Stealing from the best: A fiction writing technique class
$340
In this six-week class, using 2024’s Best American Short Stories as our guide, we’ll explore a selection of contemporary fiction—deemed this year’s best—with an eye to steal from them. This year’s guest editor, Lauren Groff, writes that these stories “buzz with their own strange logic.” We’ll examine the inner workings of these stories to decipher some of that strange logic, but more pointedly, we’ll focus each week on one technique, discuss how the author is achieving a desired effect, and practice employing it in our own writing.
Each week, we’ll read two stories from the BASS collection, and in the latter half of class, we’ll work on an exercise designed to employ a new technique. This is not a class reserved for short story writers. Whether it’s generating suspense or introducing a point of view switch in the narrative—novelists, memoirists, and creative nonfiction writers can put these techniques to work. Expanding the techniques in your toolkit can open up new avenues in your current and future work.
While this isn’t a fiction workshop in which writers bring in and distribute works-in-progress, writers will be encouraged to share some of their in-class writing aloud.
Access Program
We want our writing classes and seminars to be accessible to everyone, regardless of income and background. We understand that our tuition structure can present obstacles for some people. Our Access Program offers writing class and seminar tuitions at a reduced rate. Most writing classes have at least one access spot available.
Please apply here for access rate tuition. Contact Susan Moore at susan@literary-arts.org if you have questions.
Liaison position
Every in-person class and seminar at Literary Arts has one liaison position. Liaisons perform specific duties for each class meeting. If you are a liaison for a class or seminar, the full amount of your tuition is covered by Literary Arts.
Apply here for the liaison position.
Joselyn Takacs
Joselyn Takacs is a writer and teacher based in Portland. She is the author of Pearce Oysters, a 2024 best book of summer pick by Elle and the New York Post. Pearce Oysters is a family drama set during the 2010 BP Oil Spill. She lived in New Orleans at the time of the spill, and in 2015, she received a grant to record the oral histories of Louisiana oyster farmers in the wake of the environmental disaster.
Her short fiction has appeared in Gulf Coast, Narrative, Tin House online, Harvard Review, The Rumpus, DIAGRAM and elsewhere. She contributes interviews and book reviews to the Los Angeles Review of Books. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Southern California and an MFA in Fiction from Johns Hopkins University.
