1 Session, Saturday, April 13, 12-3pm Eastern Time

online, 12 students max

$75

Enroll for this class.

A generative workshop focusing on starting with very little and following intuition and playfulness to create work that surprises even the writer. In this class we will discuss the idea of writing from the uncomfortable place of “not-knowing.” We will discuss the work of Joy Williams, Kathryn Scanlan, Rachel B. Glaser, and David Lynch. My hope is that we will begin to write during the class, allowing ourselves to feel free to experiment. Students should leave with the belief that the surreal, the strange, can inform a piece of realistic fiction, deepening and complicating the world they are trying to create.

We will read excerpts from short stories by the above mentioned writers, as well as a fairy tale, and excerpts from Barthelme’s essay “Not Knowing” and my own essay “On Writing When I’m Not Inspired.” We will take time to begin writing either a piece of microfiction or flash, or the beginnings of something longer. This is not a workshop for in-progress work, though I believe that the exercises of free-writing and experimentation will help anyone who is stuck on their current project.

I will briefly discuss the idea of rejecting a plan and allowing a story to take you to possible dead ends, possible insight, and hopefully an image, a character, a moment, a story you could have never planned.

Enroll for this class.

About the Instructor

Richard Mirabella is a writer and civil servant living in upstate New York. His short stories have appeared in Story Magazine, swamp pink, American Short Fiction, wigleaf, and elsewhere. His first novel, Brother & Sister Enter the Forest, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and named a best book of the year by Harper’s Bazaar.