Freeing the Form: Writing the Novella

Dense yet airy. Elegant yet complex. Too long for a story, yet too short for a novel: the novella is a vast and perplexing genre. How do writers bend form and expectation to achieve these exciting contradictions?

In this single-session course, writer and professor Jeffrey Wolf will lead participants through the craft of constructing a novella by exploring one of the genre’s modern masterpieces, Denis Johnson’s . Participants will learn about some of the nontraditional craft techniques that help novella writers move beyond cause-and-effect plot, and they’ll get a chance to experiment with these techniques through multiple writing prompts.

The class will meet from 6:00 to 7:30 with an optional happy hour at 5:30 where participatns will have time to mix and mingle, get a drink from the Mini Bar, and do a little browsing or book buying.

Tuition for the course is $50 and includes a copy of Train Dreams.

Content warning: Train Dreams contains archaic racial language, violence, and references to sexual assault.

Jeffrey Wolf teaches Creative Writing at the University of Chicago. His writing has appeared in Conjunctions, Prairie Schooner, The Adroit Journal, Chicago Quarterly Review and elsewhere, and he is currently shopping his debut novel. He also hosts the Chicago-based reading series An Inconvenient Hour.