I took a couple of great online (real-time, not recorded) courses during the pandemic last year: last spring, The Way of Writing, taught by Natalie Goldberg, through Shambhala Publications, and this past fall, Writing Sadness Through Humor, taught by Blayr Austin, through the Second City. After Natalie’s course, I began writing in a journal every day, something I hadn’t done in years. Blayr’s course helped me find, for the first time, an excitement about writing short, authentic, true accounts of memorable moments in my life, and I felt the joy of writing in a new way. And right now, I’m taking another real-time online course on the short story, Story Club with George Saunders, taught by George Saunders himself (and based on the kind of close reading of Russian stories that he taught in his book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain), and I’m having a blast with it. We’re reading Hemingway’s “Cat in the Rain.” So much complexity in three short pages.