Short Story Intensive

This rigorous one-week course is designed to teach students the essential techniques of short story writing by contextualizing the form throughout history—from Edgar Allan Poe to James Baldwin, to contemporary practitioners, including Joy Williams and Jhumpa Lahiri. By encountering the work of renowned authors from a writer’s perspective, students will utilize the 5 key elements of the short story—plot, character, setting, conflict, and theme—to arrive at what is finally a common goal: to make readers feel through original, compelling, and climactic prose. 

Students will share their writing in a workshop setting and receive in-depth feedback from both their peers and the instructor. The course includes asynchronous work, which students are expected to complete between class sessions. Not only does this course impart a greater understanding of what it means to write short stories, but it will also help students become stronger writers through the use of economized and well-crafted language.