Reading is arguably the most crucial practice for any serious writer. In this course, you will “reverse engineer” acclaimed short stories to determine how and why they work. You will use these stories as lenses into key aspects of effective fiction (dialogue, plotting, voice, character, etc.) The course will help you to identify the key features of various distinctive prose styles, and you will participate in guided writing exercises inspired by those styles.
Winter term:
Wednesdays, Feb. 11 to March 25 (6 weeks, no class March 4) 6:30 – 8 p.m. $135 (+ HST)
In this interview, we chat with Sarah Bernstein about contemplation, finding time for writing, capturing the rush of language, and so much more.
Sarah Bernstein is the author of two novels, The Coming Bad Days and Study for Obedience, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She is from Montreal and lives in the Scottish Highlands.
Books and stories mentioned in this episode:
Hysteric; Whore – Nelly Arcan
Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin
The Moonstone; The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
“A Mown Lawn” – Lydia Davis
Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life – Ruth Franklin
The Book of Questions – Edmond Jabès
The Haunting of Hill House; “The Lottery”; The Sundial; We Have Always Lived in the Castle – Shirley Jackson
The Melancholy of Resistance – László Krasznahorkai
The Place of Shells – Mai Ishizawa
In the Wake: On Blackness and Being – Christina Sharpe
In this interview, we chat with Fawn Parker about showing the reader around the room, finding the right tense, protecting your writing time, and so much more.
Fawn Parker is the author of five books including novels What We Both Know (M&S), nominated for the Giller Prize and Hi, It’s Me (M&S), nominated for the Writer’s Trust Atwood Gibson Prize, and the poetry collection Soft Inheritance, which was awarded the JM Abraham Atlantic Book Award and the Fiddlehead Poetry Book Prize. Her work has been published in The Walrus, Hazlitt, Literary Review of Canada, and elsewhere. Fawn is a PhD candidate at the University of New Brunswick and the Poet Laureate of Fredericton.
Books and stories mentioned in this episode:
The Edible Woman – Margaret Atwood
The Mountain and the Valley – Ernest Buckler
Libra – Don DeLillo
The Guest – Emma Cline
Attack of the Copula Spiders and Other Essays on Writing – Douglas Glover
In this interview, we chat with Rod Moody-Corbett about tonal dissonance, sponging up influences, writing from memory, and so much more.
Rod Moody-Corbett is an award-winning writer from Newfoundland. His writing has appeared in Socrates on the Beach, The Drift, The Paris Review Daily, and Fiddlehead, among other publications. He is the recipient of the 2022 Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Story, a Newfoundland and Labrador Arts and Letters Award for Short Fiction, the University of Calgary’s Kaleidoscope Prize, and the CBC Canada Writes Short Story Prize (People’s Choice Award). He serves as a contributing editor for Canadian Notes and Queries.
Books mentioned in this episode:
Experience – Martin Amis
Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World; The Hundred Brothers; The Verificationist – Donald Antrim
Last Evenings on Earth – Roberto Bolaño
Save the Cat! Writes a Novel – Jessica Brody
My Education – Susan Choi
Underworld – Don DeLillo
Notes from Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Last Samurai – Helen DeWitt
Erasure – Percival Everett
Bad Behavior; Because They Wanted To; Don’t Cry – Mary Gaitskill
A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me; Jernigan – David Gates
Airships – Barry Hannah
The Road Through the Wall – Shirley Jackson
Get Shorty; Rum Punch – Elmore Leonard
Last Resort – Andrew Lipstein
The Sentence is a Lonely Place – Garielle Lutz
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
The Ice Storm – Rick Moody
Lectures on Literature – Vladimir Nabokov
A House for Mr. Biswas – V. S. Naipaul
Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas; Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family – Nicholas Pileggi
Monkey Beach – Eden Robinson
The Life of the Mind – Christine Smallwood
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman – Laurence Sterne
Fredericton’s monthly reading series, ‘The Catch-Up,’ curated and hosted by acclaimed writer Fawn Parker, returns with readings by local authors Alison Taylor, Chuck Bowie & Mike Thorn!
The reading will take place here at the bookshop on Sunday, January 26th, 2025, @ 3pm.
Alison Taylor (they/them) is a writer, editor, and filmmaker based in Fredericton. Taylor’s short stories have appeared in various journals, and their debut novel Aftershock, published by HarperCollins Canada, received the Atlantic Book Awards John and Margaret Savage First Book Award (Fiction), and was shortlisted for the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. They received the 2024 Douglas Adams Richards Prize for Fiction for their work-in-progress, Confessions of a Binge Drinker (working title). They have edited a hundred-plus hours of television and many award-winning short films and music videos, and their own experimental films have screened at festivals internationally. They currently work in the editorial department at Goose Lane Editions and as a freelance editor of both books and film and video, and are working to complete a draft while two cats yell at them and a 70-pound boxer whines in their face.
Mike Thorn is a SSHRC-funded doctoral candidate in the Department of English (Creative Writing) at the University of New Brunswick. He is the author of Shelter for the Damned, Darkest Hours, and Peel Back and See. His writing has appeared in anthologies, magazines, and podcasts, including NoSleep, Vastarien, In Review Online, and American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper. He co-hosts Craftwork, a writing-themed podcast, with Miriam Richer. Website: mikethornwrites.com.
Chuck Bowie is both a writer and an author, with thirteen books/novels published and one just underway. While he enjoys writing mysteries: Suspense-Thrillers and Cozy Mysteries, he also writes short stories. All of his books are well-reviewed, and he has sat on the boards of the Writers’ Federation of NB, The Writers’ Union of Canada, is a Fellow of the Kingsbrae International Residency for the Arts, as well as being acknowledged as a member of the Miramichi Literary Trail. His thriller series chronicles the adventures of Donovan, an international thief for hire, while his cozy series (written as Alexa Bowie) follows the adventures of the owner of an arts centre as Emma solves the crimes that swirl around her centre: The Old Manse. http://www.chuckbowie.ca
Daisy Miller, by Henry James (1879) A Room with a View, by E. M. Forster (1908) Pan’s Garden: A Volume of Nature Stories, by Algernon Blackwood (1912) The Custom of the Country, by Edith Wharton (1913) Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston (1937) Cassandra at the Wedding, by Dorothy Baker (1962) Another World, by Pat Barker (1998) Heartbreaker, by Maryse Meijer (2016) Babysitter, by Joyce Carol Oates (2022) The Guest, by Emma Cline (2023)
ADDITIONAL STANDOUT READS
We Are Here to Hurt Each Other, by Paula D. Ashe (2022) This Mortal Coil, by Cynthia Asquith (1947) The Space of Literature, by Maurice Blanchot (1955) The Writing of the Disaster, by Maurice Blanchot (1980) Dandelion Wine, by Ray Bradbury (1957) Wieland; or, The Transformation: An American Tale, by Charles Brockden Brown (1798) Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker, by Charles Brockden Brown (1799) The Sublime and the Beautiful, by Edmund Burke (1757) The Daughters of Block Island, by Christa Carmen (2023) Gothic Metaphysics: From Alchemy to the Anthropocene, by Jodey Castricano (2021) The King in Yellow, by Robert W. Chambers (1895) Don’t Look Now, by Daphne du Maurier (1971) Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, by Ruth Franklin (2016) Sea, Swallow Me and Other Stories, by Craig Laurance Gidney (2008) Twice-Told Tales, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1837) The Marble Faun, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1860) The Talented Mr. Ripley, by Patricia Highsmith (1955) The Woman in Black, by Susan Hill (1983) The Witchcraft of Salem Village, by Shirley Jackson (1956) Let Me Tell You, by Shirley Jackson [edited by Laurence Hyman & Sarah Hyman DeWitt] (2015) Burn Man: Selected Stories, by Mark Anthony Jarman (2023) Man and His Symbols, edited by C. G. Jung & M.-L von Franz (1964) Uzumaki, by Junji Ito (2013) The Red Tree, by Caitlín R. Kiernan (2009) The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative, by Thomas King (2003) Something Like an Autobiography, by Akira Kurosawa (1981) What Are You, by Lindsay Lerman (2022) Existence and Existents, by Emmanuel Levinas (1947) Peyton Place, by Grace Metalious (1956) Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, by Lorrie Moore (1994) Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, by Toni Morrison (1992) Devil in a Blue Dress, by Walter Mosley (1990) Black Water, by Joyce Carol Oates (1992) New England’s Gothic Literature, by Faye Ringel (1995) The Gothic Literature and History of New England, by Faye Ringel (2022) The Devil’s Candy: The Anatomy of a Hollywood Fiasco, by Julie Salamon (1991) The Last Man, by Mary Shelley (1826) The Craft of Writing, by William Sloane (1979) Lost Boy Lost Girl, by Peter Straub (2003) The Door, by Magda Szabó (1987) The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, by Tzvetan Todorov (1970) A Fatal Inversion, by Barbara Vine (1987) The Color Purple, by Alice Walker (1982) Star-Begotten, by H. G. Wells (1937) Ghosts, by Edith Wharton (1937) The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe (1987) Strange Seed, by T. M. Wright (1978)
Mike Thorn 