Class Description
This is course offered in partnership with the Shirley Jackson Awards.
Led by an outstanding roster of authors, this four-week workshop invites you to immerse yourself in horror writing. From crafting compelling beginnings to building tension, revising, and preparing your work for submission, you will leave with a piece well on its way into the world.
Each week, you’ll work with a different instructor (details below). Through craft lectures, generative exercises, and feedback, you’ll expand your creative toolkit and strengthen your confidence as a horror writer.
Week One
Brian Evenson: Doorway into Darkness—Beginning a Horror Story
This week focuses on how to begin: how to capture a reader’s attention and sustain momentum. Come with a first sentence—either from a draft in progress or a piece you’d like to write. We’ll use it to explore the expectations you establish for readers and how to develop the work organically and dynamically.
Week Two
Linda Addison: Writing Frightening, Unforgettable Fiction
In this session, we’ll explore how tone creates fear and tension on the page. Drawing on techniques from poetry, we’ll consider how to make every word, phrase, and image resonate. Through writing exercises, you’ll experiment with these tools using work you’ve already begun or a shared theme.
Week Three
Workshop with M.M. Olivas
In this peer workshop, you’ll receive feedback on your developing short stories and identify both strengths and areas for growth. Olivas will also discuss strategies for building scenes that feel immersive, vivid, and alive.
Week Four
Workshop with Kate Maruyama
In our final workshop, you’ll refine your draft and receive focused feedback for revision. Maruyama will also offer concrete strategies for revising and submitting your work.
About the Instructors
Linda D. Addison is an award-winning author of five collections and the first African-American recipient of the HWA Bram Stoker Award® as well as being the a recipient of the HWA Lifetime Achievement Award, HWA Mentor of the Year and SFPA Grand Master of Fantastic Poetry.
Brian Evenson is the author of two dozen books of fiction, most recently Good Night, Sleep Tight and his collection Song for the Unraveling of the World won a World Fantasy Award and Shirley Jackson Award and was a finalist for the Ray Bradbury Prize. He is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and three O. Henry Awards.
M. M. Olivas is trans first generation chicana writer, an alumna of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop and the Lambda Literary Workshop, and holds an MFA in creative writing from San Jose State University, is an Ignyte finalist and featured on the Bram Stoker Awards longlist for her debut novel, Sundown in San Ojuela.
Kate Maruyama is the author of The Collective, Alterations, Bleak Houses, and Harrowgate and her novella Family Solstice was named Best Fiction Book of 2021 from Rue Morgue Magazine.
Writing Roadmap: We've created a simple, goal-based writing roadmap to help you find the perfect GrubStreet course for your writing needs.
Thanks to the excellent literary citizenship of our donors, scholarships are available for all GrubStreet classes. To apply, click the gray "APPLY FOR SCHOLARSHIP" button. In order to be considered for a scholarship, you must complete your application at least one week before the start date of a class. Please await our scholarship committee's decision before registering for the class. We cannot hold spots in classes, so the sooner you apply, the better. Scholarships cannot be applied retroactively.
For more detailed information about GrubStreet scholarships, including how to contribute to scholarship funds for other students, click here.
This class will take place using Zoom videoconferencing. After registering, a yellow Resources tab will appear in this section containing a link to join class. Please note that you will need to be logged into view the Resources tab.
Zoom Participation:
In our experience, the intimate nature of a writing workshop benefits from on-camera participation. Students are of course welcome to turn their camera off whenever they need to, but it is a community norm for cameras to be on most of the time. You can learn more about using Zoom here.
Zoom Accessibility:
You can enable closed captioning at any time during the meeting by clicking the CC button at the bottom of the screen. If you'd like to access the transcript after class, please make sure to let your instructor ahead of time that you'd like a copy.