Cullman Center Institute for Teachers: Nonfiction Workshop: “The Breath of Life”

Amitava Kumar, Instructor

This is a week-long seminar taking place from July 14th to July 18th.

Click here to apply.

The title for this seminar comes from a line by William Maxwell: "After forty years, what I came to care about the most was not style but the breath of life." How are we to find in what we read but also, crucially, in what we write that particular feeling or intimation, touch, unyielding grit or, for that matter, the elusive trace of what we understand as the authentic or the real? Each day, we will begin with a discussion of short readings or by looking at materials in The New York Public Library (on day one, for instance, we will look at writers’ journals in the Berg Collection—Vladimir Nabokov, Annie Proulx, Jack Kerouac); each afternoon, seminar participants will work on independent research and writing aimed at producing a brief essay—a mix of memoir, archival research, and reportage—to be shared at the end of the seminar.

Reality Hunger by David Shields, a book that is a manifesto for nonfiction (and also for writing that crosses boundaries and mixes genres), will serve as the spine of the seminar. Participants will be encouraged to follow the examples that Shields cites to develop the topic of their interests, stitching together items from NYPL’s collections and other readings. We will end with a discussion not of a work of nonfiction but a novella, William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow. A librarian will arrange a showing of Maxwell’s papers from the Library’s collection. We will be able to see how Maxwell himself, dealing with family tragedy as a boy during the Spanish flu and later as a writer and editor at the New Yorker, struggled to capture, but maybe also create, the breath of life.

Amitava Kumar is the author of several works of nonfiction, including Every Day I Write the Book: Notes on Style and The Green Book: An Observer’s Notebook, and four novels. His novel Immigrant, Montana was on the best of the year lists at the New Yorker and New York Times, as well as President Obama’s list of favorite books of 2018. Kumar’s latest novel is My Beloved Life and was described by James Wood as “beautiful, truthful fiction.” Kumar’s work has appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times, Granta, Harper’s, BRICK, Guernica, the Nation, and several other publications. He has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, a United States Artists fellowship, and residencies from Lannan Foundation, MacDowell, Yaddo, and Bellagio. Kumar was the 2023-2024 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at The New York Public Library’s Cullman Center. He is a professor of English at Vassar College.

Click here to apply. The deadline to apply for this seminar is Friday, April 25th. This seminar is not open to the public.