Sitting down to the blank screen or empty notebook can be the hardest part of the writing life, but what do we do once we have all those words on the page? How do we revise with structure and pacing in mind, and how do we hone our sentences and descriptions into their highest, best and most invigorated selves? Revision is an alchemy of art, craft, practice and grit--and the more skilled we are as revisers of our own work, the more luminous our writing will be.
In this five week class, prose writers will come together to discuss and experiment with various revision strategies. Each week, students will be given a different revision assignment--ranging from restructuring exercises to those helping us fine-tune individual paragraphs--and we will come together to discuss our progress, revelations and challenges, and to share the fruits of our labor. Fiction and nonfiction students are welcome and should come to the first class with a piece of writing, however rough, that they are committed to expanding, refining, and/or bringing to completion.
Lauren Markham is writer and educator based in Berkeley who writes fiction, essays, and literary journalism. Her book, The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life, was published by Crown in 2017, and was the winner of the Ridenhour Prize, the Northern California Book Award, silver medal winner of the California Book Award, shortlisted for a Lukas Award and the L.A. Times Book Prize, and longlisted for a Pen America Award.
Lauren's essays and reportage have appeared in outlets such as Harper’s, Guernica, the New York Times, The Guardian, The New Republic, Orion, and Virginia Quarterly Review, where she is a contributing editor. She has published fiction in Narrative, The American Literary Review, and Drunken Boat. In addition teaching at Left Margin LIT, she also teaches in the MFA in writing programs at Ashland University and the University of San Francisco.
More about Lauren: www.laurenmarkham.info/about/