Craft Seminar: Read Like a Novelist with Ryan Chapman
Craft Seminar: Read Like a Novelist with Ryan Chapman
1 Session: Sunday, September 20
1:00-3:00pm ET
Ryan Chapman
Ryan Chapman is the author of the novels Riots I Have Known, which NPR called "one of the smartest--and best--novels of the year," and The Audacity, praised as "delicious satire" by Vanity Fair. His work has been published in The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times, The Sewanee Review, and elsewhere. He teaches at Vassar College and the Sewanee School of Letters.
Whether you're an emerging or established writer, the art of close reading yields ongoing benefits to your creative practice. And this isn't close reading in the scholarly sense. Rather, you'll learn how to parse literary fiction as a fellow practitioner, borrowing tactics from James Wood, Rebecca Makkai, and Chris Bachelder. You'll learn how to discern the blueprint underneath the text, and how to adopt its choices for your own sensibility. Crucially, we'll do this without "dissecting" the work, which implies a dead specimen. (Fiction writers read with reverence, or not at all.) For this seminar we'll consider stories by Denis Johnson, Miranda July, and Mariana Enriquez, to be distributed beforehand.
Highlights:
Learn to read fiction as a series of choices and effects
Articulate the tools and craft lessons that best work for your practice--and which you can disregard
Seminar will be a mix of craft lecture, writing, and discussion
This class has 2 scholarships available. To apply, please fill out this form by Friday, September 11.
Ryan Chapman is a Sri Lankan-American writer from Minneapolis, Minnesota, who lives in Kingston, New York. His second novel The Audacity (Soho Press, 2024) was longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and received praise from Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, and Literary Hub. His debut novel Riots I Have Known (Simon & Schuster, 2019) was longlisted for The Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and named a best book of the year by Electric Literature and The Marshall Project. His criticism and humor pieces have appeared in Bookforum, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New York Times, McSweeney's, The Los Angeles Times, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, Frieze, and elsewhere. He’s received fellowships from Millay Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the James Merrill House, and currently teaches at Vassar College and the Sewanee School of Letters. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and a contributing editor at BOMB.
