Writers & Stories | Ada Zhang
About "Writers & Stories:"
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.
This month, we are delighted to have Ada Zhang, the author of the short story collection, The Sorrows of Others, to share her favorite story with us.
Ada has picked this story for discussion: The Littoral Zone by Andrea Barrett from her award-winning short story collection, Ship Fever (1996, W. W. Norton).
About Andrea Barrett & The Littoral Zone:
Andrea Barrett was born in Boston in 1954, grew up on Cape Cod, and later attended Union College, where she graduated with a degree in biology. She began writing fiction seriously in her thirties and published her first novel, Lucid Stars, in 1988. She’s particularly well known as a writer of historical fiction.
Barrett, whose work reflects her lifelong interest in science and natural history, received the National Book Award for her fifth book, Ship Fever, a collection of stories featuring scientists, doctors, and naturalists.
The elegant short fictions gathered here about the love of science and the science of love are often set against the backdrop of the nineteenth century. Interweaving historical and fictional characters, they encompass both past and present as they negotiate the complex territory of ambition, failure, achievement, and shattered dreams.
The Littoral Zone, a short story by Andrea Barrett, is both a love story and not. In this class we will interrogate the ways time functions to both upend and uphold a passion between two people, moving at once forward and backward to create an effect that mimics the cyclical essence of time, the way we understand or make sense of it or feel it, which is often at odds with what we experience linearly.
About Ada Zhang and The Sorrows of Others:
Ada Zhang is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the recipient of a Whiting Award. Her short stories have appeared in A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She was the James C. McCreight Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin and currently teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The Sorrows of Others is her first book.
Praises of the collection includes:
The characters in The Sorrows of Others would make an uncommon and special botanical collection had they been plants: They have their given roots—Chinese or Chinese American—that bind them to their shared history, and yet they also each nurture their own set of roots, expanding, liberating, and redefining themselves. Ada Zhang is a bighearted and sensitive writer, and these stories, looking simultaneously to the past and to the future, are a triumph.
—Yiyun Li, author of The Book of Goose and Where Reasons End
Register to embark on this intimate journey with us.