The Breath of Life
Thursday, October 16, 10am–noon | Taft Research Center | Register
Join our fall keynote speaker Amitava Kumar for a workshop whose title comes from a line by William Maxwell: "After forty years, what I came to care about the most was not style but the breath of life." How are we to find in what we read but also, crucially, in what we write that particular feeling or intimation, touch, unyielding grit or, for that matter, the elusive trace of what we understand as the authentic or the real? Also, how to proceed from specific details to questions of voice and structure. Three short writing exercises will be built around a discussion of passages from Joan Didion, Arundhati Roy, David Foster Wallace, James McPhee, Amy Hempel, and Lydia Davis.