Short Story
Rebecca Bernard’s debut collection of stories, Our Sister Who Will Not Die, won the 2021 Non/Fiction prize from The Journal and was published by Ohio State’s Mad Creek Books in August 2022. Her short stories and flash fiction have appeared in many journals and magazines, including Oxford American, Cincinnati Review, Wigleaf, Bellingham Review, North American Review, Colorado Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and SmokeLong Quarterly.
Her work has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her story “This is Us Being Alive” was included on the Distinguished Story List of the Best American Short Stories 2018. Rebecca holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Vanderbilt University and a PhD in Fiction from the University of North Texas, where she was the English Department’s Outstanding Teaching Fellow for 2019-20. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the English department at East Carolina University, teaching introductory and advanced classes in fiction writing. She has served on the editorial staffs of Nashville Review and American Literary Review and is currently fiction editor for The Boiler. Visit her website at rebeccaibernard.com.
Course Description
Short Fiction
What makes a story stand out in the queue? How do we craft a narrative that’s both sound and fresh? In this course we will study aspects of the craft of short fiction like structure, psychic distance, and voice, drawing our lessons from a selection of short craft essays and sample stories, alongside the real-time examples that workshopping drafts allows us. Though our main emphasis will be on workshop, we will also find time for craft discussion and generative prompt-based writing that utilizes a collaborative touch. We will end the workshop with a practical guide toward publishing in literary journals, and a suggested reading list of collections and craft texts that explore the range of possibilities that contemporary short fiction offers.