Blog
Meet the Teaching Artist: Reading Like a Writer - How Yoko Ogawa and Christine Schutt Unsettle Us with Eugenie Montague
by Writing Workshops Staff
A week ago
Eugenie Montague, whose debut novel Swallow the Ghost received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, invites you to step behind the curtain of some of contemporary fiction’s most unsettling works in her 3-week intensive, Reading Like a Writer: How Yoko Ogawa and Christine Schutt Unsettle Us. With an MFA from UC Irvine and short fiction that’s captivated audiences across platforms like NPR and Tin House, Montague’s approach is as bold as it is meticulous.
In this course, you’ll dissect the masterful storytelling of Ogawa and Schutt—two authors who know how to unnerve readers with precision. Montague will guide you through a close reading of their works, revealing the hidden mechanics behind their craft. Expect to leave with new tools for creating your own narratives, deeper insights into tone, character, and plot, and a sharpened ability to read with a writer’s eye.
Whether you're an emerging writer or a seasoned one, this class offers a unique chance to not only study fiction that hums with menace but to apply these same unsettling techniques to your own writing.
Hi Eugenie, please introduce yourself to our audience.
Hi! I'm Eugenie. I live in El Paso with my family. My debut novel, Swallow the Ghost, came out this August 2024. One of my favorite things is to talk about stories with other writers so I'm very excited to lead this class on Schutt and Ogawa.
What made you want to teach this specific class? Is it something you are focusing on in your own writing practice? Have you noticed a need to focus on this element of craft?
Mainly, I wanted to study and discuss these writers. More generally, this is definitely something I'm interested in, this feeling that a story has unsettled me somehow and I don't understand exactly how it's working. It's not plot, exactly, nor character, exactly, although it's not those things either. It's in the fabric of the stories, and they leave me feeling off kilter and I can't stop reading until I reach the end.
Give us a breakdown of how the course is going to go. What can the students expect? What is your favorite part about this class you've dreamed up?
We'll start with by identifying some craft terms/ rhetorical strategies and then see how they play out in a sentence by sentence reading of a couple short pieces. These are very short pieces, so the stories can't "work" by plot or whether the main character changes, so it allows us to really drill down to what is happening at the sentence level and try to explain what is happening to us as we read. Then, applying the same kind of close reading to longer stories where there is a more discernible plot. I think this process illuminates all the tools available to us--so if one's goal is to write a story where there is a more traditional source of tension emanating directly from a scary character, or a plot that involves a murder or a secret, for example, we can look at how tone or patterns of imagery contribute to an eerie or unsettling text. Mainly, I am really excited to do a close reading of these writers--and read them along with other writers. I took a couple of Schutt's short pieces and a few sections from Ogawa's novellas and retyped them, adding footnotes to each sentence like Madison Smartt Bell does in his book, Narrative Design, breaking each sentence down, analyzing how it builds the story, trying to figure out what the engine is. This was a terrific exercise for me, and I'm excited to discuss some of the things I noticed--and see what the other writers in the class will bring to the group as well.
What was your first literary crush?
Too many to name:) It would make me look easy.
What are you currently reading?
Big Machine, by Victor LaValle. I love it.
How do you choose what you're working on? When do you know it is the next thing you want to write all the way to THE END?
I think I usually finish things I start these days, but that was not always the case. I find more and more I don't know what a thing is until I finish it, so I have to follow it to the end, leave it alone for awhile, come back and then see what it is. At the end, it might not work. That might sound scary and I know a lot of people who don't work that way, but it's the only way I know how to do it at this point. That being said, if I was working on something day in and day out and it always felt like a slog, and I never felt any jolt of surprise, where the story I thought I was writing surprised me, I would probably put it away. How I decide to start something--now that, I don't really know, to be honest.
Where do you find inspiration?
Other books; life. Sometimes I feel like there are a million things I want to write about and something I feel like I will never have an idea again. I do partially subscribe to that old Faulkner saying that the inspiration found him when he was sat down at his desk. I'm not Faulkner, of course, so it doesn't find me as reliably as it found him, but I have to sit down and do the work. Walking is actually a big part of my writing process, but I need to be working on something so when I go for these night walks, there's something there to turn over. I might get an idea on a walk, but then I have to sit down with it and write it, where it often becomes something else, something a little more interesting than what I thought when I sat down.
What is the best piece of writing wisdom you've received that you can pass along to our readers? How did it impact your work? Why has this advice stuck with you?
To read and study books you love. On a more craft level, one thing I like from Matt Bell's book is the idea of islands--I might not always know where I am going, but I usually have some idea of the next "island" I am trying to reach when I sit down to write, and then I hope by the time I get there, I have know what the next island is going to be. For me personally, this seems to be a good balance between the paralyzing fear of the unknown blank page and, on the other hand, thinking I know every beat in a story before I sit down, which could limit the possibilities or feel more like transcription. Another thing I was told once, which I think might have come from Calvino originally, was to think of revision as series of expansive and reductive drafts. On the first pass, add more scenes, more pages; do forty hours of research to accurately describe something that came up on your first draft and you sketched in as a place holder to not lose momentum; push each scene a little farther to see if something interesting happens. Then on the next draft, ruthlessly cut. Repeat this process until it feels right. To be honest, this is more aspirational than actual right now, but I think about it a lot and I use modified versions of this.
What is your favorite book to recommend on the craft of writing? Why this book?
As noted above, I really love Matt Bell's book Refuse to be Done. It's the perfect blend of practical tips, quotes from writers about their process, and love of the craft (and story). There are are a number of things from this book I do intentionally (one tip, from Christine Schutt, cut every other line of dialogue! I love this). Or I'll come to realize I did some version of them beforehand, and seeing these strategies clearly laid out as a strategy made me feel less like I was flailing about during revision. It made revision feel less scary, less mystical. I also really like the book we are going to refer to in this class, Narrative Design by Madison Smartt Bell, which begins with close reading and ends with the big picture. Different stories work differently; they have different engines, and Bell annotates a number of great stories in the process of showing that.
Learn more about working with Eugenie:
You can sign up for Eugenie Montague's upcoming seminar, Reading Like a Writer: How Yoko Ogawa and Christine Schutt Unsettle Us, a 3-Week Zoom Intensive, and join us for what promises to be an in-depth and engaging class!
Instructor Eugenie Montague’s debut novel, Swallow the Ghost ("bold and bewitching. . . a brain-teasing triumph that will reward multiple readings," Publishers Weekly, Starred Review) will be published by Mulholland Books in August 2024. She received her MFA in fiction from the University of California, Irvine. Her short fiction has been published by NPR, Mid-American Review, Faultline, Day One, and Flash Friday, a flash-fiction series from Tin House and the Guardian Books Network, and was selected by Amy Hempel for The Best Small Fictions (2017). She currently lives in El Paso, Texas with her family.
