Rajesh K. Reddy (he/him) is an author of fiction and nonfiction whose work explores themes of race, gender, religion, and animality through the lens of justice. His work has appeared in the Silk Road Review, Asia Literary Review, Mandala, and elsewhere, and he has served in editorial roles at the Indiana Review, Callaloo, and Narratives. Raj earned his MFA in Creative Writing (fiction) and MA in English from Indiana University and his PhD in English (creative writing concentration) from the University of Georgia. Outside of his literary endeavors, Raj has worked to advance the interests of marginalized groups, including through his efforts at the Human Rights Law Network in New Delhi, India, Animal Legal Defense Fund, and World Animal Protection, among other. Currently, he teaches in and directs the Animal Law Program at Lewis & Clark Law School.
We’re thrilled to introduce one of our newest writing teachers, Rajesh K. Reddy, who will be offering a class on ‘The Art of Fiction‘ in February 2025. With a multidisciplinary background in creative writing, higher education, and law, Rajesh brings a wide range of inspirations and experiences to his teaching, which you can read more about in this short interview with him below.
How did you get involved with Literary Arts as a writing teacher?
Before moving to Portland for law school in 2014, I’d taught creative writing at the secondary, collegiate, and adult education levels for years. I’ve long believed teaching to be my calling and so I consider myself lucky to have entered a law professor role right after graduation. And while being able to braid my teaching and advocacy interests is incredibly fulfilling, there’s nothing like the community and camaraderie that the workshop model fosters. It was a desire to reconnect with my roots that drew me to Literary Arts’ Writers in the Schools program in 2019 and spurred me to offer my workshop this winter.
Can you share a little about the class you plan on teaching?
Inspired by the John Gardner text of the same name, my Art of Fiction class (which runs for 6 weeks from February – March) is designed for writers of all levels. As a workshop, it’ll primarily be focused on student work. That said, a part of the first few classes will see us deconstruct published works, with these sessions equipping the class to appreciate how elements of craft operate in service of the narrative.
What are some things you hope students will learn in this class?
Just a few include how the decisions we make with regard to elements like point of view, setting, perspective, narrative distance, and more can open and foreclose certain possibilities in our work. We’ll also explore how story builds character and how characters, in turn, drive the story forward. In addition to considering the interplay among elements of craft, we’ll touch upon how choices we make at the sentence level impact the reader’s experience.
If you were to describe your teaching style in five words or less, what would you say?
Supportive, adaptive, constructive, and engaging.
What books or authors have shaped you the most in terms of your writing life or your pedagogy?
In addition to Gardner’s Art of Fiction and On Moral Fiction, I often revisit Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, and Charles Baxter’s Burning Down the House.
How is your writing life shaped by the work you do as a teacher, or vice versa?
Although I work at a law school, storytelling lies at the heart of what and how I teach. For example, as a general rule in fiction, if you don’t have characters and conflict, you don’t have a story. It’s not all that different from how our legal system works. And so while you have your protagonist and antagonist in literature, in the law, it’s the plaintiff and defendant—though which one’s which depends upon the perspective we as writers seek to privilege.
To take a step back, what I find so compelling about the law is how it requires us to negotiate competing accounts—or what, at their most basic, are competing narratives. The practice has inclined me to more deeply consider the perspectives, motivations, and dreams of the characters who populate my work. Today, I conceive of writing as the art as well as the practice of faithfully representing them—that is, of fleshing them out and making them full so I can do them and, by extension, their story justice.
Are there any other current sources of creative inspiration for you, literary or otherwise, you’d like to recommend?
Whether they’re about relationships, ethical dilemmas, or otherwise, advice columns have become one of my guilty pleasures. Featuring characters and conflict, they’re stories in miniature. In addition to wanting to read the columnist’s answer to see if I agree, the writer in me will often alter aspects of the people’s identities and/or details surrounding the conflict to see if the principle that informed my initial answer holds. If it doesn’t, that’s a story. The act of writing it becomes a process of self-discovery.
You can register or find out more about Rajesh K. Reddy’s ‘The Art of Fiction’ class here.
