Fiction Fiction Workshop: Art and Activism: Contemporary Black Writers

Catalog description

Toni Morrison once wrote, “If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.” She referred to the interior life of her ancestors as being a large charge that she faced as an author; the characters she created—in part from pictures, in part from the act of imagination—yielded “a kind of truth.” We are experiencing a new age of Black artists and activists, charging the world to heed their truths; as writers, we will delve into the fullness of their experiences. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah brings magical realism to the doorstep of our daily lives; Edward P. Jones establishes setting as character, garnering comparisons to James Joyce; Ta- Nehisi Coates posits large questions about writing and Black identity, while Jocelyn Nicole Johnson uses satire to address themes of class and culture; Danielle Evans, Amina Gautier, and Jamel Brinkley write in a charged realist tradition that is right in everybody’s backyard. Readings will include essays on craft and technique, as well as short stories and memoir. This workshop will also have, at its heart, the discussion of student manuscripts and the development of constructive criticism. Talking about race, talking about craft, and talking about our own fiction should occur in an environment where everyone feels valued and supported. The road may be bumpy at times—but how else to get to that truth that Toni Morrison so prized? Fiction Workshop: Short-Story Mechanics