Building Interiority in Characters: Writing Memory with Karen E. Bender, a Zoom Seminar on Wednesday, January 10th, 2024
Live Seminar Via Zoom Wednesday, January 10th, 2024
The class will meet 7PM - 9:00PM EST
**Note: no recording will be available for this class.**
Taught by Karen E. Bender, author of two collections; Refund, which was a Finalist for the National Book Award, shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Story Prize, and Longlisted for the Story prize, and The New Order, which was Longlisted for the Story prize. A new collection is forthcoming. Her novels are Like Normal People and A Town of Empty Rooms. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, The Yale Review, The Harvard Review, Story, Guernica, and others, have been reprinted in Best American Short Stories and Best American Mystery stories and won three Pushcart prizes.
Get to know Karen in our Meet the Teaching Artist series.
Building a character’s interiority consists of many elements, including a character’s memory. How do you use a character’s memories to help build their interior world?
In this generative seminar, we will look at stories by Tillie Olsen, Tobias Wolff, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Anthony Veasna So to see how they incorporate character’s processing of the past into their stories, building a character’s interiority through what they choose to remember of the past, and how memories connect to action.
We will spend the first hour discussing the stories and the second-hour doing writing exercises.
- Through close reading of stories, learn different ways that writers use memories as a way to access the interior worlds of their characters
- Learn how memory connects with action in stories.
- Develop a character through memory via writing prompts.
- Learn one element of interiority as a way to develop characters.
COURSE EXPECTATIONS:
We'll review the different ways authors use memory to build interiority in a story and then write generative exercises to practice these methods. Students should come to class ready to write and will have opportunities to share work if they would like. Students will leave the class with various techniques they can use to convey interiority through character memory.
ONLINE COURSE STRUCTURE:
- Instructor: Karen E. Bender
- Live Seminar Via Zoom on Wednesday, January 10th, 2024
- 7PM - 9PM EST
- **Note: no recording will be available for this class.**
Contact us HERE if you have any questions about this seminar.
Instructor Karen E. Bender is the author of two collections; Refund, which was a Finalist for the National Book Award, shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Story Prize, and Longlisted for the Story prize, and The New Order, which was Longlisted for the Story prize. A new collection is forthcoming. Her novels are Like Normal People and A Town of Empty Rooms. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, The Yale Review, The Harvard Review, Story, Guernica, and others, have been reprinted in Best American Short Stories and Best American Mystery stories and won three Pushcart prizes. Her work has been read at the Selected Shorts program at Symphony Space and on Levar Burton Reads, She has taught for many highly regarded MFA programs, including the University of Iowa, Hollins University, and Warren Wilson College and currently teaches for the MFA Programs at SUNY Stony Brook and Alma College. Visit her website here.