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03/03 An Eye for the Weird

Instructor: Sarah Gerkensmeyer
Date: Sunday, March 3, 2024
Time: 1:00 – 4:00 pm EST
Location: Zoom
Cost: $75 Nonmembers, $48 Writer/Reader Members, $42 Senior, Teacher, Student, Military/Veteran, Librarian Members

How can the strange, the uncanny, and the unordinary help give us more direct access to our characters’ ordinary, human experiences? This class will explore how some “weird” writers like myself work with a careful balance of the ordinary and the unordinary, the naturalistic and the fantastic in their fiction. We will discuss overt examples of weird writing, such as magical realism, fabulism, and fairy tales. And we will also explore more subtle approaches, such as conducting creative research about unknown topics and discovering a sense of mystery about topics that you are already familiar with. Participants should be both inspired and challenged to discover how injecting a sense of the unknown and the off-kilter—whether to a large degree or only in small doses—might open up the characters in their own writing.

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Course Instructor: Sarah Gerkensmeyer

Sarah Gerkensmeyer’s story collection, What You Are Now Enjoying, was selected by Stewart O’Nan as winner of the Autumn House Press Fiction Prize, longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and chosen as winner of Late Night Library’s Debut-litzer Prize. A finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction and the Italo Calvino Prize for Fabulist Fiction, Sarah’s stories and poetry have appeared in American Short Fiction, Guernica, The New Guard, The Massachusetts Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, B O D Y, and Hobart, among others. Her story “Ramona” was featured in a Huffington Post piece on flash fiction and also selected by Lily Hoang for the 2014 Best of the Net Anthology. Sarah was a Pen Parentis Fellow and is the 2016 winner of the Indiana Authors Award in the emerging category.