I teach one semester a year, and this year I'm just teaching one course during that semester, a writing workshop for older students in their late 20s and early 30s, people in our graduate program who are already working on a manuscript and trying to bring it to completion.
From Tobias Wolff
When I was about 14 or 15 I decided to become a writer and never for a moment since have I wanted to do anything else.
But a lot of writers - and I'm one of them - do tend to feel dissatisfied. It makes you a little hard to live with, but it's a goad and does keep you alert and restless.
The short story, on the other hand, is the perfect American form.
Memory is funny. Once you hit a vein the problem is not how to remember but how to control the flow.
Everything has to be pulling weight in a short story for it to be really of the first order.
The reader really has to step up to the plate and read a short story.
There's a joy in writing short stories, a wonderful sense of reward when you pull certain things off.
You don't teach information in a writing workshop.
I love Chekhov. I could go on all day about him.
3 perspectives
2 perspectives
1 perspectives