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I am beyond grateful to be invited back to A Public Space for another Sunday afternoon course. Details below.

The standard advice in a fiction workshop is that stories are made from conflict. The word conflict conjures Western-style showdowns and Shakespearean sword fights. But do all stories need to involve battle? Maybe the word is wrong, but the idea is right—and what stories really need is friction, the coming together of opposites to generate electricity and heat.

In this workshop, we will look at examples of friction in stories—friction between people, between ideas, between institutions, and even the friction between the page and the reader, considering the way that a story might participate in a larger discourse of resistance. And, in the spirit of risk-taking, we will also discuss the resistance we might encounter as a normal part of the creative process, exploring ways to find the courage to push into difficult scenes, language, or subject matter.

We will investigate both published stories and the unfinished drafts of participants. Reading likely to include works by Elizabeth Bowen, Carmen Maria Machado, Mitchell S. Jackson, Margaret Atwood, Rion Amilcar Scott, and Amy Hempel. Light reading and writing homework; student work to be read aloud.

Course Schedule
Sundays, March 13–April 3, 2022
3:00 p.m.–5:00 p.m. ET
4 sessions
Online on Zoom