1 Session: Sunday, August 17
12:00-2:30pm ET
Alexander Chee

Alexander Chee is the award-winning best-selling author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, and the essay collection How To Write An Autobiographical Novel, all lauded in reviews for the attention to descriptive writing and place.

As a younger reader, I loved novels like Frank Herbert's Dune, where a powerful sect of witches obtain power in part through their attention to detail, or in Sherlock Holmes, where Holmes' own careful eye seems to make every ordinary room or landscape into a trail only he can read. Or Batman, who used much the same approach in solving crimes. I think of it as training myself on the power and pleasure of description. As a writer, I have come to understand descriptive writing as being about more than summoning the magical power or the answer to a crime, and more than just the right metaphor at the right time. When done right you open sensory doors to other worlds. You carry the reader in your pocket or that of your character's as you run for the door, your life, the train. At every level of the story, across their five senses, you potentially can play the instrument the reader is.

And then we turn our attention to setting. Setting in writing is the people, as much as the place and the time. Whether you are writing fiction or nonfiction you will need to consider history, the laws of a place, the styles, the traditions, the weather, and how you are structuring the reader's relationship to time in this world. Your world for the duration of the story. Through writing samples and writing prompts, and revision prompts as well, we will establish some frameworks to understand why you are describing what you are describing and how to approach it from your own specific set of aesthetics and politics also--and how to address the politics of description. We will look at passages from works by Iris Murdoch, Anne Carson, Louise Erdrich, Penelope Fitzgerald, Martin Amis, Ocean Vuong, Toni Morrison, Jayne Anne Phillips and Kelly Link, among others.

This class will teach students to expand their sense of what description is and why it is done. We will cover methods for identifying what you habitually leave out or leave undone and how to solve for that by approaching what might be behind such omissions. How does the writer describe their own concerns unconsciously in what they describe and once they see this, how can they then expand those concerns or turn them toward other topics?

To apply for a scholarship, please fill out this form by Thursday, August 7.