Spring 2007

E 385N • Graduate Fiction Workshop

Course Description

This will be a workshop course in which students will present three significant pieces of work, either short stories or sections of a novel. While the majority of the time will be spent discussing the students' work, there also will be a good amount of other reading. We will be discussing the fiction of Alice Munro, Charles Portis, Denis Johnson, Michael Cunningham and Aimee Bender. During the early part of the semester, there will be a series of in-class writing exercises. There will also be visits with novelists Stephen Harrigan, Sarah Bird, and James Hynes. What I feel best equipped to teach is how to revise, how to create a certain narrative energy, how to construct a scene, how not to be boring.

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