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Meet THe Team
On earth we are all controlled by time, and yet the often clock feels like a totally elusive thing, more based in fiction than fact. Why does an hour often feel like an entire day? A year like a single minute? As writers, we can use time like a magic trick to move between scenes, explore character and briefly stop the earth from spinning. In this class, we will explore the expansion and collapse of narrative time. Prompts will include writing within time frames, short sprints about changes in the weather, and interrogating time in existing student work. We will see how moments feel when we shrink and then expand them. How does the drama of a scene change when the minutes of narrative time accumulate? How does the shrinking of time create a sense of humor and play? This class is open genre - we will play with narrative time in fiction, non-fiction and poetry.
• In-Class Writing Lift: Medium
• Homework: None
• Workshopping Drafts: Optional
Jeanie Riess is a writer from New Orleans. Her reporting and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, the Oxford American, The New York Times Magazine and The Atlantic's City Lab. She has worked for a daily newspaper in the Mississippi Delta and a New Orleans alt-weekly called The Gambit. She was a fiction fellow at the University of Montana, where she taught creative writing. She was also a fellow at the Kenyon Review’s Young Writers Workshop in Gambier, Ohio.
Jeanie is new to The Porch. Welcome!
