Class

8-Week: Heat, Escalation, Danger, Delusion: Re-thinking the Short Story

This 8-week class seeks to expand our sense of what a story can do, and how it might achieve its effects.

Beyond Freytag’s pyramid and conventional modes of plot, we’ll look at stories through the lens of what we can see, rather than what formulas have been handed down from old texts. We'll look at mystery, disappointment, texture, repetition, voice, desire, escalation, delusion, position, and connection/disconnection. We’ll take stories on their own terms, and we'll invent a new way of talking about stories and how they work.

We’ll also experiment with our own stories, and everyone will emerge from class with a workshopped story and new material from at least eight different in-class writing exercises.

Class structure: mostly discussion-based, short lectures, and workshops. Workshops will be about 50% of class time, with each writer receiving feedback from peers and from the teaching artist. The workshop time will be an open discussion—the writer can speak and engage at any time—and we will seek an experience that is generous, nurturing, open-minded, and encouraging.

We’ll read a big mix of stories—realist, elegant, zany, surreal, heartbreaking, and funny. Authors will include Morgan Thomas, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, George Saunders, Lydia Davis, Venita Blackburn, Yiyun Li, Manuel Muñoz, and more.

This class takes place in-person, at the Loft at Open Book; we encourage participants to be fully vaccinated and masked in the interest of everyone’s safety. Please see the Loft’s website for the most up to date information about the Loft’s COVID policies.