The Writer’s Studio: The Dream of the Story

On March 4, please join us for The Dream of the Story, a Writer’s Studio workshop hosted by Gahl Pratt Pardes.

As writers, we are often trapped on one side or the other of a false binary: that good writing is either the product of meticulous planning and technical execution, or, solely, of pure and unbridled inspiration. Is it necessarily true, as Hemingway (maybe) said, that “the first draft of anything is s***”? Or, as Clarice Lispector’s work seems to suggest (“Hallelujah, I shout, hallelujah merging with the darkest human howl of the pain of separation but a shout of diabolic joy…”), does one have to be in the throes of a full-on mystical experience as a prerequisite for writing? In this workshop, we will work to complicate both of these notions, and to build our own individual relationship with the generative, early stages of a writing project. Many of us know the difference between the in-the-moment magical sense of creative flow and the clunky feeling of forced writing. How can we reach for a state of flow? How can we set ourselves up for the kind of writing that feels like entering a dream? And how can we be confident that what we generate within that dream is coherent and worthy of revision, and, ultimately, of being read by others? We will approach these questions through collaborative close reading, discussion, and a final writing exercise.

Gahl Pratt Pardes is a writer from the Negev. Her work has received recognition from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the Henfield Prize for Fiction (runner up), the Balch Prize for the Short Story, and others. She taught writing and literature at the University of Virginia, where she also received an MFA as a Poe/Faulkner Fellow in fiction. A ’23-’25 Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, Gahl is at work on a novel and a short story collection.