A workshop sponsored by
The 1819 Social:
“How I Write,” a conversation with Professor Rachel Feder
Friday, November 1st, 2024
4pm EST on Zoom
"How I Write" is a series of conversations aimed at demystifying the writing process and encouraging a more open dialogue about writing practices and strategies, struggles and delights. Guests explore their habits, quirks, and techniques—the pains and pleasures of writing—their histories as writers, their development, their now, their future projects—how they generate ideas, how they procrastinate—how they overcome blocks—and where they hope to go from here.
Rachel Feder’s writing spans the critical, creative, and personal, defying genre boundaries and transforming the conventions of academic discourse. An associate professor of English & Literary Arts at the University of Denver, Feder's first book, Harvester of Hearts: Motherhood Under the Sign of Frankenstein (2018), combines the personal lyric essay with experimental literary criticism to explore, with Mary Shelley, the political aesthetics of motherhood. In AstroLit: A Bibliophile’s Guide to the Stars (2021, co-authored with McCormick Templeman), she playfully reads literary history through the lens of astrology, providing notes and prompts for writing along the way; and in The Darcy Myth (2023), she shows how contemporary love stories are also monster stories, through readings that range from Byron to Twilight and The Bachelor. Feder’s latest, co-authored with Tiffany Tatreau and coming out any day now, is titled Taylor Swift By the Book: The Literature Behind the Lyrics. Feder also writes prolifically in shorter prose forms—on Dorothy Wordsworth for Studies in Romanticism, on aesthetics and infinity for ELH, and on a variety of contemporary subjects for para-academic venues such as The Rambling and LARB. Feder's intellectual passions invest her own poetry as well, whether in the 2018 chapbook Bad Romanticisms or the 2020 collection Birth Chart. Next year Northwestern UP will issue Daisy, which she describes as “a narrative poetic response to The Great Gatsby told from the perspective of a 90s teen poet.”
The 1819 Social will host a series of events in the hopes of creating a site for community among graduate-student, early-career, and independent scholars. It is conceived with the ideal of a supportive community in mind as a source of camaraderie, feedback, and knowledge. Please read more on our Mentorship page.