Fabulism Line by Line: Nurturing the Fantastic & Unexpected in Your Writing Voice

One of the most important yet most elusive creative writing concepts is that of voice, finding one’s voice, strengthening it, embracing it. In this workshop, we’ll look at voice on the line-level, discussing different strategies for making your unique writing voice work even harder for you. We’ll look at excerpts from different fabulist authors and how they craft dramatic, uncanny, unnerving, and totally unique story-voices line by line. Fabulism, a close relative to both Fantasy and Magic Realism, is the art of making realist stories more vulnerable, more desperate, and more honest by folding in fantastic elements. What realism would seek to hide behind coy metaphors, fabulism strips naked and makes manifest. (No offense, Realists. You’ve got my love, too.) But fabulism isn’t born simply through the introduction of a ghost or a woman transforming into a carnivorous horse; it’s something that can be nurtured within the sentences themselves. For this workshop, come prepared to be super nerdy about sentence-level analysis (nothing too deep into the grammatical; that’s a different workshop altogether) as well as ready to do plenty of original writing. (Be sure to bring your preferred writing utensils!)

K.C. Mead-Brewer’s fiction appears in various places, including with Electric Literature's Recommended Reading, Joyland Magazine, and Strange Horizons, as well as in both 2019’s Best Small Fictions and 2019’s Best Micro Fiction anthologies. She’s a graduate of Tin House’s 2018 Winter Workshop for Short Fiction and of the 2018 Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop.