Cullman Center Institute for Teachers: What We Remember: A Creative Writing Workshop with Angela Flournoy, July 23-27

Angela Flournoy, Instructor

This is a week-long seminar taking place from July 23rd to July 27th.

Most stories are not a single series of events, even if they look that way at first glance. Embedded in the stories we write are numerous smaller stories–the ones characters tell themselves about the lives they’ve led and the people they’ve known, which combine to give us a fuller sense of characters and their concerns. We will examine memory as a vital tool for character development, and we will look at the ways that memory can influence nearly every other element of a work of fiction. We will spend time with oral history collections in an effort to get a better understanding of how memory works, and the tricks that memory can play. This class is a combination of generative writing exercises and discussion of fiction from writers including Edward P. Jones, Alice Munro and Yiyun Li. Each participant will write a short story that we will workshop at the end of the week.

Angela Flournoy's debut novel, The Turner House, was a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She was honored as one of 5 Under 35 fiction writers by the National Book Foundation in 2015, and her writing has appeared in the Paris Review, the New York Times, the New Republic, and the Los Angeles Times. She has taught at The University of Iowa, The New School, and Columbia University. While at the Cullman Center in 2016-17 she worked on a novel that traces the lives and friendships of a group of contemporary African American women from 2015 to 2035 in Los Angeles and New York City.

The deadline to apply to this seminar has passed.