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Fiction Workshop: Recognition and Surprise with Lan Samantha Chang
Thursday, May 19, 2022 @ 10:00 am
In this workshop, we will explore how to create the most consequential moments in stories and novels: those crucial passages of recognition and surprise when truths change and when a reader’s sense of time is altered. At such moments, which are composed of both familiarity and strangeness, the world of the story is transformed. We’ll look at work by James Joyce, Deborah Eisenberg, Jamaica Kincaid, Lesley Arimah, Sally Rooney, and others, to identify elements of transformation and how they are deployed. We’ll explore how writers lead up to such moments and how stories change in their aftermath. We’ll write our own consequential moments and use them to build stories. This workshop will include some reading and discussion, some generative work, some feedback, and some brainstorming about the development of narratives that include both recognition and surprise.
Lan Samantha Chang is the award-winning author of the collection Hunger and the novels The Family Chao, Inheritance and All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost. A recent Berlin Prize Fellow, she also has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Chang is the first Asian American and the first female director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She lives in Iowa City.
Scholarships Available for MDC Students
Miami Book Fair is offering two (2) full-tuition scholarships for MDC students interested in attending a Miami Writers Institute creative writing workshop in any genre. Applicants must be currently-enrolled, (full time or part time) degree-seeking Miami Dade College students with a demonstrated financial need.
To Apply for a Scholarship:
Please send an email to Marci Cancio-Bello, Miami Book Fair programs coordinator at mcanciob@mdc.edu by Monday, May 9 at 11:59 p.m. EST. The message must include your contact information, the title of the workshop you’d like to take, a short statement of financial need, your MDC class schedule, and a writing sample. First-time writers who lack a writing sample should submit a statement explaining their interest in the workshop.
