Writing Workshops

Work/Play: Generative Exercises on Day Jobs and Nightlife with Jamie Quatro

$175

2 Sessions

Out of stock

Saturday & Sunday 1:00 pm EDT - 4:00 pm EDT February 14 to February 15, 2026

The Center for Fiction

This writing workshop is now sold out. Please email [email protected] to join the waitlist—and become a member for early access to future programming.

As a fiction instructor, I’ve noticed that student stories centered on jobs are rare. Say you’ve worked as a scent evaluator for a soap manufacturer, or as a bike catcher at an Ironman triathlon, or as a paid companion to an aging Hollywood director (all jobs I’ve held at one point): If you have intimate knowledge of a profession, we want to hear about it! There is nothing more compelling than someone who knows what they’re talking about giving us the nitty-gritty details. On the flipside, stories set during the off-hours seem to be more common—but often, characters aren’t really doing anything specific with their leisure time.

In this workshop, I’ll offer WORK prompts that students can use to begin drafting stories, essays, or poems centered on bizarre jobs, jobs-of-the-future, work avoidance, and unemployment/job-hunting. I’ll also present PLAY prompts that give students the chance to explore components of play along a spectrum, from vertigo (think skydiving and VR games) to mimicry (sexual role play, LARPing) to games of chance (card games, dice-rolling games) and competition (chess, any competitive sport). Across both days, we will consider how the seemingly simple binary between work and play is in fact a shifting, amorphous, and perhaps non-existent divide, and how situating our work at the locus of an illusory binary can create layers of meaning and intensity.

Course Outline: On day one, prompts will center on work—bizarre jobs, work avoidance, unemployment, job-hunting, jobs-of-the-future. On day two, our focus will shift to play—childhood games, sports, sexual role-play, costumes, travel plans gone right, or gone terribly wrong.

At the beginning of each session, to get our wheels turning, I will hand out a poem or story excerpt, and we will read it aloud together. I’ll then hand out the prompts, and we will spend the next 45 minutes or so drafting in silence. We will take a short break and reconvene. For the remainder of the workshop, participants will read their nascent drafts aloud and receive feedback from the instructor and other participants. This will be “on-the-fly,” gut-level response (valuable in its own right!), no advance reading or preparation required.

Teaching Style: My teaching style is supportive, collaborative, encouraging, and participatory. Students of all levels of experience can expect to be encouraged in their work, and to receive useful, gut-level feedback. The goal is for students to come away from the weekend with two or three “seeds” ready to be developed into full-length stories, essays, or novels.

Level: Intermediate

This course is held in person at The Center for Fiction.

Led by

Jamie Quatro

Jamie Quatro

Jamie Quatro is the New York Times Notable author of I Want to Show You More, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, and Fire Sermon, a Book of the Year for the Economist, San Francisco Chronicle, LitHub, Bloomberg, and the Times Literary Supplement. Her latest novel, Two-Step Devil, is the winner of the 2024 Willie Morris Award for Southern Writing. It has also been named a New York Times Editor’s Choice, a 2025 ALA Notable Book, and a Best Book of 2024 by the Paris Review and the Atlanta Journal Constitution. A new story collection is forthcoming from Grove Press. Quatro teaches in the Sewanee MFA program and lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Photo Credit: Stephen Alvarez

About this series

Writing Workshops

We strive to make our classes the most inviting and rewarding available, offering an intimate environment to study with award-winning, world-class writers. Each class is specially designed by the instructor, so whether you’re a fledgling writer or an MFA graduate polishing your novel, you’ll find a perfect fit here.

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