The Writer's Studio: The Moving Image with William Brewer

The Writer’s Studio is a free workshop series open to all students from all majors. Come study the art of writing in intensive, fun, hands-on workshops with dynamic faculty from the Creative Writing program, the Stanford Storytelling Project, and others. You’ll leave with an expanded understanding of what your writing can do.

The Moving Image

Plenty of writing is described as “cinematic,” but for that description to hold true, it means that the writing must move (as “kinesis,” the root of cinema, suggests). This class will explore how different poets utilize movement—generated through techniques of rhythm, syntax, line, and form—to build and activate images that function “cinematically” in the reader’s mind. In addition, we'll examine how movement can create thematic and formal tension within a poem. A number of exercises will help us translate these concepts and techniques into practice.Screen reader support enabled.

William Brewer is the author of I Know Your Kind (Milkweed Editions, 2017), a winner of the National Poetry Series, and Oxyana, which was selected for the Poetry Society of America's 30 and Under Chapbook Fellowship. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, The Nation, New England Review, The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Sewanee Review, and other journals. Formerly a Stegner Fellow, he is currently a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University.