U11 EComp 4113


INSTRUCTOR

Saher Alam

smalam@wustl.edu

Saher Alam is the author of the novel The Groom to Have Been, which won the 2008 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. Her short fiction has appeared in the Best of Fiction Workshops Anthology 1999 as well as the literary journals Five Chapters and Literary Imagination, and the manuscript of her composite novel, The Amreekiad, was a finalist for the 2018 Dzanc Prize for Fiction. She has a Master of Arts (specializing in fiction) from the Creative Writing Program at Boston University, and she completed her undergraduate study at Princeton University. She has held fellowships from Emory University, the Howard Foundation (Brown University), and the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis. Saher has over 13 years of experience teaching fiction writing, most recently at the School of Continuing & Professional Studies at Washington University and, prior to that, at Saint Louis University. In 2020, she received the Marion Horstmann Online Teaching Innovation Grant. As an instructor, she designs experiences that emphasize the interdependent, iterative nature of reading and writing and explores how one practice feeds the other—and she cultivates workshops that aim to help writers realize their individual visions. 

https://saheralam.wixsite.com/saheralam


COURSE DESCRIPTION

The Onion. Last Lap. The Gathering. The Bear at the Door.  Stories often come in “shapes”—reliable structures that organize the action, details, characters, and therefore the drama. In Making Shapely Fiction, the writer Jerome Stern identifies the workings of various shapes that one often finds in narrative writing-and he gives them nifty names. You can see these shapes in operation in stories of different sizes and genres (from novels to short fiction, from tv to film), and it’s quite likely that you’ve already put them to use in your own writing. In this course, we will use narrative shapes not just to structure story material but also to find it, generate it, and revise it.  We will focus on literary microfiction (flash fiction), but you’re welcome to use shape-sense to experiment with other short forms (prose poems, micro-essays). Knowing the shapes of narrative can help you tune up your writing at every level, from overall structure down to an individual sentence. Some familiarity with the craft of fiction writing, as well as some workshopping experience, is recommended.


FORMAT

In-person workshops


SCHEDULE

Mandatory keynote speaker event and kickoff workshop Monday, 7/10/23, 6-9 pm.

Individual workshop sessions will be held thrice-weekly: Tue and Thu, 6-9 pm, and Sat, 1-4 pm.

Students are also expected to attend a minimum of 7.5 hours of the joint, public programming, inclusive of the final open mic on Sunday, July 30, 1-4 pm.