This is an in-person workshop that takes place at Inprint House
Endings: Landing the Emotional Gut Punch
Where does the power of a good ending come from? What makes an ending land with an emotional gut punch? What craft work leads to those final stirring moments on the page?
In Best Words, Best Order, Stephen Dobyns suggests that beginnings quietly foreshadow endings.
In this workshop, participants will consider the different traditions of endings: the grief and pity of Greek tragedy, the epiphany in James Joyce, and the frozen, open stillness often associated with Anton Chekhov. Through close readings of short stories and craft essays, and vibrant class discussion, participants will examine how the emotional impact of a story’s final lines is built sentence by sentence from the start, and through in-class exercises will experiment with different types of endings and revise their own work with these new craft lessons in mind.
Gemini Wahhaj is the author of the novel The Children of this Madness (7.13 Books, Fall 2023) and the short story collection Katy Family (Jackleg Press, Spring 2025). Her fiction has appeared in Granta, Third Coast, River Styx, Chicago Quarterly Review, and numerous other magazines. She has a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston, where she was a recipient of the Inprint/Michener Prize and the C. Glenn Cambor Fellowship.
