“Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.” — Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story (13)

As a group, talk through the following questions. Then we’ll come together as a group and share insights from your conversations.

1. Using Gornick’s terms, identify the “situation” and “story” in the podcast your group is examining. At one point is the situation established? How much background is established before or after? What would you say the story is? Is there just one story? Are their overlapping stories? Where does the story first show up? How does it develop?

2. Imagine the essay you might write for this course. What’s the situation? Do you have a sense of what the story is? How might you find the story?

3. Does Shankar Vedantam’s Hidden Brain episode, “The Story of Your Life” offer you any productive lenses for thinking about writing?

4. Talk a little about the limits and possibilities of Gornick’s framework? Might your writing do something that falls outside that framework? Think hard about this: Is that because your story needs something additional, or because you haven’t quite found the story yet, or a little of both?

5. Is there anything in Gornick’s book that puzzles you? Or that you disagree with? What questiosn does it raise?