Writing Workshops

Expanding the World: The Review as Creative Writing with Alissa Wilkinson

$545

8 sessions

In stock

Once a week Sundays, 2:30 pm EDT - 4:30 pm EDT October 5 to November 23, 2025

The Center for Fiction

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The review is a familiar genre, yet it’s one of the most misunderstood. Reviews frequently resemble summaries, book reports, or rants, losing their true value and becoming disposable in the process. Learning to write a good review can open doors for any writer, and a great review can extend the cultural life of the artwork under discussion, even if it’s not a rave.

In this workshop, we’ll treat the review as a genre of creative writing with specific characteristics, tasks, and opportunities for the writer. What is and isn’t a review, and how have they evolved? How do we craft a narrator, and how can description, character, opinion, and rhythm inform the review? What are great choices we can make when writing reviews?

Together we’ll read reviews by an array of critics with an eye toward these craft questions. We’ll discuss how they work and learn how to harness our voices to write great reviews. We’ll also talk about craft considerations when reviewing art and pop culture in different media, focusing on reviews of films, books, visual art, and performances intended for the general interest reader. Our meetings will involve discussion of readings, writing exercises, workshops, and feedback. Participants will leave with polished work suitable to use as clips when pitching publications in the future.

Course Outline:

Week 1: What is a review?
Week 2: Attention, rhetoric, and the reviewer
Weeks 3 & 4: Crafting the narrator, using the personal, and class workshop
Week 5: Film reviewing
Week 6: Art reviewing
Week 7: Performance reviews
Week 8: Book reviews

Level: Introductory

This course is held in person at The Center for Fiction.

Led by

Alissa Wilkinson

Alissa Wilkinson

Alissa Wilkinson is a movie critic at the New York Times. Her book We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine, a cultural history of American myth-making in Hollywood through the life and work of Joan Didion, was published by Liveright in 2025. She’s been writing criticism since 2005, and her work has appeared in Vox, the New York Times Book Review, Vulture, Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, the Dallas Morning News, the Los Angeles Review of Books, RogerEbert.com, Books & Culture, and many more. Her previous book, Salty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking and Living from Revolutionary Women, was published by Broadleaf in 2022. She earned an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction writing from Seattle Pacific University and an M.A. in humanities and social thought from New York University.

About this series

Writing Workshops

We strive to make our classes the most inviting and rewarding available, offering an intimate environment to study with award-winning, world-class writers. Each class is specially designed by the instructor, so whether you’re a fledgling writer or an MFA graduate polishing your novel, you’ll find a perfect fit here.

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