A Public Space is having me back to teach a Sunday afternoon workshop. Description below:

Sundays, 3-5PM Eastern
November 2-November 23, 2025
Zoom web conference

Making and Breaking Status Quo

What makes this day different from all other days? This workshop will explore that question from several angles. A break in status quo is often the occasion for story—or the vital climax. In fiction, how and why do we establish the ordinary for our characters, and how can the ordinary be broken open to reveal new depths of personality, relationships, motivations, and worlds? In real life, how do we bear witness to the status quo around us, even the normalization of horrors, in order to create resistance on the page? Perhaps we writers have a calling in troubling times: to pay extra attention to what is “normal” and what is not.

This workshop will look at published works that establish status quo, then resist it, while also exploring the same ideas in our own works in progress. Conversation likely to include works by JRR Tolkien, Justin Torres, Percival Everett, Negesti Kaudo, Sara Saedi, Amy Hempel, Roberto Bolaño, Torrey Peters, Suzanne Collins, and Ross Gay. Participants will share their work aloud in class. Light reading and writing homework.