Craft Seminar: Cut It Out! (Or Leave It In?): On Grammar and Editing with Nicole Treska
Craft Seminar: Cut It Out! (Or Leave It In?): On Grammar and Editing with Nicole Treska
2 Sessions: Monday + Wednesday, May 12 + 14
5:30-7:30pm ET
Nicole Treska
Nicole Treska is the author of the debut memoir Wonderland: A Tale of Hustling Hard and Breaking Even (Simon & Schuster, 2024). She taught at The City College of New York for over fifteen years, teaching a broad range of creative writing courses and workshops, including prose, drama, intro-advanced creative writing, and advanced grammar. She now teaches private classes. Gordon Lish praised Wonderland as "Straight Talk!", and Isaac Fitzgerald called Treska, "a swaggering storyteller of the highest degree." The Wall Street Journal claimed, "If Ms. Treska preaches half as well as she practices, her students are lucky. She has a talent for a sweet turn of phrase.”
Her short fiction has recently appeared in The End, Forever Magazine, and Archway Editions, as well as New York Tyrant magazine, Epiphany literary journal, and Egress: New Openings in Literary Art. Her interviews and reviews are up at Electric Literature, Guernica, The Millions, BOMB, The Rumpus, and others.
In this two-session class we will cover the basics of American grammar and usage, as well as the effects of sentence structure on meaning and clarity. Students should come to class with an interest in grammar, close editing, structure, and craft. Additionally, it is encouraged but not required to bring one short story/section/draft in progress.
We'll do in-depth grammar refreshers, lessons on line editing (every word and piece of punctuation is on trial for its life), verb choice (including a healthy but not freakish wariness of adverbs), special effects and punctuation marks (the Em Dash, and why everyone is using it wrong), and more. The end result? A clearer sentence that equals a clearer thought, and that equals a better thought! Let's clean up those drafts, kill those darlings, and slash those prepositional phrases!
Workshop Highlights:
a refresher on grammar and usage
new thinking on how to construct the best sentences
new habits for close reading and line-editing
This course has 3 scholarships available. To apply, please fill out this form by Friday, May 2.
Nicole Treska is a writer and professor living in New York City. She is the author of the debut memoir Wonderland: A Tale of Hustling Hard and Breaking Even (Simon & Schuster, 2024). The Wall Street Journal called Wonderland "gatsbyesque," and Treska "washed up on the shores of respectability…if Ms. Treska preaches half as well as she practices, her students are lucky. She has a talent for a sweet turn of phrase.”
Her work has recently appeared in The End, Forever Magazine, and Archway Editions. Her short fiction has appeared in New York Tyrant magazine, Epiphany literary journal, and Egress: New Openings in Literary Art. Her interviews and reviews are up at Electric Literature, Guernica, The Millions, BOMB, The Rumpus, and others.
