Craft Seminar: Making a Scene with Laura van den Berg
Craft Seminar: Making a Scene with Laura van den Berg
1 Session: Sunday, July 12
2:00-4:00pm ET
Laura van den Berg
This craft seminar will be taught by Laura van den Berg, who is the author of six works of fiction, most recently the novel State of Paradise (FSG, 2024). She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her next novel, Ring of Night, is forthcoming in 2027. Laura has taught in the MFA programs at Columbia and the Michner Center at UT Austin and currently directs the Creative Writing program at Harvard.
Scenes are one of the most important components of narrative writing. What makes a scene? How can we encourage our scenes to become more dynamic, surprising, and layered? As writers, we’re often told that the most important moments in a story should be rendered “in scene”—but is that always the answer? How can we approach "scene work" in a less conventional way? This seminar will explore how to write fully alive scenes through close reading, craft discussion, and writing exercises. Writers can expect to leave the seminar with new ideas on how to approach writing scenes and practical tips for tackling challenging scenes in their work.
Workshop Highlights:
Learn how to write dynamic and surprising scenes
Expand your sense of what a scene can do
Seminar will be a mix of craft lecture, discussion, writing, and Q & A
This class has 1 full and 1 partial scholarship available. To apply, please fill out this form by Friday, July 3.
Laura van den Berg’s most recent book is State of Paradise (FSG, 2024), which received starred reviews from Kirkus, Library Journal, and Booklist, and was named a must-read summer book by TIME, Publishers Weekly, Oprah Daily, and others. She is also the author of the widely praised short story collection I Hold a Wolf by the Ears (FSG, 2020), which NPR called “exquisite.” Other books include the novel The Third Hotel (FSG, 2018), a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award; the novel Find Me (FSG, 2015); and two other collections of stories, The Isle of Youth (FSG, 2013) and What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us (Dzanc Books, 2009).
Laura’s honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Strauss Living Award and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts &Letters, a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bard Fiction Prize, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, an O. Henry Award, and the Jeannette Haien Ballard Writer’s Prize, a $25,000 annual prize given to “a young writer of proven excellence in poetry or prose.” She has twice been shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.
Her stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, Freeman’s, The Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, and One Story, and have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's Bazaar, and The Believer. She writes a boxing Substack called Fight Week.
Laura has taught creative writing in the graduate programs at The Michener Center, Columbia University, and Warren Wilson College. She is currently a Senior Lecturer on Fiction and the Director of Creative Writing at Harvard University.
