Feb. 5 – Mar. 19, 2026
READING AND WRITING CLAIRE-LOUISE BENNETT
On Winter evenings we used to get behind the green velvet curtains in the living room and look out the window at the bare dark garden. If we looked long enough we would see things in the dark and the dark looking back would see things in us. Very soon the dense velvety darkness that gathered closely behind the curtain was coaxed loose by the expansive and mischievous darkness outside. They mingled together. They mingled together. Necromantically exchanging their store. And the thin glass between them, that’s right, glittered gently and dissolved like snow. -from Fish Out of Water
On January 29th—just two weeks from today—we will begin this 7-week immersion into the writing of Claire-Louise Bennett. This is a very special Reading for Writing course where we will use Bennett’s inner dark as a mirror to find the inexpressible in our own writing.
If you’ve never taken a course with me, if you’ve ever wondered how to move from a skimming reader to a building writer, I invite you to join us. Whether you are a beginning or seasoned artist, a lifelong reader, or a student seeking to go deeper into reading and developing your own craft, this is where the real work happens.
COURSE DESCRIPTION AND DETAILS
A beautiful new novel.
Big Kiss, Bye-Bye
Three shorter works, in their different ways, developing the density of inner dark she needs to find and lose her voice at once.
“Suddenly a Duck.”
Fish Out of Water
Nightflowers
Seven wonderful weeks.
“Suddenly a Duck,” initially categorized as an essay, initially a memoir, midcourse becoming something like a work of aesthetics, dissolving itself in the end into something—is it something?—although inexpressibly expressed, inexpressible.
Fish Out of Water, a little book with whose voice I easily identify (and have written about: https://marginalamericannotes.substack.com/p/claire-louise-on-reading-claire-louise), a work about aloneness, which is a blessing, and loneliness, which is not, a work about affinity—the finding of oneself inside another whose work becomes a mirror for that self, which is not in fact a self at all, but something dispersed, sometimes here and sometimes there, sometimes a “you” and sometimes an “I” and sometimes a “she,” and always there is someone—might be someone—speaking.
Nightflowers, written to accompany an exhibition she has decided she will curate at the Literature Museum in Ireland, and going back to Pond it is a work about space, about inhabiting, about a place that is nowhere, that is nothing, that is here and real and vivid.
Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, a novel that both looks back at Pond and at the looking back enacted in Checkout 19, and looks outside this solitary English woman living in Ireland (she looks outside), examining the way the connections that matter are connected in her mind and in her life and in this book, which is also a way of expanding that aloneness and of sharing it.
We will spend six weeks inhabiting this space that Claire-Louise has enacted in her writing, doing our best to read the weave and feel the textures for ourselves, writing every week a response that we can look at and discuss.
And in the seventh week, we will read each other’s final pieces, pieces enacting their own kind of inner dark to find what one forgets one has forgotten and has lost, the way that Claire-Louise enacts this movement in her work.
We will take risks together, read together, write together. And I am so excited that you will be here with me, that you will be here with us, and Claire-Louise.
Seats are limited to maintain close and intimate engagement with the materials.
- Dates: Thurs. 01/29 – Thurs. 03/12
- Format: 6:00-9:00 p.m. EST via Zoom
- Investment: $295.00
- To register: email me at vhwildman@gmail.com
Course materials:
Big Kiss, Bye-Bye is easily available online or at your local bookstore.
Fish Out of Water available through JOAN Publishing: https://joanpublishing.org/Claire-Louise-Bennett
Nightflowers available from the Literature Museum, Ireland: https://shop.moli.ie/products/nightflowers?srsltid=AfmBOooVnlh6eZ6Ngiwk8Ju_DyKJ4jayqX8RKLmSUaMx6j8_dB8-dSDT
Sept. 18 – Oct. 23, 2025
THE ARTIST IS A WOMAN
In this new Reading for Writing class we will look at four contemporary English women—one a filmmaker, one a painter, one a novelist, one a poet and performer—making work that is often reflective of both their art-making process and their lives as women making art that is also, in some way—and this will be our focus here—autobiographical.
We will “read” (look at, write about, carefully discuss) The Souvenir, Parts I and II, by Joanna Hogg, films that foreground her own early life—a difficult relationship that marked her in a way that she felt compelled to someday meticulously—drawing from journals, photographs, letters, and memory—reconstruct, and the process of dealing with this relationship through the creation of a fictional student film (a film within the second film) that also functions as a kind of auto-portrait within the larger auto-portrait of the films themselves.
We will read Celia Paul’s Self-Portrait where she brings her five-decades long practice of portraiture and self-portraiture into the space of words for the first time.
We will read Rachel Cusk’s latest novel, Parade, a book that foregrounds the position of women artists in a world once exclusively defined by men.
We will read Holly Pester’s collection of poems, Comic Timing, a book that performs (often autobiographically) the female body in space and time in ways that are both historically specific and abstract, surprising and sonically alive in ways that feel genuinely new.
Every week students will be expected to do the requisite reading (and/or watching) and respond to it in writing, and, at the end of our six weeks, to turn in their own self-portraits made of words using, as inspiration, specific techniques taken from their close encounter with one or more of these four contemporary female artists.
Dates: Thurs. 09/18 through Thurs. 10/23
Time and location: 6:00-9:00 p.m. via Zoom
Cost: $295.00 payable via Zelle before the first day of class.
Registration: email me at vhwildman@gmail.com for additional information.
Self-Portrait by Celia Paul, Parade by Rachel Cusk, and Comic Timing by Holly Pester are all available online via Amazon or Bookshop, or via independent booksellers (always preferable). The Souvenir Parts I and II are available for streaming on multiple platforms and also available on Blueray/DVD through A24.
Here’s a brief word on the course: https://marginalamericannotes.com/2025/08/26/a-brief-word-on-my-upcoming-course-the-artist-is-a-woman/
Summer 2025
HYBRID SUMMER COURSE:
READING AND WRITING A SINGLE DAY
(MRS. DALLOWAY/THE HOURS) BEGINS JUNE 26TH
Summer is here and again I will be in Providence
and excited to get together to read and write and
explore the course of a single day
together.
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is now a hundred (published in 1925)
“life; London; this moment in June”
And Michael Cunningham’s response to it, The Hours, is now 27.
We will read both books and write our own day . . . compose our own day . . . day after day . . . just one.
And make a life here
– a whole life –
in this one day.And every week students will respond to the reading and do work to make their day –
this “day” can belong to a real person or a fictional person or even yourself.
And we will meet in person
(those of you who can join me in Providence – please do!)
and virtually
over the course of six weeks (June 26h through July 31st)
hybrid (in-person and on Zoom)
at School One from June 26th through July 10th
(from 6:00 to 9:00pm)
and the final three weeks will all be on Zoom.
And there’s a dandy new edition that includes both novels
(here’s the Amazon link, but if you can, please go local): https://www.amazon.com/Hours-Mrs-Dalloway-Novel/dp/125085267
Dates:Thurs. 06/26 through Thurs. 07/31
Time and location: 6:00-9:00 p.m. via Zoom (also in person at School One for the first three weeks)
Cost: $295.00 payable via Zelle or check (if attending in person) on the first day of class .
Registration: email me at vhwildman@gmail.com for additional information.
I hope that you will join us starting this upcoming moment in June!
Spring 2025
READING/NOTING/MAKING
Just in time for spring … a creative (and perhaps a spiritual) rebirth.
This course aims to open a highly interactive daily space for process and practice allowing us to tune in to the infinite possibilities of making and creating on the page and beyond.
This course is ideal for readers/writers/creatives/makers across media who are interested in expanding their daily process and practice and thus advancing with their work at any level.
We will be reading the daily entries of a woman’s life from Uwe Johnson’s novel Anniversaries, composed of what she experiences that day in her life – a German woman alone in New York raising a precocious ten year old daughter, recording her history/her memories of the past, recording what she reads that day in the New York Times[Here is the New York Times review of the novel: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/books/review-anniversaries-uwe-johnson.html#:~:text=A%20Masterpiece%20That%20Requires%20Your%20Full%20Attention%20%E2%80%94%20and%20a%20Lot%20of%20Time,Share%20full%20article&text=There%20is%20a%20Borges%20story,masterpiece%2C%20performs%20a%20similar%20trick.]
NOTE: We will not (not to worry) be reading the whole novel, just part of Volume 1.
[Here is a link to purchase volume 1 directly from NYRB: https://www.nyrb.com/products/anniversaries-volume-1]
We will be composing a daily response to our reading of her days – a response that includes a direct recording of our reading of that entry, that may include the minutiae from our own day, that may include our own memories, and/or something (anything) else, and this response may be in writing, or in sculpture, film, sound, paint, etc. It is up to you. You may even vary the mode of your responses from day to day.
We will be making a weekly response out of these daily responses – putting together something out of what we’ve done to share with the class each week.
We will meet every Thursday for six weeks on Zoom to discuss the reading, to discuss our responses to the readings, to open up a way – always another way – together – to go on.
Just remember that this course will require a daily commitment to process and practice, along with an assignment every week.
Dates:Thurs. 04/24 through Thurs. 05/29
Time and location: 6:00-9:00 p.m. via Zoom
Cost: $295.00 payable via Zelle or check before the first day of class.
Registration: email me at vhwildman@gmail.com for additional information.
I look forward to reading, noting, and making together!
FALL 2024
WRITING MINI-BOOTCAMP: STARTING BY STARTING FALSELY
If you have a story you want to tell or an essay or memoir you want to write and are not sure how to begin or have something that you have already begun writing but don’t know how to continue, join us for STARTING BY STARTING FALSELY, a three-day writing mini-bootcamp, where we will work to get you moving with your writing by trying a number of different ways to get your project off the ground or get it moving, in just three days.
Overview:
- Day 1: Close reading of text that will serve as the basis for the first writing assignment.
- Day 2: Workshop some of the initial pieces from the first assignment and introduce the second writing prompt aimed at advancing your initial writing.
- Day 3: Workshop new writing and discuss next steps to maintain momentum.
Text: “Forty-one False Starts” by Janet Malcolm
Dates:Fri. 9/6 through Sun. 9/8
Time and location: 6:30-8:30p.m. via Zoom
Cost: $125.00 payable via Zelle or check before the first day of class.
Registration: email me at vhwildman@gmail.com for additional information.
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READING FOR WRITING: LATE HENRY JAMES (THE GOLDEN BOWL)
In this course we will be reading Henry James’s last completed novel, The Golden Bowl, a book that, like The Wings of the Dove before it, takes a melodramatic plot, and turns it into a subtly wrought drama of consciousness where the action resides not so much in the said, as in the unsaid, a book that is often described as the apogee of his exactingly oblique late style, a book that, perhaps more than any of his others, depends upon a reader with ‘the power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things’ when encountering its lavishly articulated, often labyrinthine sentences.
During these six weeks, we will read and respond in writing to these movements of these articulated movements of the mind, and we will conclude with an aesthetic performance of our own that in some way incorporates some of what we’ve caught and brought into ourselves through our exposure to this gleamingly dense and singularly challenging proto- modernist work of twentieth-century fiction.
What is Reading for Writing?
- This course provides an opportunity to closely read challenging works of literature that many may be reluctant to read on their own, owing possibly to their perceived difficulty.
- It is a course designed to help students read like writers by engaging closely with the chosen work, in a way that pays careful attention not only to what is happening in the text but also to the formal qualities of the writing itself.
- It is also an opportunity to respond closely to the text, not only through weekly written responses, but also by putting together a creative piece of writing that puts some of the formal qualities of the text into action.
Dates:Thurs. 9/19 through Thurs. 10/24
Time and location: 6:00-9:00p.m. via Zoom
Cost: $295.00 payable via Zelle or check before the first day of class.
Registration: email me at vhwildman@gmail.com for additional information.
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EXPERIMENTS IN PROSE
‘A rose is a rose is a rose.’
–Gertrude Stein
This course will function as a kind of laboratory. We will look at words. We will look at sentences. We will look at paragraphs. Closely. And we will do things with them, things you may not have thought possible. And readings and prompts will be our spurs for our own creative pieces every week.
Among the writers who will likely be encountered in this course are Gertrude Stein, Garielle Lutz, Christine Schutt, Susan Howe, Renee Gladman, Fred Moten, Caroline Bergvall, Stephen Ratcliffe, Rosmarie Waldrop, Theodor Adorno, Thomas Bernhard, Clarice Lispector, Diane Williams, Joseph McElroy and Zoe Leonard.
Dates:Thurs. 11/7 through Thurs. 12/19
Time and location: 6:00-9:00p.m. via Zoom
Cost: $295.00 payable via Zelle or check before the first day of class.
Registration: email me at vhwildman@gmail.com for additional information.
FALL 2023
marginalamericannotes.com 