Cullman Center Institute for Teachers: The First Person: A Creative Writing Workshop with Justin Torres

The First Person: A Creative Writing Workshop with Justin Torres

This workshop takes place during winter break.

In this workshop, we will examine voice and structure in first-person narratives by Donald Barthelme, Stuart Dybek, Carolyn Ferrell, Janet Frame, Amy Hempel, and Grace Paley. We will consider the difference between the often nostalgic and sometimes unreliable “I” voice that narrates events, and the active, embodied “I” who is a character in the story itself. We'll also see how associative thinking and structural fragmentation affect our understanding of voice and character. Participants will then attempt to write their own nostalgic, fragmented, wild first person narratives.

Justin Torres is the author of We the Animals, which has been translated into fourteen languages. He has published short fiction in The New Yorker, Harper's, Granta, Tin House, The Washington Post, Glimmer Train, Flaunt, and other publications. He was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and was named one of 5 Under 35 by The National Book Foundation in 2012. He is working on his second novel at the Cullman Center.

The deadline to apply to this seminar has passed.