Writing Across Forms with The Lab

The Lab: Experiments in Writing Across Genre is a cross-genre craft guide with exercises that help writers move from initial impulse to final draft. Join co-authors Matthew Clark Davison and Alice LaPlante—novelists and experienced writing teachers—and author and journalist Lauren Markham to discuss experimenting with new types of writing that push the boundaries of form and meaning.

Drawing examples from Markham's speculative, book-length essay, Immemorial, Davison, LaPlante, and Markham will discuss collisions between forms and techniques and inspriational tools for getting started.

The discussion will be interactive and run from 6:30-8. Doors will open at 6 for mingling and refreshments ahead of the event.

Copies of The Lab and Immemorial will be available for purchase—looking forward to seeing you there!

Matthew Clark Davison is co-author (with bestselling writer Alice LaPlante), of The Lab: Experiments in Writing Across Genre (W.W. Norton ’25) and author of the novel Doubting Thomas (Amble Press ’21), which was hailed as one of “46 Must-Read Books by Queer Authors” in Esquire Magazine. He is the creator and teacher of The Lab: Writing Classes with MCD, an online and SF-based non-academic school started in 2007. Matthew is a member of The Writers Grotto and has served on the board of Foglifter Journal and Press. Matthew is Emeritus Faculty in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, where he also earned a BA and MFA.

Alice LaPlante is an award-winning writer, editor, and teacher of writing, both fiction and nonfiction. A Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, Alice taught creative writing at both Stanford and in San Francisco State’s MFA program for more than 20 years. A NY Times bestselling author, Alice has published four novels, including NYT Bestseller Turn of Mind, and five non-fiction books, as well as edited best-selling books for many other writers of fiction and nonfiction: The Making of a Story, Write Yourself Out of a Corner, and The Lab: Experiments in Writing Across Genre, co-authored with Matthew Clark Davison. Alice lives with her family in Mallorca, Spain.

Lauren Markham is the author of the award-winning The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life, A Map of Future Ruins, and Immemorial. Her work has appeared in VQR, Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, The New York Review of Books, and other publications. She teaches writing at the University of San Francisco and in the Ashland University MFA in Writing Program.

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