Our culture is preoccupied with speed and output. That’s fine when it comes to texting, but the pressure to pour out perfect pages instantaneously will send your muse running for the nearest exit. In this class, the instructor will give ways to offer your muse a hammock instead of putting a gun to her head. Drawing on the insights of Brenda Ueland and Louise DeSalvo, this workshop will help participants learn how to “slow up” their writing and consider their relationships to words like “work ethic,” “success,” and “discipline.” Paradoxically, this gentle approach allows for a more inspired, efficient, and joyful output, as you learn to write what your soul longs to scrawl, rather than bullying yourself into silence.

This is a practical yet philosophical class designed to interrogate the assumptions we sometimes take for granted about what a writing practice ought to look like. In other words, it’s a class about that all-important question, “What does it mean to be a writer?” The goal is to help each participant to find their own best writing practice.

Brittani Sonnenberg writes fiction, nonfiction, and whatever strikes her pen. Lately, she’s been seduced by essay comics, poems, and cartoons. She is the author of the novel Home Leave, and her fiction has been published in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2008 as well as Ploughshares, Short Fiction, and Asymptote. Her nonfiction has appeared in Time, Associated Press, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Austin Monthly, and NPR Berlin. She has two odes to Hercule Poirot forthcoming in the North American Review.