Week Four in Review

Our Week four instructor, Sarah Pinsker, brought energy to a week traditionally considered to be one of the toughest, with the students’ energy levels crashing and stories taking strange turns. But strange is where fiction gets good, and Sarah encouraged the students to lean into the weird. A singer and songwriter known for her nontraditional story structures and turning music into prose, Sarah showed the students how to adapt musicality into their fiction, from rhythm and motifs to resonance. The best music writing evokes the experience of being moved by a song, while leaving room for the reader to imagine their favorite artist or band—a balancing act of the universal and the specific. Two of the students interviewed her during her Tuesday reading, taking questions from their cohort and the live audience.

On Thursday afternoon, the students received a surprise visit from editor and literary agent, Arley Sorg, and talked query letters, making connections in the industry, and the best path to establishing a successful writing career: writing (well) and submitting. A satisfying story is all about resonance: establishing the promises in the opening of a piece and fulfilling them by the end. By that token, this toughest of weeks has been satisfying indeed.

This week in the Flash Fiction Groups, the program Mastermind Yvette Lisa Ndlovu delved into strategies for creating characters in flash fiction by borrowing characterization techniques used in fairy tales. Her exercise challenged writers to create a list of brief, specific, unique traits for their characters to be drawn on for their stories.

In the Write-a-thon, we had a Watch Party for Ana Hurtado’s class on Magical Realism and continued on in a number of writing sessions and sprints throughout the week.