Cooper Street Workshop: Writing Work

About the Workshop

Maybe your day job isn’t where you get the most creative thrill in your life. The daily grind of work emails, long commutes, and at-times frustrating colleagues might be exactly what you hope to escape when you open your computer to start writing. Yet surprisingly, readers love to read about work! Those same details that can make it such a slog are, strangely, the thing that can give your fiction texture, grounding, and stakes. In this workshop, we’ll talk about how to translate your own job into prose, how to write about jobs you’ve never had, and look at great examples of work on the page.

COST: $20 General, $5 Camden city residents & Rutgers-Camden students

About the Instructor

Bronwen Everill is a writer and historian whose work has appeared in Smithsonian Magazine, the Times Literary Supplement, Barrelhouse, Foreign Policy, and Defenestration. Her most recent book, Africonomics (The New Press, 2025), was shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize. She currently teaches in the Princeton Writing Program, but has held various jobs across mall retail, ice cream scooping, library shelf restocking, archaeological digging, violin teaching, and Saturday-morning farmers marketing, so will be drawing on some random experiences of her own for this class!

This is a virtual event. To facilitate community-building, please plan to have your camera on during the workshop.