1 Session: Sunday, January 11
1:00-3:00pm ET
Jonathan Escoffery

Jonathan Escoffery is the author of the linked story collection, If I Survive You, which was nominated for more than a dozen prizes and awards internationally, including the National Book Award, and was a finalist for the Booker Prize, the Dublin Literary Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and others. His stories have earned awards from The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, Prairie Schooner, the American Society of Magazine Editors, Miami New Times, and Passages North. He holds an MFA in Fiction from the University of Minnesota, and was a 2021-2023 Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Jonathan designed this seminar to share the strategies that took his short fiction from good to award-winning. Participants can expect group discussions and an in-class writing prompt, as well as strategies for writing engaging fiction.

Energetic prose and unforgettable characters are often said to be the bedrocks of literary fiction. Fully fleshed out characters have implied histories and futures that never make it onto the page, so what dictates where and when a character’s problems and desires become worthy of dramatization? And what determines where that dramatization ends? And, finally, how do you know when your story is undercooked, over-inflated, or fully realized? In this craft talk, we’ll discuss story-worthy characters and explore how elements such as repetition, reversals and recognition, and suspense and tension-building can help us determine the contours of the worlds we create.

Workshop Highlights:

• Interactive class discussion

• In-class writing prompt

• Strategies for building suspense and reader engagement

This class has 1 half scholarship available. To apply, please fill out this form by Friday, January 2.