THE UN/LIKEABLE NARRATOR – LIVE
LIVE via ZOOM: 11am-1pm (Eastern)
What is “likeability” and how is it used, abused, glorified, and misunderstood in fiction? In this generative workshop, we’ll employ a light comic touch to confront personal discomfort, judgment, bias, envy, and self-awareness as both writers and as readers. We’ll refine our own prose with a special eye toward celebrating what’s “true”, even (or especially) when it’s not “pretty”, and we’ll trouble the waters with regard to the ethical duties of storytelling. We’ll question our own narrative priorities, have a grand old time playing in the shadows, and come away with less fear around giving voice to real and imagined experience. This workshop is for anyone who would like to engage the absurd and free up their narrative flow. Readings include Etgar Keret, ZZ Packer, Muriel Spark, Rachel Cusk, Stacey Richter, Junot Diaz, Jade Sharma, Danielle Evans, Rebecca Schiff, James Baldwin, Jhumpa Lahiri, David Gates, and Mary Gaitskill.
BIOGRAPHY
Elisa Albert is the author of the novels Human Blues (forthcoming in 2022), After Birth, The Book of Dahlia, and the short story collection How This Night is Different. Her fiction and essays have been published in Tin House, Bennington Review, The New York Times, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Literary Review, Philip Roth Studies, Paris Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Longreads, The Cut, Time Magazine, Post Road, Gulf Coast, Commentary, Salon, Tablet, Washington Square, The Rumpus, The Believer and in many anthologies. She has taught creative writing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, The College of Saint Rose, Bennington College, Texas State University, and University of Maine. A Pushcart Prize nominee, finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize and Paterson Fiction Prize, winner of the Moment Magazine debut fiction prize, and Literary Death Match champion, Albert has served as Writer-in-Residence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Holland and at the Hanse-Wissenschaftkolleg in Germany.