Before You Arrive
What to Bring & What to Read
Each Week, Bring
- A notebook and a pen you like writing with
- A laptop or tablet (we read together on screen for the first half-hour)
- Whatever you are currently working on, or wish to start
- An open ear
What you don’t need to bring: prior publication, credentials, confidence, or a finished project. You only need curiosity, generosity, and a willingness to listen closely — to language, and to one another.
Required Text
Imaginative Writing by Janet Burroway — any edition. Used copies typically $7–$15 from ThriftBooks, AbeBooks, or Amazon Used. Burroway covers all three genres — fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction — and is the single most useful book for what we are doing here.
You do not need to buy the book before Session 1. Bring the book from Session 2 onward if you can.
Recommended (Not Required)
- Bird by Bird — Anne Lamott The kindest, funniest, most practical book ever written about the daily reality of being a writer. Famous for the “shitty first drafts” chapter and for the title parable about taking large work one small piece at a time. Read it when you are discouraged.
- On Writing — Stephen King Half memoir, half craft manual. The memoir half tells how King became a writer; the craft half is a no-nonsense toolbox — on adverbs, on dialogue, on the open door and the closed door. Useful even (especially) for writers who do not write what King writes.
- The Art of Memoir — Mary Karr The best book in print on the actual making of memoir — voice, memory, the ethics of writing about real people, and how to put yourself on the page without lying or grandstanding. Pairs naturally with our Unit III.
- Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry — Jane Hirshfield Nine essays on what poems do and how they do it — concentration, music, the originality of the image, translation, the mind of the poem itself. Quiet, deep, and the best companion to our Unit II.
- The Situation and the Story — Vivian Gornick A short, indispensable book on the central distinction in personal nonfiction: the situation (what happened) versus the story (what the writer has come to understand about it). The book that makes the older voice / younger voice question we discuss in Unit III.
A Note About Laptops
Most sessions, we will spend the first 30–40 minutes reading and discussing a short text together — on screen, side by side, by clicking the reading link on this site. Then we close the laptops for the writing exercise. You will not need any special software — just a web browser. The ten-minute in-class writing exercise is always by hand, on paper. Handwriting is slower than typing, and the slowness is exactly what good drafting needs.
How You’ll Access the Readings
Every reading on this site falls into one of three categories:
- Public-domain texts — older works (Hemingway, Chekhov, Frost, Williams) live on free archives like Project Gutenberg, Wikisource, and the Library of Congress. Click the link, read.
- Library e-books — if you’d like to read any of these works in their fuller editions (the full Walden, the full Promised Land), your library card from any public library will let you borrow the e-book or audiobook for free on Libby or Hoopla.
Every reading we discuss in class is one click away on this site. The only book you may want to purchase is the inexpensive used copy of Burroway’s Imaginative Writing noted under What to Bring — it is not required for Session 1, and used copies typically run $7–$15.