LUMS YOUNG WRITERS WORKSHOP
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
Based in Lahore, Usama Lali is a writer and educator with an MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) from the University of Washington, Seattle. During his time there, he taught undergraduate creative writing courses for two years. He currently instructs courses on life writing, multilingualism, and screenwriting at LUMS, Lahore. Lali is a recipient of the David Guterson Award '23 and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize '23. His works span multiple languages—English, Urdu, and Punjabi—and are published or forthcoming in Pleiades, Adda Stories, Aleph Review, Pancham, among others.