Cullman Center Institute for Teachers: And Then What Happened?: On The Art of Storytelling with Ayana Mathis, July 18-22

Ayana Mathis, Instructor

This is a week-long seminar taking place from July 18th to July 22nd.

This event is scheduled to be held in-person. The seminar will be held virtually if necessary.

In E.M. Forster’s seminal book on craft, Aspects of the Novel, he writes, “And now the story can be defined… Qua story, it can only have one merit: that of making the audience want to know what happens next. And conversely it can only have one fault: that of making the audience not want to know what happens next.” There must be more to it than that! Surely, modern literature is more sophisticated than a simple matter of suspense. It is true that literature has loftier pursuits, but the fact remains that without suspense, fiction falls flat. To tell a story, to spin a yarn, to keep our reader turning pages into the wee hours, remains the writer’s greatest goal. It is through storytelling that we smuggle in, like a Trojan horse, our work’s other elements: artistry, theme, aesthetics, and ideas. 

In this class we will delve into the art of storytelling through deep exploration of plot, character, time, memory, and more. We will read and discuss fiction by authors like Eudora Welty, Edward P. Jones, and Isaac Babel among others. And of course, we will write every day, as you practice storytelling in your own work.

Ayana Mathis is the author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, which was a New York Times bestseller, a 2013 New York Times Notable Book of the Year, an NPR Best Book of the Year, and was selected for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0. Mathis’s nonfiction has been published in the New York Times, the Financial Times, the New Yorker, and Guernica. Mathis is the recipient of a Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship and a fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy. She has taught literature and creative writing in Master’s programs at Columbia University and Rutgers University–Newark and is a former faculty member of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she taught English and creative writing. As the 2014-2015 Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellow at the Cullman Center, she worked on a novel about a septuagenarian blues singer and her estranged daughter. 

The deadline to apply for the 2022 Summer Seminars has passed.