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Writers Workshops

Fiction/In-person 2526-306

Course #Fiction/In-person 2526-306
Mondays Starting February 2 6:00 pm–9:00 pm running 6 weeks
Cost: $315 Instructor: Charlotte Bellomy
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This is an in-person workshop that takes place at Inprint House

A House, A Shell, A Skin: Playing with Narrative Shape

In her essay “Beyond the Narrative Arc,” Jane Alison writes: “A house is a person’s shell, a skin, and should respond to how she lives.” In this class, we dismantle and rebuild our fiction’s support structure—that is, its narrative arc—to be a responsive house to our stories.

The standard narrative arc: (1) exposition/stasis, (2) rising action, (3) climax, (4) falling action, and (5) resolution, is ingrained in our basic storytelling training. In this class, we will begin a great story by disrupting our own stasis—that is, our adherence to this arc. We will begin by unlearning what we know about the Western storytelling model. We will investigate the narrative shapes already prominent in other storytelling cultures. Then, we will co-create and invent new “arcs,” charting them and using them to begin new work.

This is a generative course in which we will workshop one another’s new in-progress work, and exchange feedback to propel our writing still further. This course is designed for writers of fiction of any experience level; writers of memoir should also feel welcome.

About the Instructor

CHARLOTTE BELLOMY is a writer and artist based in Houston. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Houston where she was an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellow. Her work has been featured in the Gulf Coast, Poison Pen, and Boston Mayor’s Office Emerging Writers reading series. She is the recipient of the University of Houston Summer Fellowship in Research Excellence, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Summer Fellowship, and the Pulitzer Center Student Reporting Fellowship. She teaches writing workshops at studios such as Fern’s Gallop and has taught creative writing at the University of Houston.

By registering for an Inprint Writers Workshop you are agreeing to Inprint’s registration policies. If this workshop is full when you try to register, please sign up on the waiting list here so you receive priority registration the next time this class is offered. For details and a schedule of all the current workshop offerings, click here.

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