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The Art of Reading as a Writer: Masterclass with Omer Friedlander

Saturday, March 30th 1-4 pm EST

online, 20 students max (5 students minimum)

$150

Enroll in this class.

The very best stories are often highly constructed, although they may appear perfectly natural. We will pick them apart, learn by dissecting literature with an eye for how a story is built and the choices the author made to create their work. This class will focus on close reading of passages from short stories and novels, including Jhumpa Lahiri, Claire Keegan, Ocean Vuong, Truman Capote, and many more. We will read these passages closely and examine them on the sentence level. What is working here and why? We will focus on the prose: the paragraph, the sentence, the word, the letter, and even the phoneme. We will talk about the speeds and flows of narrative time (scene, summary, gap), as well as the texture of language, voice, rhythm, and musicality, among other things. Along the way, I will also provide writing prompts to help you put into practice some of the craft tips and tricks we will be talking about in this class. This class is designed as a comprehensive deep dive to equip students with all the skills they need to approach future texts not only as readers but as writers.

Enroll in this class.

About the instructor

Omer Friedlander is the author of the short story collection The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land, winner of the Association of Jewish Libraries Fiction Award and a finalist for the Wingate Prize. The book was chosen as an American Library Association Sophie Brody Medal Honor Book for outstanding achievement in Jewish Literature and longlisted for the Story Prize. Omer has a BA in English Literature from the University of Cambridge and an MFA from Boston University, where he was supported by the Saul Bellow Fellowship. He was a Starworks Fellow in Fiction at New York University. His collection has been translated into several languages, including Turkish, Dutch, and Italian. His writing has been supported by the Bread Loaf Fellowship and Vermont Studio Center Fellowship. He currently lives in New York City and teaches creative writing at Columbia University.

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March 28

Generative 1: Building the Writing Muscle, 6 session Fiction class with Danielle Lazarin

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April 3

Writing Through Relationships: 6 sessions, with Rachel Sherman