This class is only open to students who have completed Level 3 at The Writers Studio and by permission of the teacher.
The goal of this class is to help students use a full range of technique in order to access greater emotional freedom and depth in their work. Emphasis is placed on creating and sustaining an effective artistic distance. This sophisticated technical element is further explored in The Writers Studio Craft Class, which must be taken in order to participate. Students at this level work on publishable short stories and poems.
Each 8-week term, in addition to keeping current with exercises, students are invited to submit a 10-page rough draft of a story for critique. We schedule the story night for each student at the beginning of the term. Students are encouraged to share stories based on Writers Studio exercises, and to indicate on their finished piece which exercise inspired the story. Students email their stories to the class and the teacher two days before their night. The second half of class, after the usual exercise critiques, is spent discussing that story.
Open only to students who have completed Level III and upon the recommendation of the teacher.
Lesley is the author, most recently, of The Best Place to Be, linked stories described by Elle magazine as "Virginia Woolf meets Candace Bushnell." Her short stories have been published in magazines and journals that include The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, Five Points, Open City, Glimmer Train and Epiphany. Her stories have been short-listed for Best American Short Stories and included in the anthology Twenty Over Forty. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Elle, and Vanity Fair, among other publications, and the anthology Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression. She is the recipient of a fellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts and is a Yaddo and a MacDowell Fellow. Lesley is associate director of The Writers Studio.