Craft Seminar: When A Voice Becomes A Story: Writing the First-Person Short Story with Jess Row
Craft Seminar: When A Voice Becomes A Story: Writing the First-Person Short Story with Jess Row
2 Sessions: Wednesdays, December 10 + 17
7:00-9:00pm ET
Jess Row
Jess Row has published three collections of short stories (The Train to Lo Wu, Nobody Ever Gets Lost, and Storyknife, coming in July 2026). His fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Granta, Ploughshares, the Baffler, and many other venues, and has been selected three times for the Best American Short Stories. A teacher of creative writing for more than 25 years, he's currently a professor in the Department of English at NYU.
Beginning with Jamaica Kincaid's beloved story "Girl," we will look at ways of taking a distinctive, dynamic voice and making a story out of it, using (among other techniques) context clues, submerged information, indirection and subtext. While the reader thinks they're simply listening to someone talk, they're absorbing an entire fictional world. It seems difficult at first, but in truth this is one of the easiest ways to create a story—even for complete beginners!
Our other authors will include Grace Paley, Kate Braverman, Yvonne Vera, Nicole Krauss, and Raymond Carver, and we'll also talk about one of my own stories, "Dear Yale."
Workshop Highlights:
What makes a good narrator: how to pick out the right voice and make it tell a story
How narrators (in most cases) tell us much more than they intend to—and why that matters
The varieties of first person short stories: from simple dramatized monologues to fully structured works
To apply for a scholarship, please fill out this form by Wednesday, June 4.
Jess Row is the author of the novels The New Earth (Ecco Press, 2023) and Your Face in Mine (Riverhead, 2015), a collection of essays, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination (Graywolf, 2019), and two collections of short stories, Nobody Ever Gets Lost (Five Chapters Books, 2011) and The Train to Lo Wu (The Dial Press, 2005). His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, Conjunctions, Ploughshares, Granta, n+1, and elsewhere, has been anthologized three times in The Best American Short Stories, and has won two Pushcart Prizes and a PEN/O. Henry Award. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, an NEA fellowship in fiction, a Whiting Writers Award, and a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant. In 2007, he was named a “Best Young American Novelist” by Granta. His nonfiction and criticism appear often in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Threepenny Review, and Boston Review, among other venues.