I’m returning to The Shipman Agency Work Room for a craft talk on what it means to read fiction as a fellow practitioner. Join me! Here’s the official description:

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Whether you're an emerging or established writer, the art of close reading yields ongoing benefits to your creative practice. And this isn't close reading in the scholarly sense. Rather, you'll learn how to parse literary fiction as a fellow practitioner, borrowing tactics from James Wood, Rebecca Makkai, and Chris Bachelder. You'll learn how to discern the blueprint underneath the text, and how to adopt its choices for your own sensibility. Crucially, we'll do this without "dissecting" the work, which implies a dead specimen. (Fiction writers read with reverence, or not at all.) For this seminar we'll consider stories by Denis Johnson, Miranda July, and Mariana Enriquez, to be distributed beforehand.