Upcoming at Hugo House! Do you remember that story? The one that you were so excited to write, but then it somehow fizzled out? The timing wasn’t right, but you never stopped thinking about it. Well, now is the time to see if the spark is still there! In this revision-focused course, we will flesh out the original intentions for the story, pinpoint areas for growth, and practice new approaches to the story. Our happily ever after is a celebratory workshop and your new draft.

The way people speak now is often mediated by technology, so the way we write dialogue needs to adapt. This generative class will look at the craft of dialogue—whether the conversation is happening out loud or in a text thread.

Are your stories a little out of place in a typical workshop? This class focuses on those weird stories—the ones that are bizarre and uncanny and just don’t quite fit anywhere else. Each week we’ll discuss aspects of creating a weird story such as world building, genre, and publication. We’ll look at weird stories from Kim Fu, Aimee Bender, and more. We will also workshop each other’s writing, safe in the knowledge that we are surrounded by our fellow weirdos.

We live much of our lives on our devices, communicating with each other through Zooms, texts, emojis, GIFs, Facebook feeds, Instagram posts and TikTok videos, yet fiction is still figuring out how to represent these facets of our lives in prose. This four hour intensive is designed to help organize your thinking as you bring these modern technologies into your own writing. We’ll talk about everything from the purpose of including these technologies in your fiction to the logistics of doing so. We’ll look at examples from a variety of authors and genres in order to make the decisions that work best for the stories we wish to tell

Most fiction seeks to find some sort of Truth about humanity, but often seeing the truth about something means taking a step outside of it. Enter the alternate narrator—their experiences provide a convenient distance through which we can interpret the human experience. In this four-week generative course we’ll read selections from authors like Ted Chiang, Kazuo Ishiguro, Garth Stein, and Emma Donoghue, work with writing prompts to help us develop our unique narrative voices, and learn more about how alternate narrators can illuminate our own humanity.