“How to Write a True Happy Story in 2025” with Karen Tucker
Tuesdays, July 15-August 12
7:00-8:30pm ET
Online via Zoom
In this five-week online course led by UNC Chapel Hill creative writing professor and author Karen Tucker, participants will read, write, and workshop short fiction that honors the fullest truth of the world we live in, while also focusing on scenes of comfort, happiness, and peace. You will examine published works in the first two meetings with accompanying generative exercises. The final three meetings will be workshop-driven, focusing on participant drafts and accompanying prompts for revision. Everyone will receive written feedback on their fiction and strategies for continuing to advance their craft.
About the Instructor
Karen Tucker is the author of the novel Bewilderness, which was selected as an Indie Next Pick, longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize, shortlisted for the Crook’s Corner Book Prize, and chosen as a “Dazzling Debut” by the American Booksellers Association. Her short fiction can be found in The Yale Review, The Missouri Review, Boulevard, EPOCH, and Tin House, among other places. Essays and interviews can be found in Electric Literature, The Millions, The Rumpus, Hazlitt, Southern Review of Books, and elsewhere. Tucker’s awards include an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant for Emerging Writers, the George M. Harper Award for Creative Writing, the Jerome Stern Series Spotlight Award in fiction, a UNC Junior Faculty Development Award, and a PEO Scholar Award. Born and raised in North Carolina, she teaches fiction and creative nonfiction at UNC Chapel Hill.
“Writing the Other-Than-Human World” with Zoë Fay-Stindt
Wednesdays, September 10-24
6:00-8:00pm
Meets online via Zoom
This three-session generative, land-based workshop will practice reverent attention as a means of revitalizing writers’ connections to their local ecosystems. Through field journaling, freewriting, and embodied practice, we will focus on fostering a writing process that reaches toward the other-than-human world, with prompts for generative writing along the way. The works of Natalie Diaz, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ross Gay, and others will help guide us back into reciprocal relation both on and off the page.
Writers of all levels are welcome. The workshop will be open-genre, though poets and nonfiction writers are particularly encouraged to join. Participants will leave with a deepened land-based writing practice as well as several early drafts.
About the Instructor
Zoë Fay-Stindt is a queer, bicontinental poet with roots in both the French and American south. Their work has been Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets nominated, featured or forthcoming in places such as Southern Humanities Review, Ninth Letter, VIDA, Muzzle, Terrain, and Poet Lore, and gathered into a chapbook, Bird Body, winner of Cordella Press’ inaugural Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize. They have received scholarships and residencies from Santa Fe Art Institute, Tin House, Orion, Sundress Academy of the Arts, Black Lawrence Press, and others, and they currently facilitate the Spiritual Ecology Study Club at advaya and support the Hellbender Gathering of Poets prepare for its inaugural eco-poetics festival.