Writing Workshops

Getting Unstuck: How to Edit Yourself and Generate Work from Life with James Yeh (April 2025)

$175

2 Sessions

Out of stock

Saturday & Sunday 1:00 pm EDT - 4:00 pm EDT April 26 to April 27, 2025

The Center for Fiction

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Feeling stuck? Don’t know where to go, or what to try next? This two-day weekend intensive aims to uncover radical, imaginative, and accessible approaches to editing ourselves and generating new work from life. Using approaches drawn from writers and editors such as Lydia Davis, Samuel R. Delany, Gordon Lish, Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, Garielle Lutz, Tetman Callis, and others, participants will be emboldened to apply these techniques to their own work and literary practice.

Course Outline:

Day One will focus on practical approaches to generating new work from lived and observed experiences. Together, we will discuss insightful craft essays by Lydia Davis and Samuel R. Delany on notetaking, journal-keeping, drafting, and revision (“Thirty Recommendations for Good Writing Habits” and “Some Notes for the Intermediate and Advanced Creative Writing Student”), alongside looks at Davis’s hand-revised manuscripts and Delany’s notebooks. We will then apply that approach to the outside world, where we will begin generating explosive new work from real-life observations.
Day Two will focus on a close reading of the influential editor Gordon Lish’s edit of Raymond Carver’s classic short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” alongside a lively discussion of Lish’s methods and instruction (Amy Hempel’s 1984 “Captain Fiction” profile in Vanity Fair and former Lish student Tetman Callis’s “The Gordon Lish Notes”). Included in this discussion will be writer, and Lish protégé, Garielle Lutz’s “The Sentence is a Lonely Place.” In the last thirty minutes, we will apply what we’ve learned to a bold new edit of our own work, sharing our work with the group and reflecting on the results

Led by

James Yeh

James Yeh

James Yeh’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, McSweeney’s Quarterly, the Guardian, the Believer, the Drift, NOON, and Tin House, and cited as notable in The Best American Essays 2022 and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011. He was named an emerging writers fellow at the Center for Fiction in 2011, a writer-in-residence at the Hub City Writers Project in 2014, and a fellow at MacDowell in 2011 and 2024. A former editor at McSweeney’s Quarterly, The Believer, and VICE, he has edited stories anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2024, the 2024 O. Henry Prize Winners, and The Best American Travel Writing 2022. He currently teaches writing at Columbia University, and lives in Brooklyn.

Photo Credit: Jessica Parks

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.

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