$150
3 Sessions
Out of stock
Once a week Saturdays, 2:00 pm EDT - 4:00 pm EDT April 24 to May 8, 2021
Online via Zoom
By now, generations of us have grown up shaping ourselves to music, to finding in it an answering essence to our essence and its quests. It’s an important area of experience that presents particular challenges to the writer—of fiction, memoir, verse, or some other, hybrid, hybrid form—who addresses it; in fiction one needs not only a descriptive facility but a polyphonic sense of context: of atmosphere and character and narrative urgency, whether explicitly or by some subtlety of suggestion that will enable one to pare things down to the barest hints and indications and still get the sound and spirit of the thing across. No writer will find the one and only way to do it.
These thoughts indicate the nature of the workshop’s intention, via reading classic material, generating new work, reviewing work in progress, addressing a wide range of music and seeking the writerly means that can best convey what we feel most moved to write about it.
We will propose a short reading list and a writing exercise in advance, and hope to see work in progress if you’ve got some, all with the aim of making concentrated use of the available time to hear music in the words and words in the music. If you haven’t got work in progress, and even if you have, I’ll propose a brief exercise in advance, so we can get to know each other beforehand.
All Levels
Capacity: 20
This workshop will take place online via Zoom. Participants will receive instructions for access prior to the first session.
Led by
-
Rafi Zabor
Rafi Zabor
Rafi Zabor was born in Brooklyn and lives there now, but has also loitered widely around the United States and abroad; has worked as a musician, jazz critic, and magazine editor, along with a number of more miscellaneous jobs. His jazz novel The Bear Comes Home won the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction, and he has also written a fair amount of journalism, the memoir I, Wabenzi, and the forthcoming novel Street Legal. Currently he is working on a prequel to it, while a fairly jagged New York novel name of Downtown Loop is making the rounds.
By Rafi Zabor
-
.
The Bear Comes Home
By Rafi Zabor
Published by WW Norton
The hero of this sensational debut novel is an alto-sax virtuoso trying to evolve a personal style out of Coltrane and Rollins. He also happens to be a walking, talking, Blake- and Shakespeare-quoting bear whose musical, spiritual, and romantic adventures add up to perhaps the best novel, ursine or human, ever written about jazz.
About this series
Writing Workshops
We strive to make our classes the most inviting and rewarding available, offering an intimate environment to study with award-winning, world-class writers. Each class is specially designed by the instructor, so whether you’re a fledgling writer or an MFA graduate polishing your novel, you’ll find a perfect fit here.