Cullman Center Institute for Teachers: Enchanting and Exploding: A Fiction Writing Workshop with Claire Luchette, July 22-26

Claire Luchette, Instructor

This is a week-long seminar taking place from July 22nd to July 26th.

A good story, Joy Williams writes, “...never soothes or comforts. It is no prescription, neither is it diversionary, although it can and should enchant while it explodes in the reader's face.” In this class, we’ll examine ways of captivating the reader—at both the line level, with language and details, and the story level, with characterization and narrative momentum—and we’ll spend time exploring defamiliarization as a vital tool for giving stories intrigue and urgency. We’ll look, too, at what might constitute a detonation, and how to make our fiction go kablooey.

Our time will be split between generative writing exercises and discussion of fiction by Williams, Ndinda Kioko, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Jamel Brinkley, and others. Each participant will write a short story that we will workshop at the end of the week.

Claire Luchette is the author of the novel Agatha of Little Neon. A National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, Luchette has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, Yaddo, Lighthouse Works, John Carroll University, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Luchette's work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, the Pushcart Prize anthology, the New York Times, Ploughshares, Granta, and the Kenyon Review. At the Cullman Center, Luchette worked on a new novel, about the mail.

APPLY HERE

The deadline to apply is Monday, April 29th.