Connected Collections

From Edgar Alan Poe (Fall of the House of Usher) to Sandra Cisneros and Tim O’Brien, writers have been engaged in the art of writing stories that weave and interconnect. Whether through theme as in Poe or, more recently, Dan Chaon’s Among the Missing or Joan Silber’s Ideas of Heaven, through geography as in James Joyce’s Dubliners or Sandra Cisernos’ House on Mango Street, or characters as in The Things They Carried (O’Brien) or Olive Kittridge (Elizabeth Strout), or finally an incident that links them such as Haruki Murakami’s After the Quake, Russell Banks’s The Sweet Hereafter, or Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, writers have found ways to link their stories. This workshop will focus on the writing of stories that are connected in one of these various ways. We will read extensively from connected collections. Exercises will be created in order to help students mine their own material in order to create small collections of narratives with similar preoccupations, terrains, or people.