Kick off your Southern Festival of Books weekend with The Porch on Friday, where you’ll have a unique opportunity to learn from celebrated authors as they pass through Nashville before the festival officially begins! Stick around for the rest of the day to take more writing classes with Ann Powers, Darnell Arnoult, and Shawntelle Madison. 

A sentence should be more than just the information it conveys. In this class we're going to think about sound, style, and aesthetics as essential elements of the energy and meaning of the stories we're telling. As ways to surprise and thrill our readers as well as ourselves. We will look closely at individual sentences by writers such as Flannery O'Connor, Jhumpa Lahiri, Mitchell S. Jackson, Mary Robison, Grace Paley, David Berman, among others, to figure out why—and how—each writer built each one the way they did. We will try some fresh approaches to composition, and discover what is possible when every single sentence becomes an opportunity to generate narrative energy, develop voice, and deliver readerly pleasure. This class is open to writers of all levels, working in poetry or prose. 

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