A great short story is all the proof we need that bigger isn’t necessarily better—or more beautiful, or more profound. In this new class, you will learn how to apply new ideas of structure, character, plot and language to your short stories to help make them have a larger payoff and a sense of emotional resolution.

Short fiction writer Steven Millhauser has suggested that the perceived limitations of the short story are actually its greatest strengths: “If you concentrate your attention on some apparently insignificant portion of the world, you will find, deep within it, nothing less than the world itself.” In this course, we’ll read great short fiction by masters of the genre, including Joyce Carol Oates, Nabokov, and Hemingway; and learn to take apart these deceptively small gems and figure out how their structure, characterization, language, and plotting build to a big payoff and a sense of emotional resolution. We’ll then apply these insights and craft lessons to our own short fiction. Each participant will draft, workshop, and start the revision process of a short story during the course, with intensive feedback from the instructor and fellow classmates. You’ll come away with a special appreciation for the limitlessness of a great short story’s artistic and emotional power, and with the tools to get boundless territory out of, as Millhauser put it, “a single grain of sand.”