Courses

Join us as we learn how to read like writers and write like readers. By taking apart great short stories or “reading like a writer,” we can learn how to put together our own stories more effectively, identifying and eventually incorporating other writers’ techniques into our own work. This course is designed to help students hone their critical reading habits, gain a deeper understanding of story construction, and produce exercises that may become the basis of future stories.

Each session will begin with discussion of a story, move on to a craft talk highlighting the story’s construction, and end with a writing exercise that students can choose to share with the group. Octavia Butler’s science fiction classic “Speech Sounds” will show us how conflict creates plot; Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” will demonstrate how text and subtext interact to generate meaning; Kate Chopin’s early feminist provocation “The Story of an Hour” will teach us how irony can be used to complicate interpretation; Carmen Maria Machado’s “Eight Bites” will illustrate how contemporary fiction draws on fairy tale to access the irrational; and Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” will remind us that, in the right hands, “telling” can be as powerful as “showing.”