Meeting the 2nd and 4th Monday of each month with Riki Moss at 6:30 – 8PM ET via Zoom Workshops are free, no adm to wade through: just email riki@nereadersandwriters.com for the files and Zoom link.
Why should writers read? Faulkner tells writers to “…read everything, just like an apprentice who studies the masters. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out.” As Zen master Dogen said, “If you walk in the mist, you get wet.”
Fiction writers might be liars, fictionalizing names, places, ideas – and we all are wary of the reliability of memory – but when fiction is in service of deeper truths, we know it, we want to learn how the writer did it, we want to explore for ourselves.
Here’s the schedule from September through the end of the year:
9/8 Grace Paley: Conversations with my Father plus a forward from George Saunders who worked through this story on his substack. George loves Grace, whom he calls one of the great masters of our time. Here’s an opportunity to find out why, how to think about the larger import of her work, what questions she raises that are significant to any fiction writer. We’ll follow Saunders as he moves through the story.
9/22 David Means: Means is sterling in his chosen turf, “the great desolate span of the Central states,” and he’s also interesting as a male writer about relationships. The style is intriguing, no quoted dialogue, long paragraphs with little punctuation working between fact and fiction, poetics/God and hard reality. We’ve read two of his stories previously, but he just keeps going deeper with some structural quirks that are deviously fascinating.
10/13 László Krasznahorkai’s An Angel Passed Above Us published recently in The Yale Review has a hash tag: “The novelist of apocalypse insists on the reality of the present.” Remember that his earliest work was grounded in a Hungary suffocating within the Iron Curtain: later he found a relative lightness of being with books like “Seiobo There Below.” In this story, he contrasts the muddy trenches of the war in Ukraine with the phantasmagoric promises of technological globalization. He’s won the Booker, is always a name that comes quickly to mind for the Nobel and he is one of the most elegant writers of our time.
10/27 Jason Mott: an excerpt from his fourth Novel, One Hell of a Book, where an African-American author sets out on a cross-country book tour to promote his bestselling novel. I know, we want to avoid excerpts, AND memoir AND auto fiction but this guy has a wholly original voice that we need to hear and besides, he won the National. Big lessons in dialogue, big distinction between Mott’s loose patois vs the tightly sublime verbiage of both Means and Krasznahorkai.
11/10 Aimee Bender: Off a first person narrative by a willful, nuts, predatory, annoying woman messing up a party for her own game plan. A little surrealism, a little reality and a lot of sass. Bender gives us an unlikable female character with vulnerability right under the surface. A number of female authors are writing like this today, letting the ladies screw things up without judgement or redemption: I see resonance with Colette, Lucia Berlin, Mary Gaitskill, even Clarice Lispector.
11/24 Sequoia Magamatsu: Pig Son. A scientist cloning pigs for their organs gets caught in a serious conundrum when this pig starts talking, because his own child died of a diseased heart. There’s a bit of Ishiguro here: think of his novel Remains of the Day, a story about children raised to be donors. A simply written story by a young American-Japanese, whose latest novel, How High We Go In The Dark isn’t exactly sci fi or speculative fiction – let’s be unencumbered by genres here. The writing is simple, the idea complicated and we can consider how we would write in the POV of a non-verbal animal (or river or mountain).
12/8 David Foster Wallace: excerpt from The Pale King called Good People. This stands alone as a complete story. An Ironic title? Is DFW questioning what’s “good”? He’s tight in the head of his male character who tries to understand his lovers’ predicament and his place in it, It’s a moral question that will impact their lives deeply. “He was desperate to be good people, to still be able to feel he was good.” The writing is pure DFW, deep, insightful, fearless.
12/22 Flash. We’ll end 2025 with a burst of Flash, TBA.
