The Writer's Studio: Two Households, Both Unalike in Dignity: Writing About Class and Race
Speaker(s): Jenn Trahan
All workshops are free, open to the entire Stanford community, and held from 6 pm to 7:30 pm in the Hume Center for Writing and Speaking, Building 250, Room 201. Snacks are provided!
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.
Two Households, Both Unalike in Dignity: Writing About Class and Race
Gatsby and Daisy in Louisville, Lady Chatterley and Oliver in Wragby, Sammy and Queenie in the A&P. What is it about class-created chasms that make character motivation so compelling? Should writers speak to class and race in their narratives? How do we weave in these details? We will read selected snippets by contemporary fiction writers, including Dorothy Allison, Alexia Arthurs, Jamel Brinkley, Junot Diaz, and Callan Wink, and then we will generate exposition, craft our own scenes, and discuss how to bring our characters and their stories to life.
Jenn Alandy Trahan was a 2016-2018 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction and currently teaches here at Stanford. Her work can be found in Permafrost, Blue Mesa Review, Harper's, and The Best American Short Stories 2019. She currently lives in Silicon Valley, where she can't help but think about class and race more than she typically would.