OSL Skills Course: ‘Fiction: A Practitioner’s Guide’

Groningen | 29 September, 6 October, 13 October (Harmony Building, Collaboratory A, 15:00-17:00) + 27 October, 3 November and 10 November (Harmony Building, room 1315:0036, 14:00-16:00).

Organizers: Dr Suzanne Manizza-Roszak and Dr David Ashford (University of Groningen)

Open to: PhDs and RMA students; OSL members have first access.

Credits: 5ECs. NB: Credits can only be awarded to humanities ReMA and PhD students from Dutch universities.

Registration THE COURSE IS FULLY BOOKED, please send an e-mail with your name, university and research school to osl@rug.nl. We will put you on our waiting list.

This course will introduce participants to the craft of fiction writing, enabling them to develop or to expand upon their own practice as creative writers. In the first half of the course, participants will study fiction in diachronic perspective from a variety of traditions, from the epistolary genre to semi-autobiographical writing. Over this series of seminars and creative writing workshops, participants will investigate how earlier forms of fiction-writing have been (and might be) adapted for the creation of contemporary fiction.

In the second half of the course, participants will read very recently published flash fiction and short stories with an eye toward specific questions of craft. Can the musicality of the line inform our fiction writing in the same way that it does our poetry? How is dialogue shaped by what we omit as well as what we include? Throughout the block, students will produce creative work of their own that draws on these readings and conversations. A final reflective meta-writing assignment will create space for student authors to consider how their thematic preoccupations and aesthetic choices connect to the reading list, to the writing of their peers, and to a larger body of both earlier and contemporary fiction.

The full programme will be available soon.