Cullman Center Institute for Teachers: “A stone is a long event”: Time in Fiction–A Creative Writing Workshop with Madeleine Thien, July 24-28

Madeleine Thien, Instructor

This is a week-long seminar taking place from July 24th to July 28th.

 In literature, we move through buildings and worlds made of time. When we write stories, time can be unfolded in startling ways. When we read, stories generate time within us. Do we imagine time like a river, a room, or something else entirely? How do experiences of time generate some of the most moving, illuminating and universal structures of fiction? Together, we will explore what novelists, physicists, musicians, and mapmakers have discovered about the logic and experience of time. We will walk in the worlds of Jorge Luis Borges, Yoko Ogawa, Marie NDiaye, J. S. Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, Carlo Rovelli, and others. We will write our own variations of time, gather them into a larger canvas, and see if we can create a unified, artistic work of our own, capable of bringing worlds together.

Madeleine Thien is a professor of English at Brooklyn College. She is the author of the novels Do Not Say We Have Nothing (Granta, 2016), Dogs at the Perimeter (McClelland & Stewart, 2011) and Certainty (McClelland & Stewart, 2006), and a children’s book,The Chinese Violin (Whitecap, 2001). She received Canada's two highest literary honors, the Giller Prize and the Governor-General's Literary Award for Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Women's Prize for Fiction, and the Folio Prize. Her work has been published in The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, The New York Times, Granta, and The New Yorker, among other venues. During her Cullman Center fellowship year, she worked on a new novel.

The deadline to apply for this seminar has passed. This seminar is not open to the public.