Because There Wasn’t Time
to Tell Everything
This Course Wanted to Be

From the Instructor

A Letter to My Students

Dear friends and fellow readers,

When I planned The Art of Telling last winter, I imagined a course that would honor the three great rooms of literature — the short story, the poem, the memoir — and let us linger in each. Ten Sundays seemed, in the abstract, like a fair stretch of afternoons. In practice, ten Sundays is what it is: an instant. We talked, we read aloud, we wrote by hand for ten minutes, we drifted into the next conversation. The clock, that small tyrant, kept turning the page before I was ready.

So this is the polite, slightly overdue apology I owe you. I did not get to everything I promised. There were paragraphs in Chekhov I marked and never read with you. There were poems we glanced at and did not unfold. There were memoir traditions — the slave narrative, the immigrant testament, the Walden hermitage — that I sketched in a sentence when they deserved an evening. I am sorry for that, and at the same time I am not, because what we did do together was, to my mind, the most important thing: we sat in one room, and we read carefully, and we were generous with each other’s sentences.

What I can offer now, by way of restitution, is this companion volume. Think of it as the booklet I would have handed you on the last Sunday if I had been organized enough. In here you will find, for each of the ten sessions:

• A biography of the writer, longer than I gave in class, with the small facts I love most.
• A summary and a close reading of each text — the passages I wanted us to slow down on.
• The literary movement the writer worked inside, and the historical and political weather of the time.
• The main points of the session, set out plainly, and why I think they matter.
• Answers to every discussion question I posed, and sample responses to the in-class writing exercises.
• A small, succinct set of takeaways from each session — the kind of thing you might tape inside a notebook.

Beyond the sessions, I have also gathered everything I would tell a serious student about the craft itself: the ideas about poetry, short fiction, and memoir that I hope you carry out the door; the way I think readers should read each genre; a glossary of every term I used on the whiteboard; recommended books on craft; outlines and idea-starters for poems, stories, and memoirs of your own; the practical business of submitting work — what editors are actually looking for, the statistics of who gets published and how, the dos and don’ts, the best places for new writers to send first work — and the small kindnesses of revision.

There are no grades, no quizzes, and no required publication outcomes. There is only the work, the company, and the slow accumulation of skill. — from the syllabus

I want to say something else, too, because it matters more than the syllabus did. I enjoyed meeting each of you. I learned from the writing you brought, from the questions you asked when the room had warmed, and from the silences you allowed when a sentence deserved one. You were generous with your pages and with your time, and you treated each other with the kind of attention that is rare anywhere now and almost extinct in a classroom. Whatever you take from this companion, please take that, too — the memory of having been read closely by friends.

If you would like me to teach again — a Chekhov-only term, a memoir intensive, a women’s literature course, a poetry workshop, a deep dive into Flannery O’Connor and the southern grotesque — please tell me. There is a small form near the end of this volume. I am listening.

With gratitude, and with the suspicion that we are not really finished,

James F. Mulhern

Philadelphia  ◆  Summer 2026