Writers & Stories | Michael Deagler

​Every writer has a story that’s close to their heart. In our new Craftclass series, Writers & Stories, we invite a writer each month to share their thoughts and feelings about a story of their choice and lead an intimate, insightful conversation around it. This 90-minute class will cover the writer’s personal experience of the story, why it sticks in their head, and where its power to move, provoke, and change our minds comes from. You’ll walk away with not just one more good story but also a special memory of engaging with it with love, care, and wisdom.

​Here's a sneak peak at our writer of the month and the story he's picked:

​The Writer

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​Michael Deagler is the author of EARLY SOBRIETIES, winner of the 2025 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. The recipient of an O. Henry Award and a National Magazine Award for his short fiction, he lives in Los Angeles, where he is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California.

​The Story

​Jennifer Egan was born in Chicago in 1962. Raised in San Francisco, she attended the University of Pennsylvania (where she briefly dated Steve Jobs) and received a Masters from St. John’s College, Cambridge. She then moved to New York, where she supported herself working various jobs while honing her fiction in her off hours. She published three novels and one short story collection during the 1990s and early 2000s, but it was her fifth book, 2010’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, that brought her widespread recognition. The book won the Pulitzer Prize and has come to be regarded as one of the best works of American fiction of the 21st century.

​Though A Visit from the Goon Squad bills itself as a novel, critics have argued whether the thirteen self-contained chapters might better be described as a short story collection. Egan herself is agnostic on the book’s genre, interested instead in the way that the non-chronological narratives highlight the chaotic and dislocating nature of time’s passage. Characters who are young in one chapter are old, or dead, in the next. Relationships end almost as soon as they begin, creating emotional afterlives that stretch across decades and continents.

​“Safari”, which serves as the the book’s fourth chapter, was published as a stand-alone story in the New Yorker in 2010. Set in the 1970s, the narrative follows a divorced record executive, his two teenage children, his graduate student girlfriend, and several other characters as they participate in a three-week safari in Kenya. Though only twenty pages long, the story feels almost novelistic in scope. Egan plays with perception and time as the story bounces between the various safari-goers, elevating an unremarkable vacation into an pivotal moment in the lives of several characters. In this lesson, we will consider how Egan achieves this effect, and how we might replicate it to make the small moments in our own fictional feel much grander.

​We look forward to seeing you online.