The course: The Breakthrough

The trick here will be to astonish ourselves. To outfox and outwrite ourselves. This nonfiction workshop seeks to provide us with ways to leap into ideas we didn’t know we had and deliver language we didn’t know we could. Our rationale is that, as writers, we run the risk of getting in our own way, of confining ourselves to the ideas and the vocabulary with which we set out.

The risk is greater when working within a specific genre, such as place-conscious writing.

We will set out by exploring a few luminous hallmarks of the genre, work which not only considers and challenges the intersections of environment, culture, history, and science but which further demonstrates how to both harness and shatter formal considerations. The exercises in this class will provide us with immediate material—either new starting points or threads which may serve to complicate and develop works-in-progress. Our goal, both in the generative and workshop segments of this course, is to locate the places in the pages where, unexpectedly and exquisitely, a boundary may be breached.

The instructor: Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams received the 2013 Whiting Writers Award for her novella The Man Who Danced with Dolls and her memoir-in-progress The Following Sea. She has been further supported by a Rona Jaffe National Literary Award and a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship. Her work has appeared in Orion, the Oxford American, StoryQuarterly, The Pinch, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. Abrams currently teaches in the Department of English at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

Duration: This class meets over six consecutive Sundays from 1-4 pm ET from June 18 to  July 23rd.

Application window: May 1 – 15