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Teaching, Workshops, Readings, & Lectures
K. L. Cook is a professor of creative writing and literature in both the undergraduate and graduate programs at Prescott College — a liberal arts college with a strong environmental, social justice, and experiential education mission. His courses include Forms of Fiction, Short Story Cycle, Sudden Fiction, Shakespeare, Family Systems in Film and Literature, Literature of the American Dream, American West in Film and Literature, Creative Nonfiction, and Travel Writing.
He is also a member of the fiction faculty of Spalding University’s brief-residency MFA in Writing Program. He also served for several years as co-coordinator of the Southwest Writers’ Series and as the associate dean of academic affairs and chair of the Arts & Letters Program at Prescott College.
About teaching, Cook says, “I love teaching. It's a privilege to help students discover literature and to encourage them to develop the craft, vision, and generosity of spirit it takes to write their own stories. I'm amazed by the work students do. It serves as inspiration for my own writing.”
He is available for readings, book signings, workshops, book festivals, panels, conferences, and book club meetings. Contact him, his publisher, or agent for details.
Workshops by K. L. Cook
Linked Stories, Short Story Cycles, Novels-in-Stories
Short story cycles, linked stories, novels-in-stories: what is this form?
It may seem like short story cycles are a contemporary publishing fad,
particularly suited to the young MFA fiction writer who is trying to
make the leap from
writing short fiction to novels. However, the story cycle’s practitioners
include Boccaccio, Chaucer, Turgenev, Joyce, Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway,
Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Steinbeck. In the last half of the twentieth
century, the form accounts for some of the best work of John Updike,
Joyce Carol Oates,
Tim O’Brien, Louise Erdrich, Alice Munro, and Robert Olen Butler.
In this workshop, we will look at the artistic (and publishing) advantages
and
disadvantages of the form, examine its relationship to both the story
and the novel, and explore the different ways to unify a collection of
stories
so that
the whole equals more than the sum of its parts. The last half of the
class will focus on exercises that encourage students to think about
different
ways to organize and link their stories, as well as a mini-workshop of
student story
cycle proposals. Learn more about linked stories.
Sudden Fiction: The Art of the Very Short Story
Sudden fiction, flash fiction, short-shorts, prose poems, blasters—whatever
you want to call them—are simply very short stories, typically
between 150-1500 words. They have become increasingly popular in the
last couple of
decades. Magazine editors are eager to publish them since they take up
fewer pages, and some journals devote entire issues to this sub-genre.
Yet sudden
fiction is not a new phenomenon. Brief narratives have been around for
centuries and have their roots in anecdotes, jokes, parables, fables,
yarns, vignettes,
and dramatic monologues. Unlike the breezy effect that sudden fiction
often achieves, these stories (when successful) are rarely simple, nor
are they easy
to write. Whereas most fiction depends on more expansive narrative tools—such
as plotting, characterization, suspense, setting, and thematic development—short-shorts
tend to rely more heavily on poetic strategies of lyrical compression,
symbolic suggestion, and formal experimentation. In this course, we will
explore some
of the literary questions this form inspires. What differentiates sudden
fiction from prose poetry? What are the literary traditions that underpin
the contemporary
short-short? What are the creative and theoretical implications of the
genre? This class is for poets as well as prose writers.
Forms of Fiction
The goal of this seminar is to develop students’ fiction writing
skills by familiarizing them with a variety of traditional, modern,
and post-modern
narrative forms and techniques. We will do this by examining short
excerpts and through writing exercises. We will discuss and experiment
with the picaresque,
the epic, symbolic allegory, old-fashioned omniscience, as well as
radical departures such as Fielding’s mock-epic, Sterne’s
metafiction, Richardson’s epistolary strategies, and Defoe’s
false documents. Modernist forms and techniques will include Conrad’s
doppelganger, Poe’s
psychological mysteries, Henry James’s central intelligence and
dramatic method, Chekhov’s and Joyce’s epiphanies, Hemingway’s
minimalism, as well as Woolf’s and Faulkner’s experiments
in consciousness. Post-modern techniques will include Kafka’s
surrealism, Nabokov’s
formal riddles, Barthelme’s and Barth’s metafiction, Carver’s
neo-minimalism, South American magical realism, Capote’s nonfiction
novel and Doctorow’s fictional nonfiction. This class is meant
to cover a lot of ground swiftly and to acquaint writers with the richness
and variety of
techniques and forms of fiction available to them.
Shakespeare for
Fiction Writers
We know that Shakespeare serves as a model and inspiration for poets
and playwrights, but what can short story writers, novelists, and
nonfiction narrative writers
learn from the Bard? In this seminar, we’ll ignore all the
cultural and academic debates and instead examine Shakespeare with
narrative thievery in
mind. (Shakespeare was perhaps the greatest of all narrative thieves.)
We’ll
explore how he introduces and develops characters, constructs scenes,
and integrates melodrama with psychological reflection. We’ll
investigate how he uses secondary plots to inform, counterpoint,
and even subvert his primary plots
and characters. And we’ll poke into the way he transformed
existing stories and plays. We’ll also look briefly at how
fiction writers as diverse as Jane Smiley, Anthony Burgess, Hemingway,
and Melville have successfully “borrowed” Shakespeare.
No extensive familiarity with Shakespeare is required, though students
should bring a copy of the collected works so that we can analyze
scenes and soliloquies
from several plays.
Family Systems in Film and Literature
“There’s nothing so practical as a good theory,” said Ed Friedman,
a family systems theorist and therapist. Fiction writers, poets,
memoirists, playwrights, and filmmakers often demonstrate a remarkable understanding
of
and appreciation for the family as an emotional system. Without
formal training in family systems theory, writers often reveal extraordinary
sensitivity to
the intricacies of family dynamics, family roles, the emotional
web of family relationships, and the power of intergenerational themes and legacies.
This
workshop will begin with an overview of the major concepts of family
systems theory. Then using short excerpts from stories, poems, and films, we
will examine
the ways writers and filmmakers depict the complexities of triangulation,
multigenerational emotional process, chronic and acute anxiety, and differentiation.
We will
explore how creative writers can draw upon the subtleties of family
systems theory to unify and deepen their own creative work.
Which “I” Do
I Use: Fifteen Forms of First Person
The standard line in workshops is that third person is the more
sophisticated and complicated point of view with variations that
include omniscience,
effaced, and limited omniscience, among many others. First person,
on the other hand,
is often divided simply into reliable and unreliable narrators.
In this seminar, we will examine the surprising range and complexity
of first-person
point
of view—exploring at least fifteen different forms of first
person narrative. We will study examples of various forms, analyzing
the subtle and shifting
relationships that exist in first-person narratives between writer,
reader, narrator, and story. Appropriate for poets and prose
writers.
The Writing Life
In this workshop, we discuss strategies for developing a long
life in letters. How do you transform yourself as a writer,
and ultimately
as an
artist able
to transform readers? How do you develop strong habits of reading?
How do you
balance the demands of art and money? How do you go about creating
both a short-range and a long-range plan for publication? And
finally, how
do you
create the necessary
silence in your life to do your work, and how do you deal with
the silence (primarily the silence of rejection) once you finish
your
work?
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