Stein Visiting Writers

Each year, the Creative Writing Program welcomes a distinguished writer to teach a Stanford writing seminar to undergraduates. These unique classes are kept small--limited to no more than 15 students--and they focus on a subject of the writer’s expertise and choosing. The writer also holds a public reading and colloquium. These seminars and events are made possible with the generous support of Isaac and Madeline Stein.

English 190V Reading for Writers: STRANGE ENCOUNTERS

• Offered: Winter 2026

• Instructor: Prof. Zhang

• Satisfies the intermediate/advanced prose requirement

• Enrollment granted on priority basis. To be considered for enrollment, please submit the Course Preference Form

This course is both a fiction workshop and a deprogramming. While you are likely to have encountered literature as an intellectual or academic practice, sublime writing is often experienced (and produced) in the body as much as the brain. Great writing often begins that way, too, via methods that are irrational, messy, irreducible, intuitive, even mystical. In fact, we might even ask: how do we turn off the brain? We will learn to read and write not as scholars prodding toward a correct answer but as explorers and sensualists having encounters with living, breathing entities on the page. We might ask: what does a scene make you feel? where do you feel it in your body? what makes a text come alive to you and only you at this moment in your life? Note that this is not an invitation to indulge in narcissism or narrowness in the classroom; rather, this is a chance to appreciate how subjective each person’s interaction with a text is, and how valid a panoply of viewpoints. We’ll read published works that feel alive on the page: electric prose, divisive narrators, “unrealistic” plots, experimental forms, characters classified as “wrong” or “immoral.” You will be responsible for take-home writing assignments, as well as short in-class writing exercises that encourage messy, intuitive writing of your own.