Take a genre writing workshop with my fabulous friend

[kitchen_kink]

Hey everyone,

My good friend Mike Marano is running writing workshops at Grub Street these days, and asked me to signal boost his upcoming class in genre fiction. He's a great writer, a great teacher and a great guy - I highly recommend. Do check it out - and forward to your friends!

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ChiZine Fiction Editor, Stoker and International Horror Guild Award-winning horror and SF writer Michael Marano will be offering a new class on "The Art of Genre" at Grub Street, Inc., a non-profit creative writing center dedicated to nurturing writers and connecting readers with the wealth of writing talent in the Boston area. Grub's mission is to support creative writers at all stages of their development so that they can achieve their goals of publication, social and professional networking, gainful employment in the field, and/or personal enrichment. Details are below. For more information, contact Grub Street via their web site here.

The Art of Genre
Using the unreal in your fiction offers unique opportunities to break fresh, new ground. This class will help hone the tools you'll need to write genre fiction--be it science fiction, fantasy, or horror--with a distinctly literary bent. In addition to the weekly workshopping of short stories and novel fragments, students will be given a background on the genres' histories and their respective subgenres, strategies for using surrealism and postmodernism in their work, approaches to using "real world" research as a way to flesh out otherworldly settings and narratives, and ways to use the unreal as a tool to make metaphoric statements that can only be articulated with fantastic trappings. Other topics covered will be strategies for marketing your work, techniques for idea generating, and protocols for developing their work with the help of editors and agents. The goal is to give you a solid grounding in the demands of fantastic fiction, and a better understanding of literary potential of your favorite genres.

$425/$400 members
10 Sundays in Boston, 6pm – 9pm. Begins January 18th
Instructor: Michael Marano
Registration Deadline: January 13th

Comments

[desiringsubject.livejournal.com]

Not really apropos, but the growing usage of the term "genre fiction" bugs me. Because most fiction is in one genre or another. And one could make an argument for fiction being a genre. But when people use the term, they don't mean, say, autobiography. Or bildungsroman. Why are "science fiction, fantasy, or horror" more genre-like than those? Irksome.

Parenthetically, the words for gender and genre in Spanish are the same. Which makes writing about gender in lit crit in Spanish downright humorous.

[dietrich.livejournal.com]

It's a bit annoying to me, too, as I'm someone who tends to write between genres. Unfortunately, it's largely an industry term, that serves to pretty cleanly separate fiction written as "realistic literature" from fiction written in a more speculative mode. It's bullshit, but it's how business is done.

It's especially absurd when you get done reading something like what I finished recently, The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie. It's a historical fantastical romanctical fiction book. :) But it's written by Rushdie, so it's literary, not genre, right? WTF. Mostly I think it's a way of ghettoizing writers who aren't "serious."

Luckily, there are people like Delia Sherman and Christopher Barzak out there doing work like this. (http://www.interstitialarts.org/wordpress/?p=43)

[desiringsubject.livejournal.com]

Yeah, since when does lack of verisimilitude make something non-literary? And since when does "genre" as a euphemism for "non-literary" make any kind of sense?

I mean, I like me some Romeo and Juliet as much as the next guy, but I have always had this sneaking suspicion that there was not *that* much English spoken in Verona at that time! Or this time, for that matter.