A Public Space is having me back for a four-week online workshop meeting Sunday afternoons Eastern time. This one will be generative. Description below:

Epistolary storytelling, when done well, can be time travel. Having a letter, journal entry, photograph, or personal artifact in our hands puts readers right into the lives of characters. We also become detectives, piecing everything together and making the story in our minds—becoming active participants in storytelling itself. This generative class will study examples of epistolary fiction and memoir, expanding our definition way beyond the exchange of letters. Using the techniques we observe, we’ll try some experiments ourselves using artifacts both found and made up. Emails, texts, legal documents, marginalia, dictionaries, shopping lists, newspaper clippings, playlists, syllabi, Sylvia Plath’s braid: everything is on the table. 

We’ll likely discuss works by Bram Stoker, Sasha Hom, Alice Munro, Torrey Peters, Danielle Geller, Lauren Elkin, Rion Amilcar Scott, Rick Moody, Anne Frank, and Venita Blackburn. Light reading and writing homework. Participants read their work aloud.