[X] for Poets: “Fiction for Poets” with Peter Orner
Register for this workshop here.
You can order Peter’s book here, with a percentage of every purchase going to support Yetzirah.
In this two-hour workshop, we’ll look at how studying fiction can animate poetry in surprising ways. I’ve long been interested, even obsessed, by what fiction writers can learn from poets. I think especially of compression, and the poets can muster with so few words. But what about the other way around? What can poets gain from becoming more steeped in fiction? We’ll look in particular at narrative momentum. How does fiction, at its best, and through a whole host of sometimes obvious, sometimes mysterious techniques (and instincts) grab and hold a reader’s attention.
For instance, this is the first sentence of Dennis Cooper’s I Wished: “I started writing books about and for my friend George Miles because whenever I would speak about him honestly like I am doing now I felt a complicated agony beneath my words that talking openly can’t handle.” So much to say about this line, and in this class I might ask you to pause at that odd phrase “like I am doing now.” The book has only just begun?
What does a phrase do to our expectations of what’s to come? Momentum, expectations. How do they manifest in fiction? This will be our singular focus — and we’d need a lot more than two hours to do it justice, but it will be a start! Among the writers we’ll talk about are Marilynne Robinson, John Edgar Wideman, Penelope Fitzgerald, Dennis Cooper, Lucia Berlin, Italo Calvino, and VIrginia Woolf because I always at some point come home to Virginia Woolf, a fiction writer who has so much to give to any writer, whether they create poetry or prose . . .
Workshop Dates & Cost
December 3, 2026, 6:30-8:30 PM
$72—standard registration
$59—18% discounted registration for Yetzirah Members (you can become a member here)
*As we want our offerings to be accessible to all, there is a pay-what-you-can option if this pricing is a hardship. No one will be turned away for lack of funds, but please contact Program Coordinator Kyra Lisse at klisse@yetzirahpoets.org if you would like a sliding-scale ticket.
About Peter
Peter Orner’s fiction and non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly, Granta, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, The Southern Review, Ploughshares and many other publications. Stories have been anthologized in Best American Stories and twice received a Pushcart Prize. Peter has been awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy in Rome, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a two-year Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship. He’s also received a California Book Award (LOVE AND SHAME AND LOVE), the Goldberg Prize for Jewish Writing (ESTHER STORIES) and has been a finalist for the Pen/ Hemingway Award ESTHER STORIES, the Los Angeles Times Book Award (THE SECOND COMING OF MAVALA SHIKONGO), and the Northern California Book Award (LAST CAR OVER THE SAGAMORE BRIDGE) . In 2017-2018, Peter was a Fulbright U.S. Scholar in Namibia where he taught at the University of Namibia.
