F129.
The Sentence Is the Story: Reading, Writing, and Revising for Style and Sound
Friday, March 10, 2023
9:00 am to 10:15 am
Five writers enamored with sentences will discuss the pleasure and power of line-level reading, writing, and revision. We approach sentences in terms of musicality, mouth feel, the “felt quality” of sound, syntactic symbolism, and the physicality of sentences (musculature, torque, momentum). We’ll talk about first and last sentences, the one-sentence paragraph, the way prose can evoke a story through close-focus description, and the underlying idea that poetic devices are also at work in prose.
Participants
Miciah Bay Gault's debut novel is Goodnight Stranger (Park Row Books, 2019). She's faculty in the MFA in writing at VCFA and coordinator of the Vermont Book Award. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Tin House, Southern Review, AGNI, Harvard Review, Poets & Writers, LitHub, and New York Times.
Matt Bell is the author of the novels Appleseed, Scrapper, and In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, the story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, and two works of nonfiction, Refuse to Be Done and Baldur's Gate II. He teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.
Dantiel W. Moniz is the recipient of a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” Award and a Pushcart Prize. Her debut collection, Milk Blood Heat, is a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Award and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and she teaches fiction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Allegra Hyde is the author of the novel Eleutheria (Vintage, 2022) and the story collection Of This New World (University of Iowa Press, 2016), which won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award. Her second story collection, The Last Catastrophe, is forthcoming from Vintage. She currently teaches at Oberlin College.
Alexander Chee is the author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, and How Tt Write an Autobiographical Novel, a collection of essays. He is a recipient of the Whiting Writers Award and a NEA fellowship in fiction, and is an associate professor of English at Dartmouth College.
