Flannery O’Connor once said about her own writing, “My subject in fiction is the action of grace in a territory held largely by the devil.”  In writing our own stories, we will negotiate this space between beauty and mischief as we determine what it is exactly that we like about a given writer’s work, and how we can lift what we like and incorporate it into our own writing.

The stories we read in this course will be models and guides, but the primary focus will be on developing our own sense of craft, on learning how to make “the right choice” in the middle of a story or a sentence, and on investigating the various approaches we have at our disposal—retrospective narration and narrative distance, limited vs. omniscient point of view, dialogue, authorial intrusions, humor, etc. My hope is that by working together we build a constructive and creative environment that encourages risk-taking, ambition, and self-discovery.