"The Indescribable Novel" Class Reading

Join us for a celebration of Hilary Leichter's novel workshop students and their books! Offered through The Shipman Workroom, "The Indescribable Novel" is a year-long class devoted to finishing a novel, and the unconventional and mysterious ways we decide to write the things we write. Come for an evening of readings, pizza, and merriment -- and a chance to hear excerpts from these beautiful books, before they're out in the world!

Free and open to the public.

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR:

Hilary Leichter is the author of the novels Temporary and Terrace Story. She has been a finalist for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Prize, and her work in Harper's Magazine won the 2021 National Magazine Award in Fiction. Terrace Story was named a best book of 2023 by Time Magazine, The New Yorker, The LA Times, Publishers Weekly, and other publications. Hilary teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York.

ABOUT THE READERS:

Sheetal Singh is a novelist and songwriter (Jetset, Elektra) who also runs an early childhood innovation lab. She was a finalist for the 2024 Reese’s Book Club Lit Up program and has been published in Interim, We’ll Never Have Paris, and Stanford Social Innovation Review. She's attended workshops from Kenyon, Tin House, The Shipman Agency, Stanford, A Public Space, and Gotham Writers, and she was a finalist for the 2022 Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction. She runs the novel workshop for the Page Street writer’s community in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Josh Riedel is the author of the novel Please Report Your Bug Here. The recipient of fellowships from MacDowell and Yaddo, his writing appears in Esquire, One Story, Electric Literature, and Joyland, among others. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Emily Rose Soreghan is a Susan Kuehn Boyd fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop presently, and an Oklahoman always. She spends her time driving down gravel roads and, when pressed, writing about restlessness and desire on the Southern Plains. Her work has been supported by the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, the Joshua Tree Highlands Foundation, the Montana Prize, and a Fulbright Grant.

Andrew Unger is a writer from Indiana who makes a from his home in PLG, Brooklyn.

Swathi Desai was born in India and raised in the US. Her work has been published in New Ohio Review, Faultline, The Bangalore Review, the San Francisco Examiner Magazine and elsewhere. She won the 2025 NORward Prize in Fiction, was a fiction finalist for the 2023 Disquiet Prize, a fiction semi-finalist in the Chestnut Review’s 2020 Stubborn Artists Contest and shortlisted in the Hippocampus Remember in November 2020 Contest for Creative Nonfiction. She lives in the Bay Area.

Joy Chen writes and performs under her stage name Fortune Cookie. A native New Yorker from Chinatown, she produces a quarterly show featured in the New York Times called “Books and Burlesque” at Caveat on the lower east side and she is thrilled to finish the first draft of her novel in Hilary’s class!

Melissa Ragsdale’s life has always been a duet between her love of storytelling and love of music, and now both have a voice in her novel Starlight Movement. Born and raised in Austin, TX, Melissa is a classically trained pianist, an ex-marching band geek, and currently an alto in her community choir in Jersey City. She has worked as a bookseller, book reviewer, book publicity assistant, book festival intern, bookstore events coordinator, and a thousand other odd jobs around publishing and content creation – but now it’s finally time to bring her own book to life.

Tess Cumpstone is a lover of unruly girls and haunted landscapes. In 2021, she participated in the Tin House Summer Workshop with Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, and she has since completed Hilary Leichter’s year-long novel generator workshop, “The Indescribable Novel.” Tess currently lives in central Ohio with her partner and cat, where she supports the Ohio State University’s MFA in Creative Writing Program and writes novels in her free time.

Dan Murphy is a writer, editor, and artist raised in a river city by a lactation consultant and former mayor. His work has appeared in Glimmer Train, Press Pause Press, and letsworm.com. He lives in Beacon, NY with his wife and their two children.