Class Description

For this Reading Like a Writer Intensive, students will do a close reading of Long Island Compromise to study the elements that make it a page-turner. Classes will be partly discussion-based with lectures and excerpts from similar texts, like Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, Torrey Peters’s Detransition Baby, and Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads, as well as short craft readings or clips from interviews with authors. Topics will include: writing dynamic description, writing compelling backstory, managing multiple third-person POVs, and using free-indirect discourse. While there will be no workshopping, there will be generative writing time with prompts inspired by the craft topics. Students are expected to have a copy of the book and read at least the first two chapters before the first class, and supplementary readings will be emailed to the group in advance. Students can expect to have to finish reading one long novel and up to three shorter readings during this intensive. LIZ HARMER is the author of the novels The Amateurs (2018) and Strange Loops (2023). Her stories, essays, and poems have been published at the Globe & Mail, The Walrus, Best Canadian Stories, The New Quarterly, Hazlitt, Image Journal, and elsewhere. A recent fellow at the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, she was also the runner-up for the Mitchell Prize in poetry. She’s the winner of a National Magazine Award for Personal Journalism, a CRAFT Literary Creative Nonfiction Award, and the WAGs-ProQuest Award Distinguished Masters Thesis, among other prizes. She teaches in the MFA program at Chapman University.