“Tell It Slant” Workshop Reading Material: Week 2 + Week 3

I’m excited to be working with some of the writers from the Hampden Writer’s Group over the next few weeks. The title of the workshop is “Tell It Slant: Real Life as Raw Material for Good Fiction.” (You can still register via Eventbrite here.) We’ll be generating a lot of new material together, but we’ll also be reading exemplary texts. Here’s what we’ll be discuss in the next couple of sessions:

For this evening (10/27):

• “The Half-Known World” by Robert Boswell (from The Half-Known World: On Writing Fiction)
  • Four related tenets:
    • Writing is not a subject matter.
    • Writing is an act of connection.
    • Good writing is good thinking — but intention is overrated.
    • Make it interesting.
• “Round Trip” by John D’Agata (from Halls of Fame)

For next week (11/3):

• “Parents’ Morning Epiphany” and “Blocked” by Zadie Smith (from Grand Union [stories])
• “Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction” by Zadie Smith (from New York Review of Books)