How do we draw on our realist setting to provoke and sustain the magical? How might the “real” seem prone, or even susceptible, to the “unreal”? In this intensive, we will focus on reading excerpts from work that probes these questions and write our own stories in which we aim to do the same. How does fabulation allow us to evoke the unexpected in our work? How can our use of the unexpected allow us to talk about larger issues? How do we tilt the natural world into the uncanny? After all, strange things happen every day. Throughout this generative workshop we will closely examine fabulist fictions by Karen Russell, Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, Manuel Gonzalez, Amelia Gray, Sofia Samatar, and Kristen Roupenian, and engage in exercises in which we create our own fabulist creations.
Theodora Bishop is the author of the novella On the Rocks (Texas Review Press), winner of a 2018 Next Generation Indie Book Award, and the short story chapbook Mother Tongues, winner of The Cupboard’s 2015 contest. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, Prairie Schooner, Arts & Letters, and Short Fiction (England), among other journals, anthologies, and exhibits. A Best New Poets and four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Theodora Bishop holds an MFA from the University of Alabama and is pursuing her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston. She is the recipient of an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellowship and has served as Poetry Editor for Gulf Coast and Fiction Editor for Big Fiction. Visit her website at theodorabishop.com.