Strong feeling is often what drives us to write. We want our reader to experience the sadness or outrage, the delight or sense of betrayal we feel when thinking about a fictional (or nonfictional) situation. But how do we do that, exactly? How do we tell a story that’s not cold, but that’s not melodramatic either? 

This session will explore one way of doing that: using description of the physical world as a kind of container for what our characters are feeling, and to evoke those feelings in our readers as well. We’ll look at examples from writers like Gwendolyn Brooks, Louise Erdrich, Edward P. Jones, and Patricia Highsmith, then experiment to make the technique work for us. You’ll come away with a new tool in your tool belt as well as some new prose to deepen a current work-in-progress or serve as a springboard for a future piece. Useful for both beginning and more experienced writers in any prose genre.

Rachel Pastan is the author of four novels, most recently In the Field (2021), based on the life of Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock. Her 2014 novel, Alena—a recasting of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca set in the contemporary art world—was named an Editors’ Choice in The New York Times Book Review. In 2014, she edited Seven Writers, a chapbook of writing inspired by exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, where she served as Editor-at-Large for several years and developed the popular blog Miranda. Pastan was a long-time core faculty member at the Bennington Writing Seminars MFA program and has taught fiction writing at Swarthmore College, Villanova University, and elsewhere.

Wednesdays On the Stoop is a series of free writing programming by Zoom every Wednesday from 4 pm - 5 pm. From accountability co-writing to generative prompts to discussions of exciting forms and authors of all genres, these sessions are designed to be a constant structure--every Wednesday at 4 you can count on Blue Stoop to plug you into your writing energy with an informal and supportive session.