An Invitation to Bring a Literary Course
to Your Community
A page for the program director, librarian, festival curator, community-college dean, bookstore events coordinator, or continuing-education office who is considering a working writer as an instructor.
Section IWhat I Can Do for Your Audience
I am a Philadelphia novelist and professor emeritus of English with more than three decades of classroom experience — undergraduate seminars, graduate-level workshops, secondary-school classes for AP students, and a fully funded Writing Fellowship at Exeter College, University of Oxford. I have chaired departments in both English and Social Studies. My novel Give Them Unquiet Dreams received a Kirkus starred review and was named a Kirkus Best Book of 2019. I am the founder of Silver Current Press, a literary imprint based here in Philadelphia.
What I bring to a partnership is a body of literature-and-craft courses designed for adult readers who are not looking for a degree. Every course is discussion-based, generous, close in its reading, and non-competitive. I do not lecture; I open the material and let the room work with it. The best sessions I have ever taught — including the ones that led directly to the salon you are reading — have not happened in seminar rooms. They have happened wherever a serious group of adults sat down together with a shared text.
When a course lands well at a new venue, I am glad to offer the first offering without charge as a proof of concept for both of us. Ongoing terms are shaped to fit the host. This is intended to make it easy for a program partner to say yes.
Section IICredentials at a Glance
Section IIIAbout the Instructor
James F. Mulhern has spent his working life inside two disciplines that reinforce each other: the disciplined reading of literature, and the disciplined making of it. He taught English for more than three decades — in secondary and college classrooms, as a department chair, and as a mentor to writers at every level from apprentice to publishing professional. His novels and short fiction have received a Kirkus Starred Review, a place on Kirkus’s Best Books of 2019 list, a Pushcart Prize nomination in fiction, and an Aesthetica Creative Writing Award shortlist in poetry. In 2015 Exeter College at the University of Oxford awarded him a fully funded writing fellowship, an unusually competitive honor for a mid-career American writer.
He is the author of eight books — Give Them Unquiet Dreams, Molly Bonamici, The Weight of Small Mercies, All We Ever Needed, Mia Bambina and Other Stories, Crossings, and companion volumes in publishing and craft — available on Amazon and through Silver Current Press. Since retiring from full-time teaching, he has directed his practice toward what he considers the most useful next act for a writer with his years and credentials: teaching adults to read literature and to write it, together, in the format that first made him love the work — the salon.
He lives and works in Philadelphia. The courses in this catalog are the courses he most wants to teach and the ones he has been teaching, in one form or another, for years. Bringing them to a partner venue is not a favor to him — it is the shape of his continuing practice.
Section IVSelected Reviews of the Author's Work
Program directors sometimes ask for third-party validation before offering a first program. What follows are quotations from independent reviews of James F. Mulhern's fiction and poetry.
“A luminous, beautifully told fairy tale grounded in history and elevated by spirit.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review), Give Them Unquiet Dreams · Kirkus Best Book of 2019
“Mulhern’s prose is strong, delivering readers a sense of the child in Aiden’s voice and a thorough, descriptive view of the world around him … the writing is elevated by a liberal use of quotes and sayings ranging from Bible verses to Thoreau and Yeats … it’s the rich characters who bring the novel to its greatest heights.”
— Kirkus Reviews, from the starred review of Give Them Unquiet Dreams
“A gleefully and wonderfully odd protagonist eases readers into a bare-bones plot … While she may have a cold exterior, her distinctiveness is an appealing quality and often amusing.”
— Kirkus Reviews, on Molly Bonamici
“A gripping, superbly written story with a strong-willed, unpredictable protagonist. Highly recommended.”
— The Wishing Shelf (five-star review), Molly Bonamici
“Mulhern’s writing displays all of the storytelling prowess of the contemporary Irish masters, yet manages to blend it in exquisitely with the use of modern-day American settings.”
— quoted on the author’s official press page
“Impressed the editorial staff with its well-written, complex characters, themes of the piece, and its fantastic voice.”
— The Missouri Review, on the novelette “A Prayer for Home”
Read the full starred Kirkus review or browse all reviews on the Kirkus author page.
Section VThe Courses I Can Teach
Any course in the salon can be adapted to a partner venue's calendar and audience — full sixteen-week series, four-session workshops, single evening talks, or one-day masterclasses. Course descriptions and sample sessions are on this site; click any title to see a syllabus.
| Course | Focus | Sessions | Genre |
|---|---|---|---|
| Survey of American Literature | From Indigenous voices and Puritan sermons to contemporary writing | 16 | Literary Survey |
| Women in American Literature | Bradstreet to Morrison; the writers who make the canon whole | 16 | Literary Survey |
| Minority Voices in American Literature | Douglass to Ocean Vuong; Black, Latinx, Asian American, Native American voices | 16 | Literary Survey |
| Jewish Writers: A Literary Tradition | Sholem Aleichem, Kafka, Bellow, Malamud, Ozick, Amichai, and more | 16 | Literary Survey |
| The Irish Literary Imagination | From the Táin and Swift to Yeats, Joyce, Heaney, Boland | 16 | Literary Survey |
| Literature & American History — A Cross-Reading | Each week pairs a primary historical document with a literary work answering it | 16 | Interdisciplinary |
| Reading Poetry: A Beginner's Welcome | An unhurried introduction for anyone who has ever felt locked out of poetry | 16 | Reading Workshop |
| Shakespeare's Sonnets & Famous Speeches | Sixteen sonnets paired with sixteen monologues — short, self-contained texts | 16 | Reading Workshop |
| The Personal Essay & Memoir | Writing from a life — read and write across sixteen weeks | 16 | Writing Workshop |
| The Craft of Revision | Bring pages; read them aloud; cut, sharpen, send out | 16 | Writing Workshop |
| The Writing Life: Getting Published | Literary magazines, cover letters, queries, agents, small presses | 16 | Writing Workshop |
| The Art of Telling | A salon in short story, poetry, and memoir — three genres in ten sessions | 10 | Writing Workshop |
Beyond these twelve, I have taught close-reading weekends on specific writers (Chekhov, Joyce, O'Connor, Trevor) and can build a bespoke course from any part of the tradition for a partner with a specific audience in mind — for example, a Bloomsday weekend for a museum or library holding Joyce material, or a memoir intensive for a lifelong-learning program.
Section VIHow I Can Deliver a Course
What I supply. Syllabus, discussion questions, close-reading passages, revision checklists, and — if useful — a live classroom whiteboard at whiteboard.silvercurrentpress.com for shared writing during sessions. All readings are drawn from the public domain or open-access sources; students never need to buy a book.
What the host supplies. A room and its promotion, or the equivalent online platform. Everything else is on my side.
Section VIISample Materials at a Glance
- A course page — The Art of Telling A ten-session salon in short story, poetry, and memoir. Representative of how every course on the site is shaped: welcome, syllabus, session-by-session breakdown, prompts, and craft takeaways.
- A cross-disciplinary syllabus — Literature & American History Sixteen sessions pairing a primary historical document with a literary work from the same moment — Jefferson with Douglass, Lincoln with Whitman, the Pentagon Papers with Tim O'Brien.
- The Mulhern Library — Short Stories A curated companion library of canonical short stories, with reading notes and discussion guides. What partner venues can offer readers between and after sessions.
- Philosophy of Writing The author statement that sits under every course on this site. Two pages; it explains, in plain language, how I think about reading and writing and what students take from the room.
- Because There Wasn't Time to Tell Everything The companion site to The Art of Telling — a demonstration of what a course leaves behind when it is done: expanded biographies, close readings, historical context, and a downloadable sixty-eight-page Word booklet.
- Press Kit For your marketing or communications team: high-resolution author photo, Kirkus starred review language, cover images, bio in three lengths, and contact information.
How to Say Yes
The simplest way to explore a partnership is a short email — the venue, an approximate audience size, and a proposed date window. I will reply within two business days with a shape that fits, a proposed syllabus, and the details of what a first offering would look like.
Email Professor Mulhern Download the One-Pager (PDF) Frequently Asked Questions (PDF)Section VIIIAbout the Use of These Materials
Everything on this site was written and designed by James F. Mulhern for Silver Current Press. Individual readers are always welcome to enjoy, print, and share these materials for personal use. Teachers, program directors, and institutions considering the use of syllabi, reading lists, discussion questions, or course design in a classroom, syllabus, publication, or paid program are asked to write first. A short email is enough; the answer will almost always be a warm yes, with a note on attribution. Please contact [email protected].