Write the Truth, But with Compassion

Creative writing uses all sorts of techniques and tools, uses the intimacy and intensity of memoir, the confessional power of a first-person essay, the disruptive surprise of humor. In this day long workshop, we’ll generate new writing and then share our pieces-in-progress and discuss them in a helpful, constructive manner. We’ll look at sections of short stories, essays, journalism, novels, and comics. We’ll read bits of plays out loud, and explore the brilliance of Mary Karr, Adam Haslett, Jhumpa Lahiri, Jon Krakauer, Mary Gaitskill and others, examining the structure of good work in the way a carpenter might study a beautiful house. Good writing makes its own rules, it uses lists, stretches of pure dialogue, reportage, inherited knowledge, experience, naval gazing, and hard won observation. Most writers I’ve encountered need multiple drafts, and when the work succeeds it does so because the author gets a little obsessed. The best writing can and should come right at us, should defy our expectations. By the end of the day we’ll have made some new good work of our own.

Matthew Klam is the author of the novel, Who Is Rich?, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and finalist for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and the acclaimed short story collection Sam the Cat. He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, a Whiting Award, and a National Endowment of the Arts. His writing has been featured in such places as The New Yorker, Harper’s, GQ, The New York Times Magazine, The O’Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction.