Class

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

This 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 invent a new way of talking about stories and how they work. We’ll also experiment with our own, 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, workshops, with workshops taking up about 50% of the class time, where each writer will receive feedback from peers and from the instructor. 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, & funny—by Morgan Thomas, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, George Saunders, Lydia Davis, and Venita Blackburn, Yiyun Li, Manuel Muñoz, and more.

No class on July 8.

Please email [email protected] at least two to three weeks in advance if you have any accessibility requests for this class. PLEASE NOTE: the elevator in Open Book will be unavailable for use from July - August 2025 due to modernization. This class takes place in-person, at the Loft at Open Book. Please see the Loft’s website for the most up to date information about the Loft’s COVID policies.