This year, Common Ground Teaching Fellows have the option of three exciting seminars. You will be asked to rank your seminar in order of preference. Please note that while every effort will be made to place you in your first or second choice seminar, space constraints mean we cannot guarantee you your preferred options. 

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Stories
Dr. Hayan Charara

What makes for a good short story? This question is best answered by distinguishing short stories from novels, the other dominant fiction form. Novelists have hundreds of pages to build worlds and develop elaborate character trajectories (from cradle to grave over several generations, should they so choose). If the extravagant scope and detail novels accommodate forms part of their appeal, then the allure of short stories lies in their concentrated immediacy.

It is generally true that an effective short story does two things: (1) it tells of something that happens to someone; and (2) it demonstrates a deliberate, congruous relationship between all its elements. In a short story, the “something that happens” impacts a person and alters them in a significant way. Given space constraints, this usually gets focused down to a single event. Over the several hundred pages of a novel, many things can happen to a character, not all of which will impact them significantly or even at all. 

And whereas a novel has enough room for loose connections and digressions, everything in a short story is usually bound together tightly. The best short stories demonstrate a harmonious and carefully-wrought relationship between their various elements, suggesting their writers paid attention to what we’ll call “economy”— they have done the most possible with the very little available to them.

In this seminar, you will read and discuss several highly-regarded short stories and, over the course of the week, write one of your own.  

Text: 
40 Short Stories: A Portable Anthology, edited by Beverly Lawn (any edition is okay)