A Gift for Subscribers: My Complete Writing Workshop

I’m pleased to make my four-week writing workshop available to subscribers as a gift for your ongoing support. You will gain access to nearly 8 hours of lectures, writing exercises and instruction on how to hone your writing craft, develop your voice and cultivate better discipline in your writing.

The course was very enjoyable to teach and I learned a lot in the process. Over the past twenty years of writing philosophy and critical theory I have experienced both successes and failures in the effort to reach an audience and publish work that I can genuinely stand behind. Being able to distill those experiences and pass them on to others was very meaningful.

Here are the descriptions of each of the four sessions. Once you become a subscriber you will get access to each video and the folder of readings.

In the first session, I focus on developing a sustainable writing practice through developing motivation, creativity, reading habits, voice, and style. This lecture is full of practical advice (writing routines, note-taking systems, book reviews, publishing pathways) and it includes writing prompts and exercises designed to help participants clarify their intellectual commitments, cultivate a distinctive voice, and build a long-term writing plan. My contention is that strong public philosophy emerges from disciplined practice, careful reading, continual revision, and the development of a personal style that can communicate complex ideas to a broad audience.

In this session, I offer a lecture on the philosophical essay with the help of Adorno, Hume and Lukács. We examine the history of the essay, its roots in modernity and how the essay becomes a Socratic form of truth. We then review style and the method of improving style through engaging with George Orwell’s tips for good writing. Finally, we practice writing in a way that is free from jargon.

In session three, we begin with a lecture on the role of leisure, contemplation and its role in philosophy and writing. We focus on how to cultivate a space for active leisure in your writing and discuss the role of leisure in defining the writer and how it has changed historically. We then turn to examine autotheory by way of a discussion on Maggie Nelson The Argonauts (2015) and socialist realism by way of a look at Mike Gold’s “Go Left Young Writers” (1929) and Maxim Gorky, “How I Learnt to Write” (1928). This session also includes sessions devoted to practicing your writing.

In our final session, we share insights into how to pitch your work and how to navigate the world of book publishing in our age. We revisit the long-term writing goals from session one, and we map where you want to be in one year from this workshop. Marxist philosopher Conrad Hamilton offers a keynote on how to navigate publishing.