Class Starts on Sunday, July 19th, 2026

The class will meet on Sundays via Zoom (1:00PM ET - 4:00PM ET).

🌍 Class Times by Time Zone: Los Angeles (PDT): 10:00 AM – 1:00 PM / Chicago (CDT): 12:00 PM – 3:00 PM / New York (EDT): 1:00 PM – 4:00 PM / London (BST): 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM / Berlin (CEST): 7:00 PM – 10:00 PM

Any questions about this class? Use the Chat Butto) to talk with us. 

Led by Kritika Pandey, the global winner of the 2020 Commonwealth Short Story Prize and was on the shortlist in 2018 and 2016. A graduate of the MFA for Poets and Writers, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, she was a resident writer at The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico in 2021. Her writing has been generously supported by a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation and appeared in Granta, Kenyon Review, BBC Radio 4, and The Common, among others.

In the era of artificial intelligence, when stories are reduced to patterns and predictions, this workshop invites you to unlearn those patterns. Explore the versions of yourself that won’t hold still. Let language do something you wouldn’t normally permit. 

After all, to be human is to resist interpretation. 

We are creatures who don’t quite cohere and keep going anyway.

So how do you write fiction that is, in the words of Albert Camus, “the lie through which we tell the truth?” Now that machines can pass as human, how do you write something that goes beyond personal history, identity markers, and a stable sense of self? How do you expand that mysterious entity called consciousness when even quantum physicists are unsure about it? And in an increasingly polarized world, how do you tell stories about people’s myriad universal complexities, not just their narrow political leanings?

This workshop will explore those questions and more.

Together, we’ll encounter The Thunder, Perfect Mind, a 2nd-century CE Gnostic text of unknown authorship. We’ll place it alongside the ancient Chinese wisdom of the Dao De Jing and the ascetic Upanishadic philosophy of neti neti. 

But we won’t get lost in abstraction.

We’ll ground ourselves in the work of writing as we think through elements of craft such as:

• How to pass the time in fiction
  
• Escalation and causality in storytelling
  
• The narrative significance of not knowing what comes next
  
• How the best dialogue can reveal character, present information, and move the plot forward, all at once

This class is for any writer who has ever attempted to write a short story, irrespective of whether they have a complete work to submit. You’re welcome to share fragmentary notes, multiple excerpts, as well as finished stories under 5000 words.

In addition to receiving lots of feedback on your writing, as well as commenting on the works of your fellow writers, there will be in-class generative writing to demonstrate the aspects of writing that can't quite be taught.

Take this class if you’ve ever wondered if:

• All stories have already been told
  
• What makes fiction original is not the WHAT but the HOW
  
• As a new writer, your job is to touch upon the age-old conundrums of the human condition that have been tackled by other writers a million times before, such as love, loss, spite, loneliness, guilt, and belonging, in a way that feels fresh and exciting

COURSE TAKEAWAYS:

• You will have one thoroughly considered short story by the end of this workshop.
  
• You will have a clearer understanding of how to write in a way that amplifies your unique voice.
  
• You'll be equipped with new psychoanalytical and philosophical methods of abstracting all works of fiction, including your own. 

SELECTED COURSE TEXTS:

Uncanny, the Singing that Comes from Certain Husks: Joy Williams
Angles on Dialogue: Douglas Unger
The School: Donald Barthelme
Rise, Baby, Rise: George Saunders
The Feminist: Tony Tulathimutte
Borges and I: Jorge Luis Borges
The Thunder, Perfect Mind: Anonymous
Not Knowing: Donald Barthelme

COURSE OUTLINE

Week 1: Time and Dialogue
Techniques for handling time within a story, and employing dialogue to advance the plot while developing character. 

Week 2: Causality and Meaning 
Using patterns and repetition to create structure in the absence of a clear, logical progression.

Week 3: The Self That Doesn’t Hold 
Approaches to employing shifting narrative voices and points of view.

Week 4: Say It and It Exists 
An inquiry into how speech functions as action and how language can carry risk.

ONLINE COURSE STRUCTURE:

This class meets via Zoom. Come prepared for a super fun class with live interaction on Zoom each weekend and plenty of writing, reading, and talking!

• Instructor: Kritika Pandey
  
• This class starts on Sunday, July 19th, 2026
• The class will meet on Sundays via Zoom (1:00PM ET - 4:00PM ET).
  
• Tuition is $330.