Picking Up the Pieces: A Generative Workshop on the Episodic Form with Nina Schuyler (May 12-14, 2023)

The other day, I bought a tulip for myself. It wasn’t my birthday or any day special. The motorcycle came so close I could smell his aftershave. The day is white as cotton. I saw a woman on the street corner who luxuriated in the warmth of life. It was on her face.

A Generative Workshop on the Episodic Form. And damn it, it is a story, just a different shape because there needs to be a form for things that are broken or that pop up, only to fade, only to pop up again. Because the day exists, and so do the motorcycle and the tulip and the woman, at least in my imagination. And now the windows are chilled by the night air. The pieces are flotsam, maybe jetsam, I can’t be sure, but they collide and braid because life is chaos and symphony, and the plan is to write and let the pieces appear and somehow, someway make a  gestalt-like whole.

About the Instructor
Nina Schuyler’s novel, Afterword, will be published in May 2023 by Clash Books. Her short story collection, In this Ravishing World, won the W.S. Porter Prize for Short Story Collections and The Prism Prize for Climate Literature and will be published by Regal House Publishing in 2024. She teaches creative writing for The University of San Francisco and Stanford Continuing Studies.