Craft Seminar: Art of Decisions with Eula Biss and Saeed Jones
Craft Seminar: Art of Decisions with Eula Biss and Saeed Jones
1 Session: Sunday, April 27
3:00-5:30pm ET
Eula Biss and Saeed Jones
Collaborators Saeed Jones and Eula Biss dreamed up this craft class while co-teaching a writing workshop that invited some lively exchanges about the decision-making process in nonfiction writing. Saeed Jones is the author of the memoir How We Fight for Our Lives and the poetry collections Prelude to Bruise and Alive at the End of the World. He co-hosts the podcast Vibe Check with Sam Sanders and Zach Stafford. Eula Biss is the author of four books, most recently Having and Being Had and On Immunity: An Inoculation. She is currently at work on a collection of essays about how private property has shaped our world.
“Writing is, like gender or dominatricing, a kind of performance,” Melissa Febos observes. “But the craft of writing is primarily an art of making decisions.” How might thinking of writing as a problem-solving activity reorient you to your work? Could this mindset stave off performance anxiety and help keep your head in the game? We’ll discuss how we approach decisions in our own writing and offer strategies for handling difficult decisions at various stages of the process. Ample time will be reserved for your questions, and you’ll be invited to bring the decision-making problems raised by your own writing to this session.
Workshop Highlights:
Practical strategies
Prompts for new writing and revision
Your questions answered
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.
Saeed Jones is the author of the memoir HOW WE FIGHT FOR OUR LIVES (Simon & Schuster), winner of the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction and the poetry collection PRELUDE TO BRUISE (Coffee House Books), winner for the 2015 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry. His poetry and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times, Oxford American and GQ among other publications. His most recent book ALIVE AT THE END OF THE WORLD (Coffee House Press) won the 2023 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Poetry.
