About the Workshop

A generative workshop using techniques and writing prompts I’ve made to help queer students push to write the stories they’ve never seen before. Students will engage in daily reading discussions, daily in-class and out-of-class writing prompts and share work. Topics range from how to identify the way the heteronormative colonialist status quo urges you to self-censor and how it might limit your sense of main characters, topics or structure; how to set boundaries with the living; finding the regular courage to reach past the familiar to your vision; writing about communities, sex, love, affection, violence, alienation.

About the Instructor

Alexander Chee is a novelist and essayist, most recently the author of the essay collection How To Write An Autobiographical Novel. A 2021 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2021 United Artists Fellow, he is previously a recipient of the Whiting Award and a NEA Fellowship in Prose, and residencies from MacDowell, Civitella Ranieri and Hawthornden Castle. A contributing editor for The New Republic and an editor at large for VQR, his stories and essays have appeared recently in T Magazine, Harpers, and Harper's Bazaar. He is a professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and is at work on a new novel.