In Person Reading & Discussion Group: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway

Mondays, 7:30 - 9:00pm, November 27th - December 11th, 2023

At Prizer Arts & Letters

We will do a close reading of Mrs. Dalloway in three sessions, with eye toward Woolf’s dizzying shifts in perspective, and deft movement through time. We’ll look at the novel on a structural level, and notice how individual scenes and sentences are fragmented and interrupted by those same craft choices. And we’ll discuss how the idea of interruption is reflected in the wider concerns of the novel – suicide, the war, illness: all catastrophic disruptions of a life. As Jenny Offill wrote in a new introduction to the book: “Mrs. Dalloway is a remarkably expansive and an irreducibly strange book. Nothing you might read in a plot summary prepares you for the multitudes it contains.” 

Reading & Discussion Group: Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

Austin Bat Cave will have me in for a four-session class on reading this classic.

Tuesdays, 7:30 - 9:00pm, October 26th - November 16th, 2021

*This course is full. Click for info on waitlisting.

After reading To the Lighthouse, E.M. Forster called it Virginia Woolf’s “masterpiece.” In her introduction to the 1981 edition, Eudora Welty wrote, “Radiant as it is in its beauty, there could never be a mistake about it: here is a novel to the last degree severe and uncompromising. I think that beyond being about the very nature of reality, it is itself a vision of reality.” Long considered one of the greatest novels of consciousness, it is utterly modern, radical and yet beautifully anchored by formal constraints. Woolf’s inventive style, the novel’s unique structure, and her gorgeous prose combine to create an unparalleled and profound intimacy on the page. As Welty says, “There is nowhere in this radiant novel a shadow of detachment.” Think of this as a book club for readers of all levels, and for readers who are also writers. There will be optional writing exercises inspired by Woolf’s brilliance.   

Novel Writing Mentorship Program

Mondays, 6:30 - 8:30, February 8 - May 17, 2021

Austin Bat Cave will have me in to teach a workshop on long-form fiction for young writers aged 14 - 18. We will focus on structure, characterization, revision, and sustaining a writing practice, with breakout rooms for sharing work.