Thora Wilder holds a B.A. in English and Art History from Vassar College and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow and completed a novel manuscript that remains, she says, productively unfinished. Before joining Clarebourne she taught for four years at the Taft School in Connecticut, where she developed the creative nonfiction elective that she brought with her and now runs as part of Clarebourne’s Grade 11–12 elective sequence. She teaches Writing the Self: Memoir and Personal Essay, the Grade 10 core English sequence, and serves as faculty advisor to the student literary magazine.
Her approach to creative writing instruction is built around a single conviction: that students who are asked to write honestly about their own experience develop a more rigorous relationship with evidence and argument than students who are only asked to write analytically. The two modes of writing teach each other. She assigns both in every course she teaches.
“I want my students to understand that precision in language is not a constraint on expression — it is the condition of it. You cannot say something true about your own life, or anyone else’s, with vague words.”
Upper School English · Grades 10–12 · Clarebourne since 2016