Study the how and why of literary sex scenes with award-winning writer Garth Greenwell, “the finest writer of sex currently at work ... certainly the most exhilarating” (The Times Literary Supplement).

If sex scenes are so hard to write, as everyone seems to agree they are, why do writers keep trying?

Few topics are so fraught as writing sex. It’s impossible to do well, people sometimes say, or it’s not worth trying. I once heard a teacher at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop describe her ideal sex scene as two characters sitting down on a sofa, followed by white space. And yet sex is one of the great territories of human experience, and great writers continue to be drawn to it.

In two online sessions, we’ll consider why sex can be so powerful in fiction, offering tools for exploring character, context, and theme. We'll consider the logistical questions of how to represent sex, the mechanics of bodies in space; we’ll also ask how sex can serve other aspects of fiction: subjectivity, conflict, structure, time, style. And we’ll see how writers have used sex as a generator of expansive meaning, posing questions both existential and metaphysical.

We’ll do all this by close-reading examples of classic sex writing, including work by DH Lawrence, Baldwin, Mary McCarthy, and Toni Morrison, as well as brilliant recent writing by Torrey Peters, Raven Leilani, Pedro Lemebel, Lidia Yuknavitch, Miranda July, and others.

Limited full and half-scholarships are available on a rolling basis. To apply for a scholarship, please fill out this form.

About the Instructor

“[Greenwell's] writing about sex is altogether scorching. You pick his novels up with asbestos mitts, and set them down upon trivets to protect your table from heat damage.” -- Dwight Garner, The New York Times

Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, Cleanness, and Small Rain, as well as the co-editor, with R.O. Kwon, of the nationally bestselling anthology KINK. Featured on the Sept / Oct 2024 cover of Poets & Writers, he has received numerous honors for his work, including a British Book Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Vursell Award for prose style from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Princeton University, Grinnell College, and the University of Mississippi, and currently teaches in the graduate Creative Writing Program at NYU, where he is a Distinguished Writer-in-Residence.