The Southern Gothic Short Story: The Violent, Deformed, Damaged, and Deranged — 6-Week Online Fiction Workshop with Tom Cooper Starts Thursday, February 4th, 2027

Southern Gothic Writing Workshop: Write the Grotesque | Feb 2027 Online

The Southern Gothic Short Story Writing Workshop: The Violent, Deformed, Damaged, and Deranged with Tom Cooper

Begins Thursday, February 4, 2027
Class will meet weekly via Zoom on Thursdays, 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM ET

🌍 Class Times by Time Zone:

• Los Angeles (PST): 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM
• Chicago (CST): 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
• New York (EST): 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM

Now Enrolling!

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

Instructor Tom Cooper is a New Orleanian who holds a doctorate in English from Florida State University. Dozens of his stories have appeared in literary magazines, including Oxford American, Mid-American Review, Gulf Coast, and Boulevard. His two novels, The Marauders and Florida Man, were published by Random House, and his work has been translated into several foreign languages and optioned for film and television. He serves as executive producer of the adaptation of Florida Man, now in development. He has taught English, literature, and creative writing for over twenty years, and has edited and "doctored" countless manuscripts over the past decade.

Who is this class for?

This online writing class is for fiction writers of all levels who are drawn to the strange, the haunted, and the morally tangled, and who want to understand how the Southern Gothic works from the inside. If you love O'Connor and Faulkner, or you've never read them and want to find out what the fuss is about, you're welcome here.

What to expect:

In her entry on the genre in The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural (1986), Patricia Skarda describes Southern Gothic writers as preoccupied with "the private visions and psychological distortions of lonely characters in small loveless communities." This six-week creative writing workshop traces that tradition from its prototypes to its modern and lesser-known iterations, and then hands its tools to you.

Each two-hour Zoom session pairs close reading of three short stories with loose, conversational, and genuinely instructive discussion. We start with the forerunners, Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, and Ambrose Bierce, and move on to their heirs, including William Gay, Tom Franklin, Karen Russell, and Mark Richard. Along the way we keep returning to a set of questions. What makes a story Southern Gothic? Why are its characters so often grotesque or damaged, and its families so often fractured? How does violence operate on the page, and how do writers set humor alongside horror? How are race and racial violence represented? What roles do religion, guilt, and sin play? Can a house or a landscape remember? And does the Southern Gothic exist outside the historical South at all?

A fair warning, in Tom's words: we will read, discuss, and write stories that contain some, if not all, of the following: incest, violence, deformity, racism, disenfranchisement, corruption, segregation, isolation, stasis, decay, fire, brimstone, and more. If this sounds like your kind of party, you're cordially invited.

What are the writing goals?

In this Southern Gothic writing workshop, students will take the tropes and conventions of the Southern Gothic and absorb them into their own short fiction. Each student will write and submit one short story of up to 3,000 words and receive a one-on-one Zoom workshop session with Tom at the end of the term. In the final class meeting, students share the opening pages of their stories with the group.

Readings

Readings may include short stories by Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, Ambrose Bierce, William Gay, Tom Franklin, Karen Russell, and Mark Richard. All readings are provided as PDFs by the instructor.

COURSE OUTLINE

Week 1: Genre. What is the Southern Gothic? History, race, and religion in the American South.

Week 2: Setting. The landscape of Southern fiction: flora, fauna, architecture, patois, mythology, folklore, and more.

Week 3: Character. Deformity and derangement. An exploration of grotesque characters and dysfunctional families.

Week 4: Tone. Metaphor, symbol, diction, and syntax.

Week 5: POV and Voice. Humor and violence, or the strange bedfellows of Southern writing.

Week 6: Reinterpretation. Making the old new and playing with tropes in our "creative sandbox." Sharing our first few pages.

COURSE TAKEAWAYS:

• A working definition of the Southern Gothic, built from close reading of eighteen short stories spanning its forerunners and contemporary practitioners
• Craft tools for setting, character, tone, and point of view drawn directly from the genre's masters
• A clearer sense of how violence, humor, history, and faith operate in fiction, and how to use them with intention
• One original short story of up to 3,000 words written in conversation with the Southern Gothic tradition
• Individual feedback on that story in a one-on-one Zoom workshop session with Tom Cooper

PAYMENT OPTIONS:

Tuition is $445 USD. You can pay for the course in full or use Shop Pay or Affirm to pay over time with equal Monthly Payments. Both options are available at checkout.

ONLINE COURSE STRUCTURE:

• Instructor: Tom Cooper
• Begins Thursday, February 4, 2027
• Class will meet weekly via Zoom on Thursdays, 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM ET
• Tuition is $445 USD.