Cullman Center Institute for Teachers: Writing the Restless Dead: On Writing Historical Fiction

Maaza Mengiste, Instructor

This is a week-long seminar taking place from July 28th to August 1st.

Click here to apply.

Saint Augustine says that the dead are invisible but they are not absent. In this historical fiction workshop, we will imagine these restless dead who make a claim on our present lives. Guided by personal and collective memories, as well as myths, archival research, and family lore, this class will begin to name the shape of the absence that the dead leave behind. By brainstorming and through in-class writing prompts, we will find the story that they urge us to tell, understanding that history is never really the past and that what is present is infused with what came before. The goal will be to craft a compelling, well-researched scene—a moment in time that is both true and purely fiction. For one week, this class will work on developing a clearer understanding of what it means to be a historical fiction writer, someone who looks at that invisible terrain and sees it teeming with life. Under the influence of writers such as Toni Morrison, Han Kang, Miriam Toews, Hilary Mantel, E. L. Doctorow, and James Baldwin, we will discuss how to balance fact with fiction, and learn the most efficient and effective ways to research. This will be a workshop using your written scene as a way to gain the skills to develop your own historical fiction project.

Maaza Mengiste is a novelist, essayist, and photographer. She is the author of the novels Beneath the Lion’s Gaze and The Shadow King, which was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize and was a 2020 LA Times Book Prize Fiction finalist. The Shadow King was named best book of the year by the New York Times, NPR, Elle, Time, and more. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, and a Creative Capital Award, among other honors. Her work can be found in the New Yorker, New York Review of Books, Granta, the Guardian, the New York Times, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. Mengiste was the 2021-2022 Rona Jaffe Fellow at The New York Public Library’s Cullman Center.

Click here to apply. The deadline to apply for this seminar is Friday, April 25th. This seminar is not open to the public.