Nothing makes me put down a book faster than inauthentic voice. And nothing seems to be more besides the point than lying in fiction. We come to fiction for all kinds of things—as writers and as readers—but we don’t have time to deal with something that’s fake. This workshop is going to be about being ourselves. And it’s going to be about our characters being themselves. And about our writing’s voice being the best version of itself that it can be. Much—though not even close to all—of this has to do with our narrators, whether they’re telling the story in the first person like John Ames in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, or they’re moving into and out of the thoughts of characters while maintaining a sovereign omniscience like many of Henry James’s narrators, or they’re drug-addled and just telling a story as best they can like the narrator in Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son. Authenticity of voice is not a phrase that I use to suggest that we have one voice in us and that’s it. But I don’t believe that we can tell any story we want either. And whether or not we can tell a story is different than whether or not we can do it convincingly. We’ll be workshopping stories, reading published work, and discussing craft each class, so the bones of this workshop are the same as many other workshops. But we are going to make special efforts to locate where our strongest voices lie and figure out how to coax them onto the page.