Faculty
Alice Sola Kim
Writing has appeared in The Cut, McSweeney's, Lightspeed Magazine, The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, and other publications. She is a 2016 Whiting Award winner and the recipient of a Hermitage artist residency as well as grants from MacDowell and the Elizabeth George Foundation. SLC, 2025–
Graduate Courses 2026-2027
Master of Fine Arts in Writing
-
Seminar—Spring
WRIT 7440
This craft class will explore narratives in which the very nature of reality is upended, transformed, or simply revealed to be not what we had initially imagined. Reality upheavals can be insane and chaotic, renting old worlds asunder to slap together the new, or they can look more like subtle and unsettling alterations doled out carefully. They can be pulp-style shock and awe, intricate postmodern freak-outs, or goofy surprises; they are the kinds of narratives in which a family haunted by ghosts discovers that it is they who are the ghosts, or a man realizes that his whole life is a television show and he's the only one not acting, or an alien planet populated by hyper-intelligent apes turns out to be a future Earth. (These are all descriptions of movies we are not watching for class, since I am not trying to spoil any texts). We will examine work that remakes itself with regards to time and place and space, with characters who, like people, help us to create our reality, or more ominously, simply do it for us, and explore how and why these texts do what they do. We will discuss questions such as: What is a text saying about the world via its blatant play with reality and perception? How do narrative surprises and reconfigurations feel "unfair" versus "fair", and how much does that matter? And once you know the trick, what's left? Is it worth it?
Faculty
Previous Courses
Master of Fine Arts in Writing
-
Seminar—Spring
WRIT 7452
“I feel like something bad is going to happen to me. I feel like something bad has happened. It hasn't reached me yet but it's on its way.” —Lake Mungo (2008)
In this workshop, we will explore the topic of dread in fiction. Dread is incredibly powerful and multifaceted: It is both anticipation and fear, attraction and repulsion. On the page, dread can manifest as anything from a subtle mood of disquiet to a gorily ostentatious splash of horror. We will read stories from writers such as Donald Barthelme, Lisa Tuttle, ’Pemi Aguda, Tony Tulathimutte, and Nathan Ballingrud to learn how they evoke dread masterfully, in a variety of ways, and discuss craft techniques and thematic approaches to imbuing our own work with dread. While some of the reading list can be classified as horror, this class is genre-agnostic. We will follow dread anywhere it is to be found; and, luckily for us, it can be found everywhere.
Faculty