FICTION WRITING

Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here: https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses. 

Section 1 (taught by Weike Wang): Flash Fiction Workshop. This course is an intensive writing workshop focused on the art of flash fiction—stories told in under 1,500 words. The workshop will emphasize experimentation, encouraging students to push the boundaries of traditional storytelling by playing with form, language, and perspective. Readings will include works originally written in English as well as those in translation, offering a broad view of global approaches to flash fiction. Discussions will cover the mechanics of storytelling on a compressed scale, including structure, character development, point of view, dialogue, and style. Authors will include Cheever, Couto, Hempel, Davis, and Wang, and through these readings, students will explore the structural possibilities of the short form, the role of voice, and the ways in which brevity can intensify narrative impact. The class will examine how compression, omission, and implication create resonance in fiction.Each student will write and workshop three original short pieces, receiving detailed feedback from peers and the instructor. The goal is to develop a keen sense of how the economy of language can create depth and complexity in fiction.

Section 2 (taught by Idra Novey): Old Wolves and New Grandmothers. Once upon a time there was a fiction workshop and each student in the workshop conjured a new role for the animal in their grandmother’s bed. In this workshop, we’ll experiment with how the tone and iconic figures of fairy tales may provide a way into a new work of fiction, though not necessarily a way out. We’ll talk about myriad ways to subvert the expected meaning of the wolf and the wicked in our own time, and what new subtexts may be lurking in the shared stories we reconsider at different points in our lives. “You shift time and location to see what holds true, and why or why not,” novelist Helen Oyeyemi says of the allure of fairy tales as a place of departure for a new work of fiction. We’ll discuss work from writers drawn to subvert and repurpose fairy tales, including Helen Oyeyemi, Barbara Comyns, and Cristina Rivera Garza.