Chris Abani is a novelist, poet, essayist, screenwriter, and playwright. Born in Nigeria to an Igbo father and English mother, he grew up in Afikpo, Nigeria, and published his first book at age 16. Jailed three times and sentenced to death…
Personal essays can do many things. They can help us navigate our experiences, our grief, our trauma, or our joy. They can help show others how to navigate these for themselves. And they can unite us—author and reader—in a shared,…
Openings are important in any piece of writing, but they’ve always struck me as particularly important to critical writing. Why? Well, because critical writing bears the burden of always being about something else, often something readers have heard of and…
It was an essay about climate change. At least that is what I wanted the essay to be about. I wrote passionately about finding trash on the trail, the bear hunter who passed us on the road, a meadow in…
In a workshop, the writer Dorothy Allison had us go around the room and all fake an orgasm. She critiqued the authenticity and then had us write a sex scene where sound was present. This idea came up when she…
Writing for the stage offered me an opportunity to explore the mechanics of dialogue. In a play, the spoken word carries a weight that in other genres it shares with written descriptions, insights into situations, references… On stage the word…
Do you write fiction? Maybe you’ve got a shoebox full of short stories, or the drafts of various novels. Maybe you haven’t yet found the right form in which to realize the full potential of your story. Maybe you’re wondering…
Creativity is a slippery thing. There’s nothing so thrilling as being in the flow of the creative zone…until the day your inspiration is gone. Then it’s like you’ve been dumped on the side of the highway. You’re lost, tired, stuck,…
How do you want the reader to be changed by the words you’ve written? We all know too well that what motivates one person to keep turning pages could equally trigger another to shut a book forever. Which is why…
As a mother, I know how hard it is to find time to write. In the early years, it was all I could manage to scribble out a short journal entry in a 10-minute burst while someone else held the…
On September 27, Jayne Anne Phillips, Mira Jacob, and Ruth Joffre will start off the 2019–20 Hugo Literary Series with new works on the theme of “The Great Divide.” In a recent email exchange, Jayne Anne, Mira, and Ruth revealed…
On September 26, poets Kenji C. Liu and Ching-In Chen will read from their latest work as part of our first-ever Spotlight Poetry night. Spotlight readings feature writers whose work transcends, engages, and recontextualizes poetry in the current moment. We…
There are a lot of names for these two ideas. Whatever we call them, they can shape some of our biggest decisions as storytellers. The Goal, or what Robert McKee (Story) calls the “conscious desire,” is the concrete and unconcealed…
It was July 2007 and I was in line outside the bookstore at quarter to midnight. I was in Maryland and the mosquitos were still biting and the heat of the day clung to the sidewalk. I was only a…
Don’t know what a lyric essay is? Not sure if you’re even intending to write one? Don’t worry! My class, Structuring the Lyric Essay, will explore the lyric essay as a form that can be used to help inspire your…