Six-session seminar · Dates forthcoming
An Eye for an I
A focused seminar on first-person writing across the short story, essay, novel, memoir, and autofiction.
The premise
Before the story, understand the storyteller.
The author may be you. The “I” the reader encounters is a constructed presence on the page, and making that presence convincing requires hard work, intentionality, control of voice, and a precise understanding of what the narrator reveals, withholds, misunderstands, and notices.
How we’ll work
Read closely. Discuss precisely. Write. Revise. Repeat.
Each meeting will pair a primary creative work with criticism, interviews, or other supporting material. Discussion will move between the architecture of an entire piece and the exact choices made in individual pages, paragraphs, and sentences.
Each class will also include generative writing. We will begin small—sentences, paragraphs, characterization, dialogue, backstory—and build toward the larger projects participants want to pursue.
Critical reading is part of the practice. Participants will learn not only to receive workshop feedback, but to read other writers with enough clarity and discipline to offer feedback that is useful.
The reading lens
The working syllabus draws on writers including Joan Didion, Amos Oz, Denis Johnson, Ottessa Moshfegh, Nicole Krauss, Natalia Ginzburg, James Baldwin, Violet Allen, Jennifer Egan, James Frey, and Kristen Roupenian.
We will ask who the narrator is, why this narrator is telling this story, why first person is necessary, how voice is established, what the narrator can be trusted to understand, and how the distance between author and narrator changes the work—especially in nonfiction.
Dates, timing, format, and final reading list will be announced before registration opens.