This course will engage with horror literature’s legacies and unique capacities for catharsis, allegory, and personal expression. We will discuss what scares us and investigate the psychology of fear within the context of fiction, digging into the nuts-and-bolts processes of generating fear in the reader. We will explore the wide range of horror’s subgenres and aesthetic possibilities, looking at tropes, traditions, and metaphors as opportunities for creative openings rather than restrictions. We will discuss the importance of atmosphere, point-of-view, and convincing characterization. Drawing on insights and fiction by some of horror literature’s most important and exciting figures, we will dive into the genre with a focus on craft and technique.
Date: Tuesdays, Oct. 29 – Dec. 3 Time: 7-9 p.m. Location: Community Room (Charlotte Street Arts Centre) Length: Six week Cost: $15 Max. class size: 12
In this interview, we chat with Mark Anthony Jarman about hockey fiction, deadwood words, finding stories in newspaper clippings, and so much more.
Mark Anthony Jarman is the author of Touch Anywhere to Begin, Czech Techno, Knife Party at the Hotel Europa, My White Planet, 19 Knives, New Orleans Is Sinking, Dancing Nightly in the Tavern, and the travel book Ireland’s Eye. Burn Man, published in 2023 by Biblioasis, was an Editors Choice with the New York Times. He was an acquisitions editor for Oberon Press, and introduced many new writers through the Coming Attractions series. He is also the editor of Best Canadian Stories 2023. His novel Salvage King Ya! is on Amazon.ca’s list of 50 Essential Canadian Books and is the number one book on Amazon’s list of best hockey fiction. Widely published in Canada, the US, Europe, and Asia, Jarman is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a Yaddo fellow, has taught at the University of Victoria, the Banff Centre for the Arts, and the University of New Brunswick. He is also co-editor of the literary journal CAMEL.
Book and poems mentioned in this episode:
Flowers of Evil – Charles Baudelaire
Study for Obedience – Sarah Bernstein
Cathedral – Raymond Carver
The Stories of John Cheever – John Cheever
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The U.S.A. Trilogy – Jon Dos Passos
Literary Theory: An Introduction – Terry Eagleton
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” – T. S. Eliot
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Attack of the Copula Spiders: Essays on Writing – Douglas Glover
The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
Dubliners; Ulysses – James Joyce
The Incognito Lounge and Other Poems; Jesus’ Son; Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond – Denis Johnson
On the Road – Jack Kerouac
Panama – Thomas McGuane
Dance of the Happy Shades – Alice Munro
Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle; Lolita; Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov
In this interview, Craig Laurance Gidney talks about genre mashups, writing workshops, telling Mom which of your stories to avoid, and so much more.
Craig Laurance Gidney (he/him/his) is the author of Sea, Swallow Me & Other Stories; Skin Deep Magic: Stories; Bereft (a YA novella); and A Spectral Hue (a novel). He has been a Lambda Literary Finalist three times, was a Carl Brandon Parallax Award Finalist, and won the inaugural Joseph S. Pulver Sr. Award for Weird Fiction. The Nectar of Nightmares is his most recent collection. He lives in Washington, D.C.
Books and stories mentioned in this episode:
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
Giovanni’s Room; Go Tell It on the Mountain; If Beale Street Could Talk – James Baldwin
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell; Piranesi – Susanna Clarke
Dhalgren – Samuel R. Delany
The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen
The Uncanny – Sigmund Freud
A Ring of Endless Light; A Wrinkle in Time – Madeleine L’Engle
Black Light – Elizabeth Hand
The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus – Joel Chandler Harris
“The Golden Pot”; “The Sandman” – E. T. A. Hoffmann
Finnegan’s Wake – James Joyce
“Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk” – Franz Kafka
Delirium’s Mistress – Tanith Lee
“The Outsider”; “The Rats in the Walls” – H.P. Lovecraft
In this interview, Lindsay Lerman talks about philosophy, procedural knowledge, writing dialogue, and so much more.
Lindsay Lerman is a writer and translator. Her first book, I’m From Nowhere, was published in 2019. Her second book, What Are You, was published in 2022. Her first translation was published in 2023. She holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. She is working on a novel, a philosophy manuscript, and here and there, some screenplays. She lives in Berlin.
Books mentioned in this episode:
Gothic Metaphysics: From Alchemy to the Anthropocene – Jodey Castricano
James and the Giant Peach; The BFG; Matilda – Roald Dahl
William Ping is a novelist and journalist, born and raised in St. John’s. His debut novel Hollow Bamboo was published by HarperCollins in 2023 and was shortlisted for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, the BMO Winterset Award, and the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award as well as being longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. He has previously been published in ‘Us, Now,’ Hard Ticket and Riddle Fence. William is also known for his contributions to CBC News, where he can most often be heard reading the news.
Books mentioned in this episode:
Waiting for Godot; Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable – Samuel Beckett
Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
Death on the Ice: The Great Newfoundland Sealing Disaster of 1914 – Cassie Brown and Harold Horwood
The King in Yellow – Robert W. Chambers
The Wapshot Chronicle – John Cheever
Trust Exercise – Susan Choi
A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
Less Than Zero; American Psycho; Imperial Bedrooms – Bret Easton Ellis
The Beautiful and Damned; The Great Gatsby; Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Open – Lisa Moore
Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov
Animal Farm – George Orwell
Consider This: Moments in My Writing Life After Which Everything Was Different – Chuck Palahniuk
In this interview, Randy Nikkel Schroeder talks about noir, character possession, Biblical frisson, and so much more. Listen here.
Randy Nikkel Schroeder is the author of Arctic Smoke (NeWest), Crooked Timber: Seven Suburban Faerie Tales (Green Magpie), and over fifty published short stories. In his spare time, he is professor of English, Languages, and Cultures at Mount Royal University.
Books mentioned in this episode:
Queenpin; The Turnout; You Will Know Me – Megan Abbott
Poetics – Aristotle
Book of Greek Myths – Ingri d’Aulaire & Edgar Parin d’Aulaire
Save the Cat! Writes a Novel – Jessica Brody
Dave Robicheaux novels – James Lee Burke
The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know – Shawn Coyne
Neuromancer – William Gibson
Attack of the Copula Spiders and Other Essays on Writing – Douglas Glover
Red Dragon – Thomas Harris
Winter’s Tale – Mark Helprin
The Lottery and Other Stories – Shirley Jackson
Rose Madder – Stephen King
Mystic River – Dennis Lehane
The Magician’s Nephew – C. S. Lewis
Dialogue: The Art of Verbal Action for Page, Stage, and Screen – Robert McKee
Consider This: Moments in My Writing Life After Which Everything Was Different – Chuck Palahniuk
Mike Thorn 