Teaching

Introduction to Creative Writing - May 2024

Join me this summer on the campus of Lake Forest College for a four-week intensive on the fundamentals of creative writing, in which we’ll explore the tools needed to create good writing in any genre: poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and drama.

All Lake Forest College summer session courses are open to members of the community, from high school students to adult learners to retirees. For more information on registering, and for information on many other course offerings this summer, click here or contact me directly: corey (at) lakeforest (dot) edu.

Resources

An occasionally updated list of my favorite books, websites, newsletters, and podcasts about writing and literature:

Books

• Lynda Barry, What It Is

• ---, Syllabus

• ---, Making Comics

• Charles Baxter, Burning Down the House

• Matt Bell, Refuse to Be Done

• Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style

• Samuel R. Delany, About Writing

• Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

• John Gardner, The Art of Fiction

• ---, On Becoming a Novelist

• ---, On Writers and Writing

• Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

• Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story

• Robert Hass, A Little Book on Form

• Anorak Huey and W. Todd Kaneko, Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology

• Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town

• Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

• Brian Kiteley, The 3 AM Epiphany

• ---, The 4 AM Breakthrough

• Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

• Robert Pinsky, Singing School

• Raymond Queneau, Exercises in Style

• Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

• Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey

• Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World

• Hazel Smith, The Writing Experiment

• Blake Snyder, Save the Cat!

• Michael Theune, Structure and Surprise

• Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer

• ---, A Muse and a Maze: Writing as Puzzle, Mystery, and Magic

Websites and Magazines

• failbetter

• Granta

• The Los Angeles Review of Books

• Literary Hub

• The Millions

• The Nervous Breakdown

• Numero Cinq - The Holy Book of Literary Craft

• Page Turner

• The Paris Review Daily

• Poets and Writers

• Triple Canopy

• The White Review

Newsletters

• Alison Acheson’s Unschool for Writers

• Radha Marcum’s Poet to Poet

• Nate Marshall’s Uncut Slang

• Kate McKean's Agents and Books

• Memoir Monday

• Lincoln Michel's Counter Craft

• Jeremy Noel-Tod’s Some Flowers Soon

• MFA Declassified by Matt Saccaro

• George Saunders' Story Club

• Sean Singer’s The Sharpener

• Brandon Taylor's sweater weather

• The Washington Review of Books

Podcasts

• Backlisted

• Book Fight

• The Invisible College

• The Maris Review

• The Moth

• So Many Damn Books

Essays and unclassifiables

• Christian Bök, “Excerpts from Eunoia”

• Douglas Glover, “The Novel as a Poem”

• Garielle Lutz, “The Sentence Is a Lonely Place”

• Bernadette Mayer’s Writing Experiments

• Lincoln Michel, “On the Many Different Engines That Power a Short Story”

• —”TV Casualties: Avoiding Bad Habits from Visual Media”

• Viktor Shklovksy, “Art as Device”

• Brandon Taylor, “The Miserly Eye”