The Writer's Studio: Writing from the Margins with Mark Labowskie

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.

Writing from the Margins

In her one and only stab at taking a creative writing workshop, the novelist Sarah Schulman was alarmed when her fellow students assumed her first-person narrator—who expressed desire for women—was a man. When writers from marginalized communities put their work “out there”—whether into workshop or into print—there is always the potential for said work to be misconstrued, attacked, or simply depreciated. This workshop will explore how writers creating fiction from differential perspectives (be they of class, race, religion, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, etc.) can think about and speak to their readership. Is there a “general”/mainstream reader to which we should be pitching our work? How much or how little about our worlds do we need to “explain”? This workshop will examine a number of writers’ strategies for coping with these questions, and we will test out our own feelings on these matters by writing scenes and sketches that draw upon our own communities and histories.

Mark Labowskie is a Jones Lecturer and recent Wallace Stegner Fellow. His stories have appeared in Subtropics, Gulf Coast, and Sou’wester, and his writing has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Lighthouse Works, VCCA, and the Millay Colony.