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NEA Big Read 2025

Creative Writing Workshops with Diana Abu-Jaber

Join Diana Abu-Jaber for a Writer's Workshop on the novel "To Live" by Yu Hua

This two-hour workshop will ask students to enter into a more personal conversation with the novel TO LIVE by Yu Hua. During the first hour we’ll discuss the reading from both a writer’s as well as a reader’s perspective, looking at the ways the author brings his story to life. Students will be encouraged to suspend judgement, to get curious about anything that might seem different or surprising including the depictions of family, work, and politics. We’ll also consider different parts of the writing craft, to ask how Yu Hua employs such elements as voice, suspense, and character development to more effectively convey his story. During the second hour, students will be given some writing exercises designed to free creativity and produce quick, uninhibited work. Freewriting allows writers.to think and speak in new ways about their own lives and to better form connections to those of others. Writers will be asked to consider ways they might identify with Yu Hua’s struggles –to write about times they might have encountered injustice or what they’ve learned through overcoming obstacles. We’ll attempt to move toward deeper insights and to challenge old assumptions, to take the reading of TO LIVE to a more personally meaningful level. 

NEA Big Read is a program of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest.  

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