Class Description

The Horror!! 2: The Horror Within: Horror and surrealism are not just for genre writers! They’re great tools for any writer who wants to turn up the vibes of their prose and have a powerful and visceral impact on their readers. This round we’ll be focusing on the horror within, where the locus of horror is the character’s own mind. Over the course of these 4 weeks, we’ll read novel excerpts and short stories that embrace psychological horror. 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 manifest psychological horror, and we’ll use our observations as a launching point for our own work. I’ll be providing prompts to generate new material, feedback to guide you as you select one of your pieces to expand out into a short story or novel excerpt. All sessions will be recorded and the recording made available to all registered participants. 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.