Course Title: George Saunders: How Beginner’s Mind, First Thought, and Buddhist Meditation Practice Inform His Writing and Teaching
Instructor: Jerry Webster, PhD
Brought to you by Odyssey
March 26, 2025 - April 23, 2025 (5 Sessions)
Wednesday, 6:30PM ET - 8:30PM ET
Virtual via Zoom
Course Description: Great art and fruitful meditation require techniques that dive into vast dimensions of human existence. George Saunders explores these dimensions deeply. His work unfolds from the contemplative wellsprings of life. Saunders captures beginner’s mind and first thought, two foundations of meditation practice, not only in shaping the schemata of the values of his daily life but also in shaping of his aesthetic expressions involving his writing style and his teaching techniques.
Sanders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, a work from which he garnered the 2017 prestigious Booker Prize, is a fictional work surprisingly populated almost entirely by a cast of newly dead characters. In Buddhist terms, the most commonly used meaning of bardo is as an intermediate state between death and rebirth. Within the work Saunders envisions how Lincoln comes to grips with the death of his favorite son William in the course of the Civil War. Indeed, all of Saunders’ newly dead characters must navigate their own deaths. Saunders rests the background of his novel on teachings from The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
In Saunders’ work A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russian Masters Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life, Saunders ventures further both into beginner’s mind and first thought. Saunders probes the works of four Russian short story masters analyzing both the themes and writing of these four writers as well as examining his own teaching and writing.
This class will explore the powerful combination of meditation and writing and teaching in Saunders’ works. The class will include meditation exercises that inform Saunders’ creations.
*Required Readings: George Saunders: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life (2021). Random House: ISBN 9781984856029.
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