Class Description

Horror and surrealism are not just for genre writers! They’re great tools for writers of literary realism too. Some scenes just benefit from horror vibes, like when you want to capture a character’s fear or uncertainty or disgust or awe, when you’d like an uncanny mood, a sinister atmosphere, a positively terrifying exchange of dialogue, etc. Also, writing horror is super fun. Over the course of these 4 weeks, we’ll read novel excerpts and short stories that embrace horror vibes. These will largely come from works of literary realism (I guarantee you’ll be surprised by some of my choices), though we’ll blend in some material from the horror genre too. We’ll examine how these writers created horror vibes, and we’ll use our observations as a launching point for our own work. I’ll be providing prompts to generate new material and feedback to guide you as you select one of your pieces to expand out into a short story or novel excerpt. Instructor bio: Katie M. Flynn is a writer, editor, and educator based in San Francisco. Her writing has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Tin House, and Tor.com, among other publications. She’s been awarded Colorado Review’s Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction and the Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing. Her first novel, The Companions, came out in March 2020, and opens during a prolonged quarantine where the living can’t go out, but the dead can come in as companions. Her interlinked collection of short stories, Island Rule, is out now from Gallery Books.