CRW 5130 Fall 2021 Butler

The fall graduate fiction workshop under Robert Olen Butler will, as it traditionally does, focus intensively on the essentials of process in creating literary narrative. Given the most elusive and crucial of these essentials, the workshop will propose an aesthetic theory of the short short story, both as a distinct art form and as an image of the first pages of any work of viable fiction regardless of length, and students will write short short stories (or de facto beginnings) until the essential is mastered. When that is achieved, they will have a chance to write onward from there. And yes, my deeply considered conviction—based on nearly four decades of teaching experience—is that this pursuit is crucial even for advanced graduate students. Indeed, for all of us.