"I think we should stop being night-resisters, and learn to celebrate the changes of the seasons, and realign ourselves to autumn and winter, not just turn up the heating, leave the lights on and moan a lot," writes author Jeanette Winterson. "Night and dark are good for us. As the nights lengthen, it's time to reopen the dreaming space."
As the winter solstice nears, this generative class, open to all genres and experience levels, aims to help reopen that dreaming space. We will consider ways to write about and into this time of year, while also anticipating the growing light ahead. We'll talk about using time in our writing process and, through a series of short in-class writing sessions, consider the way the season, light, shadow, and night/day affect everything from our settings, our characters, our sentences, and our own writing process and its rhythms. We may also draw from texts by Jeanette Winterson, Samantha Chang, Erika Kobayashi, and James Baldwin.
Lee Conell is the author of a novel, The Party Upstairs (Penguin Press), which received the Wallant Award. She’s also the author of the story collection Subcortical (John Hopkins Press), which received The Story Prize's Spotlight Award. She is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Japan-US Creative Artist Fellowship, the Tennessee Arts Commission, Millay Arts, Willapa Bay AiR, and Yaddo. Her stories and essays have appeared in ZYZZYVA, Kenyon Review, Oxford American, Glimmer Train, Guernica, American Short Fiction online, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Paris Review Daily, and her work has won the Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Award and been shortlisted in Best American Short Stories and the Pushcart Prize anthology.
"I had a marvelous time with Lee! She created a warm, welcoming environment suitable to all levels of writers."
"Lee is a great instructor who makes sure all participants have an opportunity to contribute!"
