In this workshop, we will explore various ways to unify a short story collection, focusing on character development, imagistic patterns, and narrative tensions both within each story and between stories. Linked story collections depend on parallels and contrasts, repetitions and surprises to create both unity and diversity. Often such collections combine the sustained skill of a novel along with the contained intensity of a short story. The short stories we will read for this class often work as standalone stories but also develop characters, places, and motifs that extend beyond a single story, thus deepening and complicating a reader’s sense of narrative. Linked stories are, in some ways, a hybrid form. In essence, we will ask: What is at stake in this particular story? How does this story complicate or challenge the stories that come before and after? What motifs are prominent and repeated? How is time used? 

For this workshop, we will read four to five stories (each) from two linked story collections. We will engage in extensive writing, focusing on exercises designed as catalysts for two new stories that can add to your current or future collection. We will “workshop” at least one of these exercises and conference on the second. The class does not require that you have begun your linked story collection, but it does require that you have thought intently about the recurring characters and the potential architecture (narrative arc) of a collection. As in all writing, we will take risks and surprise ourselves. 

In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our week.