The Writer's Studio: Tiny Metaphorical Things

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.

Metaphor is the basis of most of the meaning-making we humans do—talking about one thing in terms of another is in fact at the heart of language, cognition, and imagination. For writers, metaphor is often the way we stretch our consciousness, and invite others to stretch theirs. Sometimes this is a matter of hunting for the right metaphor to capture an experience, but more often it is a matter of finding in an experience its larger resonance. In this workshop, we'll look at how writers turn ordinary encounters, objects, and even bits of dialogue into ways of talking about our deepest experiences, and we'll try out methods for discovering and writing about the metaphors our own experience offers us.

Jonah Willihnganz is the Director of the Stanford Storytelling Project and Co-Director of the LifeWorks Progam for Integrative Learning in the School of Medicine. He has published fiction, essays, and literary criticism and has taught writing and literature at Stanford since 2002. This spring he is teaching, with Shannon Pufahl, Fight the Future, a course on speculative film and fiction.