8-Week: The Art of Catharsis—Bring Out Your Angst

To put it mildly, these are stressful, stormy times. Fortunately, we are writers, and can find an outlet for our emotions in the refuge of art. Our stories and characters can give space to our anxieties, anger, and dark fantasies, and ideally morph them from personal burdens into collectively recognizable narrative forms that are satisfying, and even helpful, for people to read. But how do we do this without simply trauma-dumping or writing unreadable screeds—how do we create fictional containers that still read like well-composed stories? This will be the slippery pursuit of this 8 week course, in which we'll study examples from literature, discuss our own fears and creative ambitions, and workshop our stories for class feedback.