Fiction Seminar with Lysley Tenorio and Anthony Doerr: SCENE-STEALING: Scenes by Contemporary Masters and What To Take From Them

Register for a cocktail hour literary seminar with SMC MFA fiction Professor Lysley Tenorio with guest author Anthony Doerr

You know the saying: good artists borrow, great artists steal. In this class, we’ll aim for greatness, examining the ways contemporary fiction writers render scenes in their work. How do they use this building block of narrative to generate drama and suspense, and to develop both external and internal conflict in their fiction? How do they use dialogue, internal monologue, and action to develop character, in order to give readers an immersive emotional experience? By studying the strategies used by these celebrated authors, we’ll learn to use their techniques for our own work.

One of the writers we’ll read is Anthony Doerr, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the New York Times bestseller, All The Light We Cannot See. Doerr will make a special virtual visit to our class to offer advice on writing scenes. To celebrate this incredible opportunity, the class will include a signature cocktail, which you can prepare during the class break and enjoy during his visit.  The cocktail recipe (with a non-alcoholic, mocktail option) will be sent to students in advance.

This three-hour class includes close readings and discussion, in-class writing and sharing, and an author visit.  Recommended (but not required) readings will be sent to students one week before the class.

Lysley Tenorio is the author of the novel The Son of Good Fortune, and the story collection Monstress. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Whiting Award, the New American Voices Award, a Stegner fellowship, and the Rome Prize.  His stories have appeared in  the Atlantic, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Ploughshares, and have been adapted for the stage in San Francisco and New York City.  A finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, he will be a 2021-22 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University.  He is a professor at Saint Mary’s College of California.

Anthony Doerr is the author of All the Light We Cannot See, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Carnegie Medal, the Alex Award, and a #1 New York Times bestseller. He is also the author of the story collections Memory Wall and The Shell Collector, the novel About Grace, and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome. He has won five O. Henry Prizes, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, the National Magazine Award for fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Story Prize. Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife and two sons.  His new novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land, will be published in the fall of 2021.

Funds raised from this seminar will go to support scholarships for BIPOC/Global Majority students and LGBTQ!+ students in the MFA in Creative Writing program