RLAW is a zoom workshop the 2nd & 4th Mondays of each month. The schedule is here. Below, see the prompt generated for each reading – have fun with it!
If you’re new to us, if you’re a writer who reads or a reader who writes and would like to consider joining us, it’s simple – please email for the files and the zoom link – that’s it.
2.23.2026 Mircea Cǎrtařescu, The Dance & The Fall: This Romanian author tells us this, and I am paraphrasing here, that when he sits down to write – and he writes by hand – a sort of second personality emerges, it’s like some other person writes, he has no previous planning, he makes no outlines, synopsis, plans, he never knows what will be written on the second page, it’s like, he says, the book is making itself, and he offers a metaphor here, he is like a jockey, he says, who is small, light, only hovering over the horse, trusting the horse to win the race. So let’s try it. Find your horse, mount and off you go, led by the beast that is you but not you. Try writing 1000 words without stopping to steer because you are light and small and the horse will take you safely to the finish. One, Two, Three – Go!
2.09.2026: Lauren Groff The Wind from The New Yorker. In this harrowing story blowing through generations of trauma, the writer switches her narrative voice almost immediately from third person to a very distant first person told “much later” by a mother who was a child at the beginning to her unnamed daughter. Try this. Start a story narrated in third person, switch to first to move the story forward. If you want to complicate it, then have the second narrator “much later” finish the initial story by relating what a character in the first part told. It’s very complicated, but interesting to play with, interpret it as you like! The point is to move a story along by changing narrators and POV’s through time.