The Virginia G. Piper
Center for Creative Writing

Have you ever wondered how to translate your stories into comics? From super hero comics to graphic novels it all starts with learning how to do a single page layout. Join us as we learn how to create a short one-page story and explore the importance of creating a clear setting and page flow.

In this workshop we will work on bringing together elements of horror, noir, and the supernatural while learning to use violence as a tool. We will explore the role of empathy through characterization, which means we'll discuss positionality, Otherness, physicality, and other core elements of great character development and how they fit into horror narratives.

We will talk about the explosive, messy nature of violence and how to pace it to serve our narrative while also looking at some of the subgenres of horror and their relations/expectations in terms of violence.

We bring where we come from when we travel. In this workshop, participants will reflect on writing about familiar and unfamiliar landscapes, and practice making place a character in their writing.

How can poetics serve our most socially urgent writing? Writing about race [for example] is a polemic,” writes Cathy Park Hong, “but also a lyric, in that our inner consciousness is knotted with contradictions.” To investigate this convergence, this course explores the creative nonfiction resistance essay. We will read contemporary works by Aisha Sabatini Sloan, José Orduña, Sarah de Leeuw, and Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas—and, in honor the essay’s genre-defying roots, we will also read hybrid/fluid/genre-contested works by writers such as Tommy Pico and Claudia Rankine.