An 8-Week Fiction Workshop
Wednesdays, January 6 - February 24, 6-9 PM
The “trickster” character is a narrative mainstay in the storytelling traditions of numerous cultures, occupying sizable spaces in oral storytelling and written fiction alike. There is the wily coyote ubiquitous in the stories of various Native American groups like the Shoshone and the Nez Perce. There is the Japanese kitsune, a clever fox spirit who often transforms into a beautiful woman to beguile lustful men. There is the Br’er Rabbit figure in African-American storytelling, who uses his wits to outsmart the larger animals that would just as soon eat him as spot him, a figure who is largely believed by scholars to symbolize the cleverness of the enslaved Africans and Black Americans forced to navigate their brutal worlds of slavery. There is the Norse figure Loki popularized by the entertainment behemoth that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the son of a giant and a god who uses his cunning to maneuver a world populated by gods, giants, and other figures powerful beyond all imagining. In this workshop, we will analyze how these trickster figures—and several more not stated here—use their remarkable wits to undermine, flit around, or otherwise destabilize the power structures that seek to do them harm.
The study of these figures, and the stories in which they appear, will be instructive for our own fiction writing, offering guidance for the structuring of character, the use of narrative escalation, and the writing of fresh, exacting, narratively surprising social commentary. We will also use these characters and strategies to launch broader conversation about the place of “trickery” on and off the page: the ways in which deception manifests in literature, but also the ways that we as writers might use our own instruments of “trickery” to create narrative suspense and surprise. In this course, we will spend our first few weeks reading, analyzing, and discussing the works of fiction writers like Louise Erdrich, Lesley Nnekah Arimah, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, among others. We will also be reading assorted folktales from the various cultures who revere the trickster figure, cultures like the Shoshone of the Great Plains, the Japanese, the Norse, the Greek, as well as Haitians and other Afro-descended groups. We will dedicate the remaining weeks of our course (three to four weeks) to student workshops, wherein students will submit their own original fiction for discussion, critique, and celebration.
$410 Members/$485 Nonmembers
Juliana Lamy is a Haitian fiction writer from South Florida. She received her Bachelor’s degree in History & Literature from Harvard University. While there, she was also the recipient of the university’s Le Baron Russell Brigg’s Prize for Undergraduate Fiction, as well as the Gordon Parks Essay Prize for Nonfiction. She is the author of You Were Watching from the Sand (Red Hen Press, 2023), winner of Red Hen Press's 2021 Ann Petry Award for Fiction, winner of the 2024 CLMP Firecracker Award for Fiction, and a longlist selection for the 2024 Carol Shield's Prize and the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Fiction. In 2023, she received her MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She has work forthcoming from Ploughshares Magazine. She really is 6”2, she swears.
ADVANCE REGISTRATION REQUIRED
All MWPA workshops require advanced registration. We accept registration by phone, mail, and online via our website. We cannot guarantee registration in the final 24-hours before a workshop, and can rarely accommodate day-of registration.
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QUESTIONS
For any questions regarding this workshop, please contact programs@mainewriters.org.
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Call 207-200-7180 and register with your VISA or MasterCard.
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SCHOLARSHIP
The MWPA is proud to offer one partial scholarship to this workshop for members-only. Scholarships are awarded on a combination of need and merit. Application Due two weeks prior to the workshop start date, at 9:00 a.m.
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