In this 6-week fiction workshop with award-winning writer Mary Margaret Alvarado, students will engage in the grave and happy labor of dreaming other worlds. We will follow our most vivid, feral visions, and then do the craftwork of making those live.
Perhaps you sense an end. Perhaps certain possible resolutions to that end (Elon Musk live streaming in your veins e.g.) are unsatisfactory to you, a person of care and vision who delights in the real (actual streams, the look of a field of thistles at dusk, coffee, her smell). We are done with the either/ors (we’re doomed/everyone keep shopping). We are here for the and/ands, the visions, the sentences so exquisite they kill us, happily. Having dispensed with optimism, we will commit to the discipline of hope.
Additional details:
This course is appropriate for writers of various experience levels who have some background in story writing and love reading, exploring ideas, and learning in community.
Tuition includes high-quality photocopies of course materials.
Good writers are good (and various) readers first. Students will have weekly readings and prompts. Class will be part seminar, part workshop, with occasional correspondence by mail, and a few drawing prompts. We will write from hopeful experiments, from our watersheds, from ways so old their new. We will write fiction of ideas, which is not fiction from a thesis.
About the Instructor:
Mary Margaret Alvarado is the author of Hey Folly (Dos Madres), a book of poems; and American Weather (forthcoming from NewLights press), a book-length essay on gun violence in collaboration with the artist Corie Cole. Her most recent work is a speculative novel, Love Is an Emergency, that is represented by Annie DeWitt. Mia's writing has been published in VQR, Outside, The Boston Review, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere, and has thrice been named notable in The Best American series, most recently for "Is The First Technological Question the Question of Nipples?" Mia founded a tiny playschool, and has taught at Colorado College, the University of Colorado, New York's St. Michael's Academy, and Cincinnati's Seven Hills School. She paints murals, mothers, and farms her yard in Colorado.