An Eye for the Weird with Sarah Gerkensmeyer

Instructor: Sarah Gerkensmeyer

How can the strange, the uncanny, and the unordinary help give us more direct access to our characters’ ordinary, human experiences? This class will explore how some “weird” writers like myself work with a careful balance of the ordinary and the unordinary, the naturalistic and the fantastic in their fiction. We will discuss overt examples of weird writing, such as magical realism, fabulism, and fairy tales. And we will also explore more subtle approaches, such as conducting creative research about unknown topics and discovering a sense of mystery about topics that you are already familiar with. Participants should be both inspired and challenged to discover how injecting a sense of the unknown and the off-kilter—whether to a large degree or only in small doses—might open up the characters in their own writing.