Manufactured Spaces: Setting

In this four-week generative class, we’ll visit one of the basic elements of storytelling – setting –and immerse ourselves in how we craft these spaces. How do we choose which details to include? What can we borrow from cinematographers? From composers? From artists? How do we choreograph complicated scenes? What can we leave out and what can we heighten? What about a character’s interior setting? What can we learn from science writers? Journalists?

The classes will involve visualizations, writing inside and outside of our meetings, sharing our work in an exploratory way, movement, and discussion of setting, voice, and tone in works by Tommy Orange, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Barry Lopez, Hanif Abdurraqib, Louise Erdrich, and others. We’ll also look at crowd scenes and landscape scenes in films and listen to orchestrated work (how the composer brings in instruments as pieces of a “setting”). How might the brain “read” a scene as it’s described and how can we use that brain science in our writing? This class is ideal for memoirists and fiction writers, though poets, of course, are welcome.

Access Program
We want our writing classes and Delves to be accessible to everyone, regardless of income and background. We understand that our tuition structure can present obstacles for some people. Our Access Program offers writing class and Delve tuitions at a reduced rate. The access program for writing classes covers 60% of the class tuition. Most writing classes have at least one access spot available.

Please apply here for access rate tuition. Contact Susan Moore at susan@literary-arts.org if you have questions.

In-Person Class
Note: This class meets in-person at Literary Arts, 925 SW Washington. Literary Arts will require proof of full COVID-19 vaccination, or a negative test result (within 72 hours) from a healthcare provider, for entry into our in-person classes. Please see our complete Covid-19 policy here.

Alex Behr

Alex Behr has an MFA in creative writing from Portland State and has taught fiction at the college level. She has led fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction WITS residencies since 2014. She’s currently facilitating creative labs called “Eno/Ono” through Corporeal Writing. She’s the author of Planet Grim: Stories (7.13 Books), and her interviews, essays, short fiction, book reviews, and poetry have appeared in Salon, Tin House, The Rumpus, Vol 1 Brooklyn, Propeller, Gravity of the Thing, Oregon Humanities, Cleaver, and elsewhere. In various cities, she shared excerpts from her dire teen journals in the comedy show Mortified and was in rock bands for more than 20 years.