, counter-intuitive, obstinate, playful, and even enraged. They extend the aperture of consciousness, sentence by sentence, word by word.

We will be studying a number of writers who write, wonderfully, about writing. One of these is Philip Lopate who defends “the historical prerogatives of the literary nonfiction form to charm and entice by way of a voice that can speak in more than one register, that can tell an anecdote, be self-mocking and serious by turns, and analyze a conundrum.” Hallmarks of this kind of writing include original thought, emotional expressiveness, and honesty. Such writers must be willing to “think critically — to think against themselves — which may necessitate the abandoning of an original argument or thread for a fruitful digression or self-contradictory ambivalence.” I appreciate this as a benchmark.

Joyce Johnson

I hope you will join us for this journey!

Use the Coupon Code WORD125 for Tier 1 tickets and WORD225 for Tier 2 tickets. Feel to write me with any questions. I am also happy to give some partial scholarships / deeper discounts for those in financial need. Please write to me about your situation, so I know what’s up.

Thank you.