Short Story Workshop

The short story is a specific literary art form in fiction; how might we use it to engage the ideas we are shaping and exploring in our other work – ideas about politics and equity and justice and environment and climate and physics and disease and food systems and urban design? In evolutionary biology or visual arts or music or law? How can we use fiction to approach problems and solutions and knowledges of all sorts?

Short stories deal in the depths of human experience, the macrocosm in the microcosm. In this interdisciplinary Creative Writing workshop, we will explore the short story, with an eye to bending its shape to accommodate innovation in the form itself, and in the subject matter that the story might address. We will read exemplary published short stories that might engage the realms of other ways of knowing. Centrally, we will craft and critique and revise our own short stories. We will employ artmaking as an essential epistemological process, as a way of knowing, about the other fields of our interest – and the short story as a form for exploring ideas about the world.