Here's the flyer for the advanced fiction workshop I'm teaching at my u. this spring semester:
“A group of linked narratives can create an effect you can’t get from a novel or from one story alone. It’s like a series of snapshots taken over time. Part of the pleasure is turning to them again and again. The interest lies in what has happened in the interstices.” --Michael Chabon
“Linked” short story collections are a perennially popular genre for first-book publication, since they allow the beginning writer to assemble early short compositions into an impressionist whole. You could make the argument that a set of linked short stories, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, midwifed the movement that came to be known as American modernism; the linked story collection has thrived ever since. Most major authors have published at least one work of linked stories, including Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Carlos Fuentes, Munro, John Updike, John Cheever, Louise Erdrich, Robert Olen Butler, and a surprising number of others.
In this advanced creative writing workshop, students will study seven works published as linked narratives or “novels told in stories” and write four linked short stories of their own, using a balance of variables and constants within a short story sequence such as:
-a unifying perspective or narrator,
-a unifying locale or setting, with multiple perspectives
-a common object over various time periods
-multiple narrators with a common bond
-a repeated form, such as letters, documents, official statements, oral histories
-a singular era or event, narrated from various perspectives.
In addition to the collections below, students will read and report on one other linked short story collection of their own choosing, and compose one 3-minute narrative silent film or photo-essay illustrating a particular perspective of “unity” that interests them.
Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (online, public domain)
Alan Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner ISBN-13: 978-0307389640
Donald Ray Pollock, Knockemstiff ISBN-13: 9780767928304
Patricia Highsmith, Little Tales of Misogyny ISBN 0-393-32337-4
Robert Olen Butler, A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain ISBN-13: 9780140176643
Julie Hecht, Do the Windows Open? ISBN-13: 9780140271454
Ursula LeGuin, Changing Planes ISBN-13: 9780151009718
Note: The list is not meant to be offered as models of "correctness;" the list is meant to be random. The only ones of these I've read so far are Winesburg and Good Scent. The rest I chose because I want to read them. So please don't be spammin' me w/ yr fascist aesthetic emails about what should be on the list because of its superiority, etc., plz.
