September 18- 20, 2026
About the Course
Summer travels offer us new words and sensory impressions that yearn to be folded into small fictions. A story that begins with seeing Cigoli’s Study of Narcissus in Rome. A tale from the slopes of the postcard’s Italian volcano. A vignette about Madrid which piggybacks John Dos Passos’ experiences. A car rented in Mississippi carrying translations of poems by Tomas Transtromer in the trunk. A hotel room haunted by Hannah Höch. I will share a few pieces from my (still unfinished) postcard experiment addressed to various strangers who agreed to play along with a series of flash fictions. After exploring how other writers import the travel vignette, we will collect images, proper nouns, literary references, songs, works of art, and landmarks from our summer experiences, and then use these half-remembered treasures to develop narratives from the fragments. Verb and noun forms will be squished together as we take “experiment” literally.
About the Instructor
Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. Recent books include a creative nonfiction chapbook, Ribald (Bull City Press Inch Series, Nov. 2020) and Dor, which won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize (September, 2021). Her debut fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Books Prize (April 2018). Alina’s poems, essays, and fiction can be found in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, Poetry, BOMB, Crab Creek Review, and others. She serves as editor, reviewer, and critic for various journals and is currently working on a novel-like creature. My Heresies, a poetry collection was published by Sarabande in late April 2025. More online at www.alinastefanescuwriter.com.