Fall Craft Intensive: Joseph Earl Thomas
Workshops
$75.00
Description
Editor's Note
Subjunctive Mood: Threads of Tension Across Genre with Joseph Earl Thomas
Sunday, November 23
11 AM – 2 PM PT/ 2 PM – 5 PM ET
Online
Given the wide considerations in any writer’s pantheon, the one that best transgresses the generic threshold of real or unreal motivations and voice, the subtle pains of contemporary difference in race or sex or heretofore unacknowledged power relations, and the sometimes infinitesimal differentiation between science fiction and realism, is subjunctive mood: the thread of tension generated in the gap from one word to the next. Comprising but not subsumed by syntax or diction, we’ll follow Samuel Delany’s lead from his essay “About 5.750 Words” and eschew “aboutness” to generate meaning in the mental space between word-images. This craft class will examine the definitions of genre and how a sentence might live in one world and change its mind mid way as a function of the author’s style. Focusing on syntax, surprise, detail and diction, we’ll work our sentences out of their precognitive rut and toward invention. Students should come with a single first sentence for a workshop exercise.
SCHOLARSHIP
The scholarship for this intensive has already been awarded.
BIO: Joseph Earl Thomas is the author of Sink, a memoir, the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, winner of the Center for Fiction first novel prize, and the story collection Leviathan Beach. His work has been published in The Paris Review, The Verge, Vanity Fair, Harper’s, Dilettante Army, The Yale Review & elsewhere. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame’s MFA program, he also earned his PhD in English at The University of Pennsylvania. He teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College and Holy Family University’s Low Residency MFA Program, as well as Literature, Black Studies, Anime, and Video Games at The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.