Cullman Center Institute for Teachers: Making Strange—Defamiliarizing a Familiar World: A Creative Writing Workshop with Marisa Silver, July 15–19

Marisa Silver, Instructor

This is a week-long seminar taking place from July 15th to July 19th. 

Fiction is artifice. No matter whether we write in the mode of realism, or whether our work stretches the boundaries of the actual, we are engaged in an act of defamiliarization. We want to present the recognizable anew in order that our readers have the opportunity to confront the world around them with a widened awareness of the complexities that inform any given moment, action, or relationship. In this class, we will study the work of selected writers who, through the subtle use of craft (voice, structure, narrative distance, time, and tone), manage to take the known and make it mysterious. Each morning, we will combine our discussion of the assigned texts with generative writing exercises that focus on the element of craft explored during discussion. In the afternoons, each student will have time to work on a short story that will be workshopped at the end of the week.

Marisa Silver is the author of four novels, including Little Nothing and Mary Coin, and two collections of short stories. In 2017, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work has received the Ohioana Book Prize, the Southern California Independent Bookseller Award, and the O. Henry Award. Her short fiction has been published in the New Yorker, as well as other journals, and has been included in The Best American Short Stories and other anthologies. She is working at the Cullman Center on a new novel titled The Mysteries.

The deadline to apply for a 2019 Summer Seminar has passed.