The Art of Writing About Community with Mai Sennaar (Online)

Join writer Mai Sennaar for a conversational, dynamic writing workshop that examines how writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Sandra Cisneros leverage the concept of community—local, global, cultural, spiritual—in their storytelling to shape literary forms, voice, and structure. Concurrently, through close reading, discussion, and creative practice, participants will produce original work that experiments with community on their own terms.

Course Outline:

• Week 1 — Defining Community. Exploring depictions of community across geography, cultures, and time in historical and contemporary fiction, including selections from Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Lahiri’s The Namesake. What are these authors saying about community? We’ll identify shared and distinctive themes and approaches, and free write on our personal experiences of community.
• Week 2 — Zora Neale Hurston: Illustrating Local Community with Voice. We’ll focus on how Hurston creates an immersive world with the dialect and detail of Black communities in Florida in the early 1900s. Our discussion will center on how rhythm, tone, and imagery contribute to the vividness of community in selections from Their Eyes Were Watching God, and we’ll experiment with voice to capture the essence of a community.
• Week 3 — Jhumpa Lahiri: Exploring Migration and Identity Through Plot. After reading select passages from The Namesake, we’ll explore community on a global scale through story structure and begin to sketch outlines for our own stories.
• Week 4 — Sandra Cisneros: The Magnitude of the Minute. We’ll discuss the power of detail in The House on Mango Street and explore how a neighborhood can become an entire ecosystem through style, specificity, and focus. Building on previous assignments, participants will also expand a scene or moment through detail.
• Week 5 — Complexity: When Community is Absent. Exploring works by Jack London, Richard Wright, and Ernest Hemingway, we’ll explore how writers capture the absence of community. Participants will free-write a scene portraying displacement or isolation in any context they choose.
• Week 6 — Community in the Room. We’ll discuss our own participation (or lack thereof) in the communities in our lives, and then write our own scenes. How have our identities been shaped by a presence or lack of community? How can we use the flavor of these experiences in our work?
• Week 7 — Project Goals. We’ll identify and outline personal goals for our workshop projects, and discuss approaches for generating an effective roadmap for completing creative projects.
• Week 8 — Workshop. Sharing and workshopping first drafts with peer feedback to identify strengths, gaps, and next steps for revision.
• Week 9 — Workshop. We’ll discuss the role and significance of a workshop community for writers, offer feedback on our works-in-progress, and give feedback on our feedback. How can we be better writers to one another?
• Week 10 — Reflection. Final sharing of original works, followed by group reading and reflections.

Level: Introductory

This course is held online via Zoom.