Writing About Home
Taught by Stacey Kahn
Stacey Kahn is a native New Yorker, a writer and a teacher. She received her MFA in nonfiction from Sarah Lawrence College and has had work appear in Epiphany Magazine and Print Magazine. She has worked for a couple of literary journals and freelances from time to time. An avid music fan, she often writes about the subject and attends concerts whenever she can. Aside from music, she is also an enthusiastic eater; you can find her around the city in search of the perfect rice krispy treat.
Everyone has a home--whatever their concept of it is--and what you consider home can be constantly changing, or constantly fixed, or more than one place at a time. Maybe the best news about the fact that everyone has a home, though, is that it's an automatic writing topic--it provides a prompt for those who want to write but often feel they have nothing to write about.
And even if you don't think of anywhere as home, this, too, provides plenty of fodder for a piece. In this class we'll look at and share some pieces--both fiction and nonfiction--by writers like Joan Didion. The first week we'll read pieces on the home we all currently share--New York--and the following week we'll take a look at some fictional pieces about home from writers like Sherwood Anderson and compare our experiences with the people involved in the pieces. We'll look to these writers for inspiration, discuss, and then have some time at the end of each class to write.
(class size: 10-12, lots of discussion!)
