Imagine taking your pencil and throwing it against a window. Now imagine that same pencil growing wings made of feathers, shattering the window, and flying off. What in the world will happen next? Instilling a bit of magical or fabulist realism into fiction gives a writer a wide canvas to create a telling reality in stories about the world we inhabit now. Using prompts, short selected readings, and writing exercises on ironic distance, metaphor, and humor, this four-week fiction workshop explores how writers can infuse magical realism into their work. Authors we might read include Julio Cortazar, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Angela Carter, Laura Esquivel, Franz Kafka, and Nikolai Gogol.