This winter, we are offering one 5-week class:
December 2026: Craft Lessons from The Best American Short Stories (5 sessions – Cora)
How do they do it? What choices do authors make when crafting a short story to form its particular plot, characters, setting, tone, mood, and ideas? How do dialogue, point of view, pacing, narrative distance, and detail contribute to an overall effect? In this course, we’ll read short stories from the last century—one or two a week—and take inspiration from both contemporary and classic writers. A portion of each class will be dedicated to responding to generative prompts and exercises, based on that week’s theme.
We’ll cover the likes of Denis Johnson, Kathleen Collins, James Baldwin, Ann Beattie, Ben Lerner, Grace Paley, James Salter, Ted Chiang, and many others, spending time in each class to discuss the craft elements and underlying mechanics of these authors’ works to see which tactics make sense for use in our own writing.
Class structure: virtual (Zoom); max capacity: 12 students
Meetings: Tuesdays, 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm, December 1st – December 29th: 5 sessions total
Cost: $300-400 sliding scale
Classes currently in session:
What is a character? How do we create memorable ones? At a moment when the very notion of the human is, for better or worse, being eroded in favor of money and machines, it’s common to see lifeless narrators and bland protagonists praised as radical artistic creations. This workshop will try to get at another idea of character, not as empty ciphers for social and psychic forces, but as dramatic renderings of conceivably real people, with all the awkwardness and mystery and stubbornness of neighbors and strangers on the street.
We’ll look through the fiction of writers like Henry James, Mavis Gallant, Lee Chang-dong, JF Powers, Edward P. Jones, William Trevor, Shirley Hazzard, Yu Hua, and others as, like human LLMs, we use prompts to generate our own stories–and novel excerpts, if we (you) choose–and then workshop them.
Class structure: virtual (Zoom); max capacity: 10 students
Meetings: Thursdays, 6pm – 8pm, October 8th – November 12th (skipping October 22nd): 5 sessions total
Cost: $250-300 sliding scale
How does smallness work in prose? How do small pieces render such largeness within themselves, and how can smallness propel us toward bigger, more expansive projects? For students interested in exploring short prose forms, this class will consider published works from collections of very short fiction, prose poetry, creative nonfiction, and hybrid texts. Students will likewise be given ample prompts to generate, discuss, and hone their own work.
Writings by the likes of Yasunari Kawabata, Grace Paley, Lydia Davis, Lyn Hejinian, Renee Gladman, and others will guide us toward a greater understanding of the short form in its many iterations.
Class structure: virtual (Zoom); max capacity: 10 students
Meetings: Sundays, 6pm – 8pm, October 11th – November 8th: 5 sessions total
Cost: $250-300 sliding scale
