Fall Craft Intensive: Jonathan Escoffery

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Editor's Note

An Occasion For the Telling with Jonathan Escoffery
Thursday, November 10
3 – 6 PM PST  
Online

Energetic prose and unforgettable characters are often said to be the bedrocks of literary fiction. Fully fleshed out characters have implied histories and futures that never make it onto the page, so what dictates where and when a character’s problems and desires become worthy of dramatization? And what determines where that dramatization ends? And, finally, how do you know when your story is undercooked, over-inflated, or fully realized? In this generative intensive, we’ll use prompts to create story-worthy characters and explore how elements such as repetition, reversals and recognition, and suspense and tension-building can help us determine the contours of the worlds we create. Short readings will include works by authors such as Justin Torres, Tobias Wolff, and Jhumpa Lahiri. Participants will leave class with numerous tools for testing their current drafts’ “readiness,” as well as an outline for a new story.

 

BIO: Jonathan Escoffery is the author of the debut linked story collection, If I Survive You (MCD/ Farrar, Straus & Giroux, September 6, 2022). He is the recipient of the 2020 Plimpton Prize for Fiction, the 2020 ASME Award for Fiction, and a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Literature fellowship. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, Electric Literature, Zyzzyva, and AGNI, and has been anthologized in The Best American Magazine Writing 2020 and elsewhere. Jonathan is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and resides in Oakland, CA.