4-Week: Standing on the Shoulders of Giant Robots—Craft Lessons from Speculative Short Fiction

This four-week course will draw on short fiction by masters of science fiction, fantasy, horror, absurdism, and magical realism to explore craft techniques that can benefit all short story writers of any genre. We’ll look at stories by the likes of Octavia Butler, Aimee Bender, Ted Chiang, and Carmen Maria Machado that leverage their speculative conceits to undertake intriguing experiments in point of view, narrative time, and style. We’ll do some generative exercises to see if those experiments can help us with our own work—whether speculative or realist, fiction or non-fiction, and everything in between. Each class will involve assigned reading—two short stories per week—and participants should come prepared to discuss. Ideally, participants will be working on a short piece that they could use for the in-class generative exercises, but this is not a requirement, and we won’t be workshopping or sharing our in-class writing for critiques. All genres welcome!