Why is it that some narrators feel real to us — as if they were sitting across the table, telling us their story? And why do we feel so utterly compelled to listen to them?

The sense of a narrator’s deeply individual presence starts with what we like to call voice, the linguistic expression of character. Voice is why your mother can call you up on the phone and start talking without ever stopping to identify herself. You know it’s her because of her voice. Voice is the feeling of the person behind the words.

But how does voice work? And how do we create it in our own writing? We will analyze some examples from great works of fiction and nonfiction, and then put what we’ve learned to work in our own writing through in-class exercises.

Robert Anthony Siegel is the author of a memoir, Criminals, and two novels, All Will Be Revealed and All the Money in the World. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Smithsonian Magazine, and The Paris Review, and has been anthologized in Best American Essays 2023, O. Henry Stories 2014, and Pushcart Prize XXXVI. He has been a Fulbright Scholar in Taiwan, a Mombukagakusho Fellow in Japan, a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and a Paul Engle Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a BA from Harvard.