$395
6 Online Sessions
Out of stock
Once a week Wednesdays, 6:00 pm EDT - 8:00 pm EDT July 13 to August 17, 2022
Online via Zoom
In her 2007 anthology, Rotten English, Professor Dohra Ahmad collects works of literature written solely in various forms of nonstandard English. According to Ahmad, what connects the writers in the collection, “is their choice of composing in linguistic codes that are primarily spoken rather than written, and also ones that have generally been perceived as having a lower status than Standard English.” The goal of this six-week workshop is to center the work of writers who compose fiction primarily in nonstandard English–be it in patois, slang, Spanglish, or any other creolized form. How do we juggle writing for multiple audiences–those familiar with the language and those wholly unfamiliar? What craft traditions can we look to for guidance or inspiration? We’ll read selections from Rotten English by writers such as Earl Lovelace, Louise Bennett, Peter Carey, Zora Neale Hurston, Irvine Welsh, James Baldwin, R. Zamora Linmark, and Gabriel Okara. Each participant will also have the opportunity to receive feedback on a work in progress (up to 25 pages).
Capacity: 12
Led by
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Maisy Card
Maisy Card
Maisy Card is the author of the novel These Ghosts are Family, which won an American Book Award, the 2021 OCM Bocas Prize in fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her writing has appeared in the Paris Review Daily, AGNI, the New York Times, Guernica, and other publications. She lives in Newark, NJ.
By Maisy Card
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These Ghosts Are Family
By Maisy Card
Published by Simon & Schuster
Stanford Solomon’s shocking, thirty-year-old secret is about to change the lives of everyone around him. Stanford has done something no one could ever imagine. He is a man who faked his own death and stole the identity of his best friend. Stanford Solomon is actually Abel Paisley.
And now, nearing the end of his life, Stanford is about to meet his firstborn daughter, Irene Paisley, a home health aide who has unwittingly shown up for her first day of work to tend to the father she thought was dead.
These Ghosts Are Family revolves around the consequences of Abel’s decision and tells the story of the Paisley family from colonial Jamaica to present-day Harlem. There is Vera, whose widowhood forced her into the role of a single mother. There are two daughters and a granddaughter who have never known they are related. And there are others, like the houseboy who loved Vera, whose lives might have taken different courses if not for Abel Paisley’s actions.
This “rich and layered story” (Kirkus Reviews) explores the ways each character wrestles with their ghosts and struggles to forge independent identities outside of the family and their trauma. The result is a “beguiling…vividly drawn, and compelling” (BookPage, starred review) portrait of a family and individuals caught in the sweep of history, slavery, migration, and the more personal dramas of infidelity, lost love, and regret.
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.