Writing Girlhood with Anika Jade Levy

Writing Girlhood is a six-week generative workshop exploring one of literature’s richest and most unstable subjects. We will examine the girl as both writer and character, subject and object, consumer and consumable. Drawing on novels, short stories, diaries, criticism, and contemporary culture, we’ll think about how writers use girlhood as a liminal vantage point to look at desire, performance, power, and ambition. We will read work by Sylvia Plath, Mary Gaitskill, Jen George, and Andrea Long Chu.

Designed for fiction and nonfiction writers working on new material, the course turns close reading into craft practice. Each week, students will respond to in-class prompts that generate scenes, structures, and obsessions for their own stories. The subjects we will cover include: friendship as plot engine, humiliation as narrative energy, and the tension between innocence and experience. We will discuss the theme, content, and cultural relevance of each book, but we will always consider craft components such as voice, point of view, structure, compression, dialogue, and revision.

Participants can expect to leave with sharper critical language, a portfolio of at least ten new pages, and a sense of how contemporary fiction can metabolize the psychic material of girlhood into elegant original work.

Course Outline:

• Week 1 – Theory of the Young Girl: Introductions and a discussion of the state of contemporary girlhood, the trend of extended adolescence, and the girlification of everything. In class, we will look at Jenny Holzer’s “Truisms” series and Sappho’s poems, as well as excerpts from Tiqqun’s “Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl” and Andrea Long Chu’s Females. Our in-class writing prompt will concern aphorisms.
• Week 2 – Girls as Women, Women as Girls: In-class discussion of Jen George’s “The Babysitter at Rest” and Emily Adrian’s Seduction Theory. We will explore Adrian’s approach to power on the page and use George’s stories to consider the currency of youth, the myth of purity, and the tendency of digital life to sexualize girls and infantilize women. We will also break down the varying formal approaches of the six stories, and students will respond to one of six prompts in order to begin crafting their own surreal, absurd, or dream-like short story.
• Week 3 – Delusion and Disaster: In-class discussion of Iris Owens’s After Claude and Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight. In class, we will read excerpts of James Wood’s writing on Jean Rhys, as well as look at excerpts of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and from her diaries. Using these readings, we will consider how embarrassment, longing, exposure, and self-consciousness often produce unforgettable fiction. We’ll discuss practical tactics for writing convincing characters whose self-concept is unstable, performative, or contingent upon their social world. Prompts will focus on social disaster, failed performance, status anxiety, and the comic uses of pain.
• Week 4 – Ingenues, Abjection, and Art-Making: In-class discussion of Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan and Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior. We will consider how Sagan and Gaitskill use their subject positions as a narrative lens and a way of metabolizing the world, breaking down how and when private experience can be mined for public works. In-class writing prompt will concern durational frames (e.g., a summer, a short job, a single evening) as story structure.
• Week 5 – Extended Adolescence: In-class discussion of Susie Boyt’s Loved and Missed and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. We will consider what remains of girlhood in adult consciousness. Girlhood does not end; it mutates into caretaking, class shame, fantasy, resentment, and repetition. How can emotional and generational wreckage be approached with tenderness and precision? How can fiction depict domestic cruelty without flattening anyone into a victim or villain? In-class writing prompt.
• Week 6 – Boyhood, Projection and the Male Gaze: In class discussion of Sylvia by Leonard Michaels and The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis, considering what happens (or doesn’t) when girlhood is narrated by boys and men. We’ll examine female characters as fantasy objects, enemies, mirrors, and aesthetic projects. What might we steal, resist, or revise from these traditions? Participants will workshop selected pages and develop revision strategies for expanding one or more of the in-class writing projects into a complete work.

Teaching Style: My teaching style is rigorous but playful. Each session will combine the depth and intellectual energy of a lecture course with the spontaneity of a lively seminar discussion. Expect close reading, contemporary references, generative prompts, and practical craft guidance in a warm but serious atmosphere.

Level: Intermediate

This course is held in person at The Center for Fiction. Note: there will be no meeting on September 7th.

We offer a limited number of need-based scholarships for our Reading Groups and Writing Workshops, covering 50% of tuition. Applicants selected for scholarships will be notified one week prior to the first meeting. To apply for a scholarship, please fill out this form.