Writing Nonlinear Essays and Stories

Chekhov and Woolf challenged realism and introduced a new, “modern” structure that is ordered associatively, following mood or waves of consciousness: the all-middle story and the lyrical essay. Grace Paley mastered this form, and many contemporary essayists now use it as a matter of course. We’ll analyze these kinds of stories and essays to learn how this structure works and then practice it. We’ll workshop the stories or essays with this structure that you generated or revised during the class. Required: John D’Agata, The Next American Essay.