Writing from the Senses

Just finished teaching my first multi-week class at Northwestern University’s Lifetime Learning Center. The class I designed was Writing from the Senses, so I spent 8 weeks leading students through sense-prompted writing exercises, class discussion and critique—all designed to improve their use of metaphor and help them write more vivid characters and descriptions. We discussed writers from Collette, Proust, and Hemingway to Aimee Bender, Sandra Cisneros, and Stuart Dybek. What a blast—I expect to be teaching variations of this course for years to come.