R225. The Art of the Encounter: Structuring Short Fiction

Auditorium Room 2, Level 1
Thursday, April 9, 2015
3:00 pm to 4:15 pm

 

Short stories are demanding in their precise elusiveness. While novels should be the journey into the coal mine, we are told, stories must be the multifaceted jewel awaiting discovery. Not a long friendship but a haunting encounter. In this panel, five writers who’ve found success from the New Yorker to Best American Short Stories discuss how to create, utilize, and refine short story structure to this end, especially at the stages of premise, conception, revision, and reader experience.


Participants

Moderator:

Arna Bontemps Hemenway is the author of Elegy on Kinderklavier. His fiction has appeared in A Public Space, Ecotone, AQR, FiveChapters, and the Missouri Review. He is an assistant professor of creative writing at Baylor University.

Caitlin Horrocks is author of the story collection This Is Not Your City. Her work appears in the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. She is fiction editor of the Kenyon Review and teaches at Grand Valley State University.

Rebecca Makkai is the author of two novels, The Hundred-Year House and The Borrower. Her work was chosen for The Best American Short Stories in 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011 and appears in places like Harper's, Tin House, and Ploughshares. She is the recipient of a 2014 NEA fellowship.

Chinelo Okparanta is the author of Happiness, Like Water. A 2014 O. Henry Prize winner, and a 2014 Lambda Literary Award winner for fiction, she was a finalist for the 2014 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and for the 2014 Rolex Mentors and Protégés Arts Initiative. Her stories have appeared in Granta, the New Yorker, and Tin House.

Molly Antopol is the author of the short story collection The UnAmericans and is a recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction, she is currently a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University.

#AWP24

February 7–10, 2024
Kansas City, Missouri

Kansas City Convention Center