Joseph Earl Thomas
Given the wide considerations in any writer’s pantheon, the one that best transgresses the generic threshold of real or unreal motivations and voice, the subtle pains of contemporary difference in race or sex or heretofore unacknowledged power relations, and the sometimes infinitesimal differentiation between science fiction and nonfiction, is subjunctive mood: the thread of tension generated in the gap from one word to the next which might express one’s wishes, desires.
Comprising but not subsumed by syntax or diction, we’ll follow Samuel Delany’s lead from his essay “About 5.750 Words” and eschew “aboutness” to generate meaning in the mental space between word-images. This creative nonfiction workshop will consider how a sentence might live in one world and change its mind midway as a function of the author’s thought and style. Focusing on syntax, surprise, detail and diction, we’ll work our writing out through its precognitive rut and toward invention.
Joseph Earl Thomas is the author of Sink, a memoir (Grand Central Publishing, 2023), longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and a finalist for the William Saroyan International Writing Prize; the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer (Grand Central Publishing, 2024), longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Literary Excellence, finalist for the LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award, winner of the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize; and the forthcoming story collection Leviathan Beach (Penguin Random House, 2027).
His prose and poetry has been published in The Paris Review, The Verge, Harper’s, N+1, and Vanity Fair. His honours include the 2020 Chautauqua Janus Prize, The Anisfield-Wolf Fellowship in Writing and Publishing, and fellowships from Fulbright, The Hermitage, Kimbilio, VONA, Tin House, and Bread Loaf.
A graduate of the University of Notre Dame’s MFA program in prose, he earned his PhD in English from The University of Pennsylvania. He is a member of the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College as well as low residency MFA programs at Holy Family and Randolph Colleges, and teaches literature and theory courses at The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.
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