Replay: Steve Almond shares Five Things He's Learned about Where Stories Come From
Check out the first five minutes of his recent class.
"My students arrive desperate to locate the stories they are meant to tell, to pluck meaning from the rush of their experiences, to bear witness to their lives and honor their imaginations. This is not as easy as it sounds. Because there are almost always deep psychological and emotional anxieties that hold us back from telling those stories. We fear exposing ourselves to readers, exposing our loved ones, unleashing the chaos and pain we most often carry in silence. If you’re anything like me, you spend a long time looking in the wrong places, too."
– Steve Almond, Five Things I’ve Learned about Where Stories Come From
Steve Almond is the celebrated author of twelve books of fiction and nonfiction, including the New York Times bestsellers All the Secrets of the World, Candyfreak and Against Football. He is also a professor of Journalism at Harvard University and serves as a literary correspondent for NPR. Here’s the first five minutes of his recent two-hour class in which Steve shares the Five Things He’s Learned about the powerful emotions that serve as the engines of our storytelling – and about the ways that these emotions show up in literature, shape our writing, and inform our lives.
Five Things I’ve Learned about Where Stories Come From offers a look at what Steve has come to believe are the emotional states that function as the central engines of our storytelling. He provides close readings of his own work, talks about the writing he admires, and even considers submissions from some of the class attendees. His class helps both readers and writers identify the way in which five key emotions – Obsession, Desire, Doubt, Rage, and Mercy – shape our need to make sense of the world through story.
If you’re a writer – or if you want to know more about the ways that writers’ most private emotions shape their writing and their world – this class is for you.
Steve’s short stories have been anthologized widely, in the Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, Best American Erotica, and Best American Mysteries series. For four years, he hosted the New York Times Dear Sugars podcast with his pal Cheryl Strayed. He hosts storytelling events for The Moth. Don’t miss his recently released William Stoner and the Battle for the Inner Life.
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