Read Like A Writer

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The 2nd and 4th Monday of each month at 6:30 – 8:00 EST on Zoom.

Writers read to become better writers by teasing out the brilliance in the stories we love. And then trying things out for themselves. Fiction writer Riki Moss brings us short stories from The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, etc.; stories picked for their unique voices, or a stunning first paragraph, exquisite sentences, unexpected endings, the way tension builds in a conventional narrative or circles in fragments: like that. How does the writer pull it off?  Prompts are provided for generative writing, so we hear each other’s voices without judgement. A two month schedule will be posted in advance, the files provided with enough time to read before each workshop. That’s what we ask of you; Read the story, pull it apart, delight in the conversation and write.

To join a session, email [email protected]. We’ll respond with the file and a zoom link. It’s that simple.

Here are the currently scheduled workshops for 2024:

We’ll respond with the file and a zoom link. It’s that simple.

Do you find writing from prompts useful?
Would you like to share your prompts?

Would you like feedback/comments from your peers for other writing?

Workshop participants are invited to post in our google docs.

Email [email protected]

Currently Scheduled Workshops

March 10 Mircea Cărtărescu, known as Romania’s most famous avant guard writer, novelist, poet. The Fall is an excerpt from his amazingly 680 page novel Solenoid, described as a colossal anti-novel, an intricate and sprawling myth of multidimensional reality, is a book Michael Sevy calls maybe the best novel published this century. This excerpt is but a hint. The Dance, published last month in Granta,  is …I don’t know, it seems like a parable, it feels a little like Borges. Like Cesar Arias, he professes to write in long hand and never revise. He says, “…it’s as if the text has always been there, but covered over by white paint, and my only work is to erase that paint, revealing the manuscript beneath.” Nice! And of course he never has a plan or a story in mind, and yes, he considers his work autobiographic, in the sense that he has “..never lived my life but has constructed it.”.

March 24 Helen DeWitt: So hard to categorize her. Her big wonderful novel was The Last Samurai, about a mother raising a boy born of a one night stand with Liberace, (the other one). It’s funny, poignant, sad and brilliant: and these two stories, bite in similar ways. Famous Last Words, an early story written in 1985, is described as a sharp academic satire, though unlike most academic comedy in its warmheartedness, a deliciously light arabesque around the concept of the Death of the Author—a figurative phrase used by Roland Barthes and others to describe an ideal authorial withdrawal from a literary text. Sheila Heti highly and publicly recommended the more recent story On The Town. AI calls it a fable about the pursuit of artists by the culture industry, and the resulting frustration and madness of the artists, a fantasy tale about having competent people in charge.

Read Like A Writer will be on a writer’s vacation April and May. We’ll be back with new short stories in June.

Workshop leader Riki Moss