Academy Archive

A master class exploring various approaches to revision, from the philosophical to the technical.

How do we write what cannot be said or cannot even be known? How do we use language to delve into mystery and wonder?

In this interdisciplinary master class we will study repetition’s different manifestations, ranging from incantation to structuring device intended to harmonize or disrupt meaning, and from conceit (in the case of copying and reenactments) to narrative through line and plot device.

It’s been said that the law of the innermost form of the personal essay is heresy, and if that’s true, if the form itself is heretical, if it resists orthodoxy, then what can I say as a teacher that doesn’t involve burning witches? Let’s don’t do that; instead, let’s be witches together. In this class we’ll create a kind of essayistic space and do all our discovering together, exploring one the form’s central mysteries.

In a depressed decade in the near-bankrupt New York of the 1970s, two fiction writers, both women, brought their distinctive prose styles to bear on the experience of living alone as women in the city. Style is the subject of this class with close attention to selections from Elizabeth Hardwick’s novel Sleepless Nights and Renata Adler’s story “Brownstone.” This class will be held on November 18, 2021.

This master class will take a close look at how different writers use voice on the page.