Fiction | Workshop

8-Week Advanced Fiction Workshop

This advanced workshop led by Julia Pierpont is for serious writers of fiction who have previous workshop experience. Writers should come to class with pieces that are ready for feedback. Novel excerpts welcome.  Workshop will be supplemented with craft exercises and assigned readings. Each student will workshop twice and meet once with the instructor for an individual conference following their in-class critiques.

CLASS TAKEAWAYS

- intensive peer and instructor critiques on two fiction submissions

- one private conference with the instructor to discuss your writing style, goals, and areas for improvement

- access to a nurturing community of writers and readers and an engaged mentor; free admission to Catapult's write-ins and student events, as well as access to our monthly digest of submission , residency, and award deadlines 

- practical advice about taking the next step as a professional writer - from applying to MFAS to preparing work for submission to agents and publishers

- greater familiarity with contemporary masters of literary fiction

- more confidence as a writer, on and off the page

*no class on May 29th

Julia Pierpont

Julia Pierpont is the author of the bestselling novel Among the Ten Thousand Things, recipient of the Prix Fitzgerald in France. She is a graduate of Barnard College and the M.F.A. program at N.Y.U., where she was a Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellow and a Stein Fellow. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, and Guernica, as well as in the essay collection CRUSH: Writers Reflect on Love, Longing and the Power of Their First Celebrity Crush. Julia splits her time between New York and Los Angeles, and is a member of the creative writing faculty at NYU.

Testimonials

"[A] tender, delicately perceptive account of one family torn apart by infidelity . . . Pierpont’s voice is wry and confident, and she is a fine anthropologist of New York life, especially for those creative types who never quite manage to fit in with cultural expectations."

THE WASHINGTON POST

"What sets Pierpont apart . . . is her storytelling chops. The chapters that follow that dramatic opening make it clear that there are going to be as many ingenious twists and turns in this literary novel as there are in a top-notch work of suspense like GONE GIRL. The effect is dizzying: as a reader you feel, as the Shanleys do, that the earth keeps shifting beneath your feet."

Maureen Corrigan NPR's FRESH AIR

"Pierpont’s language is heart-stopping. In one scene, with her characters suspended in emotional turmoil, she pauses to describe their empty house. There’s even a sparse, poetic interlude in the middle of the book that skips across the family’s lives for decades. . . . Then she rewinds the decades and picks up where she left off. It’s the kind of structural risk that shouldn’t work, but in her skilled hands it lands beautifully. Technically, of course, this is a domestic drama. But between Pierpont’s literary finesse and her captivating characters, it reads like a page-turner. "

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

"[An] excellent, insightful first novel . . . a gripping portrait of the disintegration of the Shanley family . . . Pierpont brings this family of four to life in sharply observed detail. . . . An acute observer of social comedy, Ms. Pierpont has a keen eye for the absurd."

Moira Hodgson THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

"A luscious, smart summer novel . . . about a family blown apart and yet still painfully tethered together, written by a blazingly talented young author whose prose is so assured and whose observations are so precise and deeply felt that it’s almost an insult to bring up her age. . . . Pierpont illustrates how hard it can be to grow up, at any age—just one of the many reasons AMONG THE TEN THOUSAND THINGS is such an impressive debut."

Helen Schulamn THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW