We are pleased to announce our latest Image Intensive, an opportunity to dive deeper into your craft, guided by faculty from our community who understand the unique impulses and challenges facing artists at the intersection of art, faith, and mystery.

Why and how is one compelled to write a story in the first-person point of view? The “I” at the center of any novel poses a perspective that is at once imaginatively powerful and narratively problematic, uniquely insightful and necessarily unreliable. This course will be a study of how and why the first-person works in fiction.

In this Image Intensive, we will read and discuss three contemporary novels that grapple with faith: Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It; Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead; and Jon Fosse’s Septology. As we do, we will ask: Why this form? What is lost and what is realized in the telling of a story in the first-person? Students will produce written pages of their own from work in the first-person, as well as offer critical and creative feedback in each class on a fellow writer’s pages being discussed.

Capped at 12 participants to ensure intimate learning, our goal will be to have each student’s work read and discussed in-class twice during the course. At the end of this class, a final written project of 3,000 words will be submitted to the instructor for personalized feedback.

Meeting Schedule (nine 90-minute Zoom sessions):

Week 1: February 27
Week 2: March 3 & 6
Week 3: March 10 & 13
Week 4: March 17 & 20
Week 5: March 27
Week 6: March 31

We will be exploring these ideas and reading and writing together in a small group setting, capped at 12 students, which will include:

• Nine sessions: 90-minute Zoom sessions each week, exploring ideas around first-person narrative writing.
• An in-depth exploration of several contemporary first-person novels.
• In-class peer feedback on your writing.
• Individual manuscript review (3,000 word maximum) with Andrew Krivák.