Writing the Everyday
Instructor: Usama Lali
The aim of this workshop is to help you see the stories in the mundane, everyday life, taking inspiration from writers such as Alice Munro, Maile Meloy, and Raymond Carver. We will closely read imagist poems, Punjabi dohray, Japanese Haiku, and film scenes, discussing how writing is just as much about observing, feeling, and witnessing our daily lives as it is about an obsession with themes, ideas, and meanings.
By collecting and fictionalizing images, oral family histories, childhood memories, fragments, anecdotes, jokes, bits of overheard conversations, myths and legends, half- truths, and exciting lies, as well as awkward silences and pregnant pauses, and recording them in a diary, we will reimagine writing as a means to deepen our experience of everyday life, providing a rich reservoir from which stories can then be told.
About Usama
Usama Lali is a Lahore based writer and filmmaker with an MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) from the University of Washington, Seattle. He has taught life writing and screenwriting courses at the University of Washington and LUMS in the past. His short film (Permanent Guest) that he co-wrote screened at TIFF ‘25 and Sarmad Khoosat’s upcoming feature film that he assistant directed premiered at Berlinale ‘26. He is a recipient of the David Guterson Award ‘23 and a Commonwealth Short Story Prize shortlistee whose English, Urdu and Punjabi fiction, essays, poetry and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Pleiades, Adda Stories, Aleph Review, Pancham and others.