Click the link

There's been some confusion about where to find the workshop stories for this week. *Puts on exasperated teacher voice.* I did say this in class--I have linked the Google Docs folder to the Homework page of this website. So to access the stories, go to the Homework page and click the link for Workshop #1.

See you all later today. Don't forget to bring TWO copies of each letter for workshop. Also, don't forget to do the Jerome Stern reading for today.

This Week's Reading

For the enhancement of this week's reading, you might want to check out this video of Adam Johnson is which he reads the entirety of tomorrow's story, "Nirvana," and answers some questions from the audience at the end.

Reading Tonight

Tonight there's going to be a reading that I will give you extra credit to attend. It's one of the Campfire series at the Modern Hotel here in Boise. It's also fun. This month it's journalists discussing what stories have resonated in Idaho.

Here's the link to the Facebook event page.

https://www.facebook.com/events/578517255658232/

To get the extra credit, just write a paragraph or two about what the vent was like and what you learned from it. You'll receive an extra participation point.

Get Going!

I read over all of your Five Story projects this morning, and now I'm so excited for the real, full-length stories! So get writing!

To those of you who couldn't see my comments--I think I've figured out why. You have to open the document in your word processor, like Word or Pages or whatever. Don't open it in the Dropbox program. It has its own commenting system, and that was not the one I was using when I commented. I made my comments in Word, and they should be there. Also make sure your document is set to Final Showing Markup in the review pane--otherwise, the comments will be hidden.

One final note: some of you did use bits here that I would consider genre or experimental in some fashion, and that's fine, but I am going to push you to make those stories literary, so if that's not what you want to do, DON'T USE THOSE. It does us little good for me to force you to write a story looking through a completely different lens from what you want the story to me.

Also, like I said in class, I'd like the stories you write for this course to be original to this semester.

See you Tuesday!

A Story A Day

This exercise is to get you generating a lot of possibilities for your short stories this semester and to get you familiar with the process of writing every day.  If I could have my way, I would require you to write 250-500 words a day, 7 days a week, for the entire semester.  Think of the writer you’d be after that!  You’d have the beginnings of a collection!  But, since I can’t do that, I will start the semester out by having you write every day for a week.

So, here’s the assignment:  Thursday, 9-8, you must bring in between 5-7 stories (hence, a story a day) that could be the seeds of your stories this semester.  The typical published short story is 15 pages long.  If you can manage to write a 15 page story every day for a week, more power to you.  But for the sake of your sanity, I will require only that you produce 1-2 pages per each story (250-500 words).  That “story” could be an opening scene or two, or it could be looser piece of writing where you try to pin down the story as a whole.  I only ask that it be intelligible enough for me to understand, as I will be reading these and advising you on which would make the best stories for you to pursue, and that it be an earnest attempt at creating a short story for a real audience.

Of course you are allowed to make use of the Generating Exercises, the ones in Making Shapely Fiction, and I will load even more exercises to your Dropbox file, if you need something to go on.  Use them or don’t—it doesn’t matter to me.  All that matters is that you write, write, write!

I am eager to see what you come up with! 

Dropbox

Last week I sent invitations to all of you to join the class Dropbox. Please accept the invitation, but just in case it didn't go through and you want to take a look at the exercises for this week, try here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/te5j130tjrkplvj/AABOSqNgWxq3l_8oyf43cl47a?dl=0

I have added our workshop schedule to this website, and edited the Conversational Topics page to account for all the different groups. Please get in contact with your group to discuss how you want to handle your discussion.

Also, please read over the supplemental material about the reading I put up on the last post.

See you tomorrow.

To Enhance This Week's Reading

This week we are reading stories from The New Yorker by Maile Meloy and Louise Erdrich. I'd like us to not only study the stories I assign you by themselves, but also in the context of the careers of the writers who wrote these stories, and where they were published.

The New Yorker

We'll talk more about The New Yorker in class for the next few days, but notice that five out of the twenty stories in the Best American come from The New Yorker. This says something about the quality of the work they publish--and also, I suspect, the taste of the editors of BASS. Check out the actually-pretty-good Wikipedia page on the New Yorker for more about its history. 

As we read the next three stories in class, let's try to figure out what similarities these stories have. What makes a "New Yorker" story?

Maile Meloy

Maile Meloy is the author of the novels Liars and Saints and A Family Daughter and the story collections Half in Love and Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, which was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2009 by the New York Times Book Review and one of the best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times and Amazon.com. She has also written a trilogy for young readers, beginning with The Apothecary, which was a New York Times bestseller and won the 2012 E.B. White Award. Meloy’s short stories have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, and other publications, and she has received The Paris Review’s Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two California Book Awards, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.  In 2007, she was chosen as one of Granta’s 21 Best Young American Novelists.  Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Slate, Sunset, and O. She grew up in Helena, Montana, and now lives in Los Angeles.

Click here to read this very interesting interview with Meloy in The Fiction Writers Review. 

Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich is the author of fifteen novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, short stories, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel The Round House won the National Book Award for Fiction. The Plague of Doves won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and her debut novel, Love Medicine, was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Erdrich has received the Library of Congress Prize in American Fiction, the prestigious PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. She lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore.

Click here to read a long, but wonderful interview with Louise Erdrich in The Paris Review.

Victor Lodato

Victor Lodato is a playwright, poet, and novelist.  His book, Mathilda Savitch, was hailed by The New York Times as “a Salingeresque wonder of a first novel” and was deemed a “Best Book of the Year” by The Christian Science Monitor,Booklist, and The Globe and Mail.  The novel won the PEN USA Award for Fiction and the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, and has been published in sixteen countries. Victor is a Guggenheim Fellow, as well as the recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Princess Grace Foundation, The Camargo Foundation (France), and The Bogliasco Foundation (Italy). His short fiction and essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Best American Short Stories. His new novel, Edgar and Lucy, is forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press.

As a playwright, he is the recipient of the Weissberger Award for Motherhouseand the PEN USA Award for Arlington (a collaboration with composer Polly Pen). Other plays include Wildlife, Dear Sara Jane, The Bread of Winter, and Slay the Dragon.  Other honors include the Helen Merrill Award, John Golden Prize, Roger L. Stevens Award from The Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, and the Julie Harris Playwriting Award. His work has been produced and developed nationally and internationally at venues such as Vineyard Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville (Humana Festival), Manhattan Theatre Club, The Guthrie Theatre, Williamstown Theatre Festival, American Conservatory Theatre, Primary Stages, The National Theatre (London), Quartieri dell’Arte Festival (Rome), and Theatre Na Zabradli (Prague).

Victor lives in Ashland, Oregon and Tucson, Arizona.

Click here to read an interview that Victor gave in the New Yorker about "Jack, July."