Writers on Writing

“People on the outside think there’s something magical about writing,” Harlan Ellison once wrote, “that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn’t like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that’s all there is to it.” In this class, we will take an introductory look at contemporary literature from a writer’s standpoint.

Writer Lacy M. Johnson will guide participants through specific excerpts from a group of authors chosen to demonstrate a variety of perspectives on writing and the writing process. Under consideration at press time are short essays by Alexander Chee (from How to Write an Autobiographical Novel), Annie Dillard (from The Writing Life and/or Teaching a Stone to Talk), Anne Lamott (from Bird by Bird), Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize Lecture, and Mary Oliver (from A Poetry Handbook). Final selections will be shared with registrants to allow for considered conversations.

Lacy Johnson describes herself as a professor, curator, and activist. She has been lauded for The Reckonings (Scribner, 2018), The Other Side (Tin House, 2014), and Trespasses: A Memoir (University of Iowa Press, 2012). She is co-editor, with Cheryl Beckett, of More City Than Water: A Houston Flood Atlas (University of Texas Press, 2022) and teaches creative nonfiction in the Rice University English department.