Thank you all of you who took the time to suggest to me the authors who weren’t included in the poll. Among them were Jane Austen, George Eliot, Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Edith Wharton. I love reading and teaching the classics, and while I haven’t taught any long novels, I am interested in finding a way to read these authors with you in the future.That said, it only makes sense to begin with the authors who were more in demand. And we have a list of authors that will not disappoint anyone. I get excited just thinking about how much good writing is in store for us!Alice Munro got the most votes, followed by Katherine Mansfield, Flannery O’Connor, Lydia Davis, and Lauren Groff. The names alone declare it: In 2024, our theme is Feminism and the Short Story.As I said in my yearly roundup, the MFA semester design worked out nicely for us, and the only thing I now want to add is more writing. I never wish to assign too much work, but I am always here to support you if and when you decide to take up something extra, such as writing and submitting a story to the workshop. If you were in an MFA program, you’d write 2 short stories per semester. How about we do the same, in our own time, surrounded and supported by our fellow writers? You know I am here to help you from the beginning to the end.Here is our class calendar for the 1st Semester!
Thursday, February 1, 8, 22, 29
Alice Munro is constantly called the Chekhov of our time. She has exclusively written short stories and won the Nobel Prize in Literature for being the “master of the contemporary short story” in 2013. Her stories are masterpieces of elegant design and psychology. Her masterful use of the elements of the craft, her employment of time, flashbacks, and flash-forwards, and her timely inclusion of letters, poems, and songs render all signs of invention and construction invisible that the reader rarely notices the structure beneath the narrative. Munro is an expert in catching the minute details and gestures that often go unnoticed. Her characters are often working-class women, but most importantly, they are complex human beings with complex desires and fears. Studying Alice Munro, not only will we learn the endless potential of the short story but also the innumerable intricacies of the human psyche.***If you are already a fan of her work, you may know that Alice Munro’s stories are often around 30 pages or so. In order to give us time to comfortably prepare for classes, I’ve set up our Munro classes around vacations, so that there’ll be more time to read her longer stories.***
Katherine Mansfield - II in MarchThursday, March 7, 14, 21, 28
Despite her death at the age of 34, Katherine Mansfield is considered a key figure among modernist short story writers. In her stories, Mansfield does away with the old-fashioned plot structures that rely on action and has the characters’ reactions to their experiences carry the narrative forward. As she effortlessly moves into the inner worlds of her characters, their revelations become the reader’s revelations, since their themes are the very themes of our lives, such as anxiety, loneliness, gender roles, expectations and disappointments, and the co-existence of life and death. From Mansfield’s stories, we will learn how to translate our observations of the world into scenes and to distill them into images with a sense of symbolism and psychology. Mansfield will teach us to see the multiple layers that make up any experience and how to recreate them in our own stories.Responding to Stories with Stories in April-MayAlice Munro, Flannery O’Connor, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Doris LessingThursday, April 18, 25, May 9, 16
Writers often respond to stories with stories. It is an intimate and intellectual conversation between two creative minds that knows no bounds of time or place. In this star-studded course, we have two Nobel Prize-winning writers rewriting stories they admire. Alice Munro is fascinated with the literature from the American South, and she has chosen “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” a classic by Flannery O’Connor, while Doris Lessing gives Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” a modern twist. We will study the originals and the responses to learn what makes a good story and the many possible ways to respond and rewrite a story. If you wish to write one of your stories for this class, I strongly urge you to write your version of a story you admire, which will give you a chance to deeply understand the story and yourself.Flannery O’Connor in May-JuneThursday, May 30, June 6, 13, 20
Flannery O’Connor is the writer of perfect technique and is often funny, loud, and wild. O’Connor was born in Georgia and studied writing at the University of Iowa. She was a Southern writer who wrote in the Southern style and captured the spirit of the place and culture that is the South. In her stories, she pairs the elements of the Gothic story with her recurring themes of religion, humor, and the grotesque, puts her characters in violent situations that trigger revelations, and brings opposing forces in conflict in search of free will, redemption, and humanism. In this class, we will read a selection of her stories along with her essays on writing from Mystery and Manners. Flannery O’Connor is unlike any writer you’ve read before and will challenge and liberate you in the best way you can imagine. I don’t want to finalize the second semester’s calendar just yet, because one has to keep things open for surprises! Still, I have some ideas, such as reading more from Alice Munro. We’ll have studied 5 of her 170 stories, so there’ll be plenty more to read and learn from. Perhaps the second Munro course may focus on the epistolary story or the long story, both of which she does often and masterfully. We may also wish to contrast the long story with flash fiction, which Lydia Davis excels at. Seeing how time-pressed and tired everybody was at the end of the year, saving the shortest stories for the busiest months seems like a good way to ensure we never go without literature. I also think you’d enjoy reading Simone de Beauvoir’s nonfiction with me and learning more about the woman who wrote the most remarkable book of modern feminism, The Second Sex, which influenced every book on feminism that came after it. I will continue to receive your suggestions and share the class calendar for 2nd Semester in July.✨💫 PS. Class calendar only includes Thursday dates. Tuesday classes will be opened when there are enough number of participants.✨💫🌟 PPS. You may sign up for classes starting January 20, until then, you're invited to our Open Events. Stay tuned! 🌟Follow The Ways of Black Ink
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