Advanced Weeklong Fiction Workshop: How to Pay Attention with Jenny Offill

In this workshop, we'll explore the clarification and magnification of what Virginia Woolf once called "moments of being." We'll focus on the small, the habitual, the overlooked, and discuss how we as writers might transform these seemingly modest things with the force of our attention. Each class will feature discussion of an assigned short story followed by a student workshop. We'll discuss why a specific (and at times mysterious-seeming) choice has been made by a writer as well as expand our conversations to include larger philosophical questions prompted by these explorations of craft. Topics for discussion will include the science of attention, the uses of ritual and repetition, "the discipline of rightness" (as Wallace Stevens once described it), and emotional vs. literal autobiography. Accepted participants will submit up to 15 pages by May 13, and will have the opportunity to meet one-on-one with Jenny during the week of class.