Craft Seminar: Close Study with Eula Biss
Craft Seminar: Close Study with Eula Biss
4 Sessions: Thursdays, October 3, 10, 17, 24
8:00-9:30pm ET
Eula Biss
This seminar is taught by Eula Biss, the author of four books: Having and Being Had (2020), On Immunity (2014), Notes from No Man’s Land (2009), and The Balloonists (2002). Her work has been translated into a dozen languages and has been recognized by a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a New America Fellowship, and a 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library. She is currently at work on a collection of essays about how private property has shaped our world.
“My ongoing education as a writer has always depended, more than anything else, on returning again and again to certain essays that yield new lessons on every visitation. In this four-part course, we will read eight of these essays together, and each week I will guide us through a close study of two works -- an older work from the 20th century and a newer work from the 21st century.
As we explore the intricacies of these works, I will model my own process for learning from other writers while explaining, line-by-line, what I see these writers doing on the page, and how they’re responding inventively to the pressures and problems presented by their work. The intent of all this is to not to admire other writers from afar, but to dig in with a fork and directly feed our own work.”
Each class session will include time for us to discuss how the essays we’ve read might inform our own writing and several prompts for producing new writing will be provided at the end of each session. This is essentially a course on the internal mechanics of the essay. We’ll take apart some engines to see how other writers power their vehicles, all in service to better understanding the fundamentals of our own artistry.
Session 1: “At the Dam,” Joan Didion and “What I Learned in Avalanche School,” Heidi Julavits
Session 2: “Equal in Paris,” James Baldwin and “1979,” Aminatta Forna
Session 3: “Kinds of Water,” Anne Carson and “The Querent,” Alex Chee
Session 4: “Parade March from ‘That Creaturely World’” Albert Goldbarth and “Bad English,” Cathy Park Hong
Scholarships for this class have been awarded; applications are now closed.
Eula Biss is the author of four books, most recently Having and Being Had (Riverhead Books, 2020.) A New York Times Editor’s Choice, it was named a Best Book of the Year by Time and NPR. Alexander Chee praised it as “A brilliant, lacerating re-examination of our relationship to what we own and why, and who in turn might own us in ways we didn’t know we consented to—what could be more necessary now?” Her previous book, On Immunity: An Inoculation (Graywolf Press, 2014) was a New York Times bestseller, and was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2014 by the New York Times Book Review, New York Magazine, Chicago Tribune, Publisher’s Weekly, the Los Angeles Times and more. Other books include Notes from No Man’s Land (Graywolf Press, 2009), winner of the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism and the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, and The Balloonists (Hanging Loose Press, 2002). Her work has been translated into over ten languages and has been recognized by a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award, a 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library, and a Pushcart Prize. Her essays and poems have recently appeared in the New Yorker, the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, The Believer, Harper’s, and the New York Times Magazine.