OCT 13– DEC 8

FICTION WRITING: SPECULATIVE AND CROSS-GENRE

A fiction writing workshop with Claire Light

Mondays, 7 – 9PM
October 27– December 15

Class size: minimum of 8, maximum of 12.
Location: SomArts Cultural Center, 934 Brannan Street, between 8th and 9th streets, SF.
Cost: $135 non-members, $115 for KSW members. To register, please send a check for the full amount to:
Kearny Street Workshop, 934 Brannan Street, San Francisco, CA 94103.
Please include your name, contact information (phone number and email address if possible), and which class you are registering for. For questions, please contact program manager Samantha Chanse at 415.503.0520 or info@kearnystreet.org.

Course Description:

In the United States in the past fifty years, “literary fiction” has become synonymous with fictional realism, and elements of the fabulous or speculative have been relegated to “genre fiction.” Yet the origins of both poetry and fiction lie in lyric and epic, forms full of images of gods, fantastical creatures, impossible events. More recently, the European novel and short story forms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries cut their teeth on gothic, fantastic, and adventure stories. Yet, in our century, fiction has become less about telling stories that symbolize human struggles, and more about retelling and interpreting existing stories.

In this context, Asian American writers and marginalized writers concern ourselves primarily with the survival of our community stories — with expanding literary realism to include us. Yet the development of an Asian American voice, of a community voice, also requires us to develop a vocabulary of our own fairy tales, symbols, and wonders of the imagination. Sometimes, it is easier to get at our reality — to make it fresh and vivid and resonant — through unreality or fantasy. Sometimes, rather than asking “Why?” we need to ask “What if?”

This course seeks to acquaint — or reacquaint — readers and writers of our community and beyond with the ideas, traditions and tools of speculative fiction: magic realism, fantasy, science fiction, and horror. At the same time, the course will introduce beginners — and refresh more advanced writers — to basic craft elements of fiction writing. The inquiry of our writing throughout these eight weeks will be: “What if?” And to answer that, anything goes.

Students will read and discuss short stories and novel excerpts from marginalized and mainstream writers using speculative elements, as well as analytical texts. Students will write in-class exercises and one take-home assignment per week. And at the end of the course each student will turn in the first draft of a longer writing project for the class to workshop.

About the Instructor:

Claire Light recently stepped down as Kearny Street Workshop's program manager to pursue her Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing (fiction) at San Francisco State University. She received her Bachelor's degree in creative writing from the University of Arizona in 1992 and subsequently studied contemporary history and cultural studies at Humboldt University of Berlin. She is also a graduate of the Clarion West Writer's Workshop, an intensive workshop/retreat for writers of speculative fiction. She is a co-founder and the literary editor of HYPHEN Magazine and has had her stories and articles published in various online and print zines and magazines, as well as in the chapbooks TOO MIXED UP and WRITINGS FROM THE LONG TABLE II.

Wednesday, November 12

RULES: Poetry Reading Featuring Dennis Somera and Tsering Wangmo Dhompa

Co-presented with the San Francisco Arts Commission Chinatown Community Arts Program

Chinese Culture Center
750 Kearny Street, between Clay and Washington (3rd Floor of Holiday Inn Building), San Francisco
Doors open 6pm; reading ends at 8pm. Light refreshments will be served.
Free and open to the public.

About the Artists:

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa grew up in the Tibetan communities in India and Nepal. She received her MA from University of Massachussetts and her MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. Tsering is the author of two chapbooks, In Writing the Names, (A.bacus, Potes & Poets Press) and Recurring Gestures (Tangram Press). Her work has appeared in the Atlanta Review, Boston Review, Mid American Review, 26, Zyzzyva and others. Tsering lives in San Francisco.

Dennis M. Somera writes his way out of his head into the rest of his body, hoping his ideas, concepts, words, text, writing find collaborators in the audience, of course, and artists of every discipline to further extend him into the world. He is currently fleshing out as many ideas as possible as an MFA candidate in poetry at Mills College in Oakland.