Breaking Storytelling Norms with Symbiotic Forms: A Generative Workshop with Sarah Cypher

As an editor of 20 years, I see writers break through into “fresh” writing whenever they slyly engage with and trouble culturally received narratives. In this generative workshop, we’ll loosen up and get inspired by using other texts as access points for new drafts or as fresh angles for revision of works-in-progress. At all levels of our projects—genre, structure, and sentence—we’ll consider a variety of examples across fiction, creative nonfiction, and maybe a poem or two to explore how we can crack open forms that often have little to do with creative writing and find a starting point for our own stories, which can make inventive and critical use of their source material. We will read excerpts of work by Carmen Maria Machado, Isabella Hammad, NourbeSe Philip, and others.

Course Overview

Each session will include a discussion of a text (to be read at home), time for free-writing and optional sharing based on prompts. The goals are to gain a foothold in our writing project(s) and community beyond this class, and to share ways to disrupt conventional writing to find the forms best suited to our stories.

Course Outline

• Week 1: What is a parasitic form? Advance readings: Megan Milks’ short essay “Itchy Occupations: Toward a Parasitic Mode of Writing,” Milks’ short story, “My Father and I Were Bent Groundward,” and the first portion of Carmen Maria Machado’s “Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU.” We’ll get to know each other, discuss communication guidelines, and then dive into an introduction of the concept of parasitic writing that undoes harmful narratives (group reading of Milks’ essay). The second half of the session will be devoted to a few free-writing prompts and optional sharing. Assignment: designated students will create a prompt to share in Week 2 based on the advance reading.
• Week 2: Symbiotic forms and narrative exchange, a reciprocal mode of writing. Advance readings: More of Carmen Maria Machado’s “Especially Heinous” and her Paris Review interview about writing it (“Pleasure Principles,” Oct. 3, 2017), Liz Prato’s short essay about her brother’s sudden death, “Anatomy of an Autopsy Report,” and an excerpt of Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost. In the first half of the session, we’ll talk about taking risks to converse with “authoritative” narratives, and how our new approach can also deepen and renew our source material. The second half of the session will be devoted to a choice of the students’ free-writing prompts and optional sharing. Assignment: designated students will create a prompt to share in Week 3 based on the advance reading.
• Week 3: Angela Carter said, “I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the new wine makes the old bottles explode.” Our advance reading will be the first three short stories of The Bloody Chamber, which present a successive undermining and shifting of the terms of the traditional fairy tale toward a feminist mode. In the first half of the session, we’ll talk about how genre presents writers with a container for upending other social conventions, presenting limitless opportunities for subversive play. Students are encouraged to think about their own favorite examples from film and literature, and then we’ll dive into the generative second hour of the session and optional sharing. Assignment: designated students will create a prompt to share in Week 4 based on the advance reading.
• Week 4: Breaking open the sentence. If language influences thought, then sometimes our projects need us to become more limber at the line level. Advance reading: Sabrina Orah Mark’s short story “Wild Milk,” Kevin Young’s poem “Errata,” and excerpts of NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (excerpts of “Os” and of her essay on its writing, “Notanda”). We will work through the delights and mysteries of these texts together, talking about what surprises us, where our expectations wanted to take us versus where the writing called us to go, and how they refresh our experience of the subject matter or writing itself. We’ll end with one or two free writes that invite our sentences to crack open and bloom.

Capacity: 12