About the Workshop

In The Unnamable, Beckett offers this: “Dear incomprehension, it’s thanks to you I’ll be myself in the end.” In our week together, I would like to examine this idea by thinking about the concept of “bewilderment” and how it gets acted out in our writing—either through syntax, our accessing the duende, leaps into the unconscious, or simply circling around what is unsaid, unknown, unrealized. This will be a generative workshop, in the sense that we will look closely at work we bring in to find ways to transform it, go deeper into this shadow world.

Two weeks before the workshop I will ask you to submit a few things to a shared google drive folder–material related to your projects that we will use in the workshop, and so we can all get a sense of each other.

About the Instructor

Nick Flynn's most recent book is Low (Graywolf, 2023). His book Stay (Ze Books, 2000) chronicles his work with other artists (filmmakers, visual artists, musicians, etc) over the past twenty-five years. His bestselling memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (Norton, 2004) was made into a film starring Robert DeNiro (Focus Features, 2012) and has been translated into fifteen languages.