Craft Seminar: Close Study II with Eula Biss
Craft Seminar: Close Study II with Eula Biss
4 Sessions: Thursdays, May 1, 8, 22, 29
8:00-10:00pm ET
Eula Biss
Eula Biss is the author of four books, most recently Having and Being Had. 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.
Back by popular demand! A new version of the close reading course offered last fall, with a fresh selection of essays. This four-part course is inspired by the pleasures and rewards of carefully tracking a writer’s decisions across an entire work. Each week, I will guide us through a close study of two essays--an older essay from the 20th century and a newer essay from the 21st century. Line-by-line, I’ll describe what I see these writers doing on the page and how they’re responding to the pressures and problems presented by their work. The intent here is not to admire other writers from afar, but to directly inform our own writing. 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 developing a better understanding of our own artistry. Each class session will include time for questions, open discussion, and prompts for generating new writing.
Session 1
“A Small Place,” Jamaica Kincaid & “If You Knew Then What I Know Now,” Ryan Van Meter
Session 2
“Notes on Camp,” Susan Sontag & “Joy,” Zadie Smith
Session 3
“Aces and Eights,” Annie Dillard & “Michael,” John Jeremiah Sullivan
Session 4
“Notes of a Native Son,” James Baldwin & “One Small Step,” Angela Morales
This class has 5 full and 5 partial scholarships available. To apply for a scholarship, please fill out this form by Sunday, April 20.
Note: All class sessions will be recorded and this course can be taken asynchronously.
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.
