Class Description
If you find yourself always pushing at the boundaries of reality, looking around the corner for fairies, genies, and ghosts, wondering whether the armoire has feelings, or imagining conversations between you and your Great Aunt Mildred's dead cat, you will enjoy Magical Fiction! Located at the crossroads between reality and fantasy, horror stories and shadow puppets, sci-fi and Steve Jobs, this genre is all about bending rules and warping conventions.
In this week-long teen camp, we will focus on traditional fantastic forms and how they work in the context of reality. We'll develop realistic, relatable characters who might just happen to be pieces of furniture, or owls, or people. We'll work on plot, structure, and making those stories that peek out behind the shadows come out and play in the real world. There will be prompts and reading selections designed to pull you out of any writing slump, get you started on new stories (perhaps new worlds?), and inspire you not only to jump out of the box but challenge the box itself.
Feel free to bring works in progress; there will be plenty of time for workshopping and figuring out how to make something new again if you've hit a rut. By the end of the week, we'll have started a couple of new pieces and given you loads of beginnings to chew over and work on long after the class is done. We'll also discuss the submission process and publication opportunities for teens, and finish out the week with a reading where you can share your work! Students craving inspiration from odd places, with open minds and keen imaginations, are encouraged to sign up! Some authors we will be discussing are:
- Neil Gaiman
- Christopher Priest
- Kelly Link
- Karen Russell
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Jo Walton
- A.S. Byatt
- Francesca Lia Block
- Ransom Riggs
- ...and many more!
Limited to students aged 13-18.
SCHOLARSHIP OPPORTUNITIES:
Grub Street is happy to be able to offer a limited number of full scholarships for our teen writing camps. To apply for a scholarship, please complete and submit this online form describing why you want to take the teen writing camp and detailing your financial need. The deadline to apply for this scholarship is Friday, July 3rd at 5pm.
*If you are registering on behalf of your teen, add their email information in the “For a Friend or Child?” field on the right-hand side of the screen before you check out. This will send them a direct link and reminder to create their own profile with GrubStreet.
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.