Instructor: Geraldine Brooks
Day & Time: Fridays 12-2:45pm
Enrollment: Limited to 12 students.
Course Website
This workshop aims to develop a tool box useful for a wide range of fiction. Students will begin by writing an oral history, develop it into a non-fiction profile, and then create a fictional character based on their subject for a short story or first chapter of a novel. In our first workshop, we will read selected Studs Terkel and WPA oral histories, discussing how to approach and conduct an oral history interview. Next we’ll workshop the results of your interviews and discuss how to shape them into profiles. As we move into creating fiction, we’ll read Colum McCann’s essay “Two Stories, So Many Stories” in the anthology "Kingdom of Olives and Ash" and study how he developed his reportage into the novel “Apeirogon.”
Supplemental Application Information: Please submit a short note of introduction, a writing sample of two thousand words or less in any genre and a note on one or two novels that have influenced or enchanted you.