Brian's teaching has been recognized with the Loft Literary Center/Madeline Island School of the Arts Excellence in Teaching Fellowship (based exclusively on student evaluations) and commendations from the Creative Writing Program at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities.
Fiction Basics: Emotional Range (April 19, 2025)
A frequent criticism of literary fiction is that it is often humorless, with a narrow emotional range that begins with ennui and ends in despair. If you're weary of the drama of the broken tea cup and want to write and read stories with a broad emotional range, this session is for you. If readers laugh with your characters, they are more likely to cry when tragedy strikes. We'll read story excerpts that ably mix comedy with heartbreak, and absurdity with terror, as we work towards convincingly mixing humor and heartache in our own writing. Strategies we will play with include irony (dramatic, verbal, and situational), absurdity, exaggeration/understatement, incongruity, surprise, and wordplay, among others.
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