Craft Seminar: The Art of the Short Story with Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
Craft Seminar: The Art of the Short Story with Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
2 Sessions: Sundays, October 5 + 12
1:00-3:00pm ET
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
Called a “twisted, twisty genius” by Vulture and “ferociously intelligent” by The New York Times, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is a PEN Faulkner and Radcliffe award winning author. Her short stories have twice been featured in The Best American Short Stories (2023 & 2024). This two-part craft seminar is open to writers with any level of experience.
So much of writing a short story is about understanding how to best structure the story you are telling: how to compress time, how to make great leaps in time, how to include sufficient backstory without clogging up the narrative. In a short story, how you manage the question of time is pivotal for animating your characters and keeping your reader curious and engaged. And the opening paragraph is the story's heartbeat! In this two-part craft seminar, we will conduct close readings of four successful short stories and examine how each writer establishes the rules of their story world from the very first paragraph. We will also devote time to editing a story you are working on and discuss challenges you might be facing and how to move past them.
Workshop Highlights:
Learn to craft a pitch perfect opening paragraph
Learn tools for structuring your story
Learn tools for bringing your characters to life
This class has 1 full and 1 partial scholarship available. To apply, please fill out this form by Friday, September 26.
Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi is an Los-Angeles born Iranian novelist and non-fiction writer. She is the author of Call Me Zebra, named a Best Book of the Year by over twenty publications and the winner of the 2019 PEN/Faulkner Award, the John Gardner Award, and long listed for the PEN/Open Book Award. Her other novels include Savage Tongues and Fra Keeler, for which she received a Whiting Writers' Award and a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" award. A recipient of fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University, Fulbright, the Aspen Institute, MacDowell, and Art Omi, her work has appeared twice in The Best American Short Stories (Ed. by Min Jin Lee and Lauren Groff), The Sewanee Review, The Yale Review, The New York Times, and The Paris Review among other places. She is the Dorothy G. Griffin College Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.
