All stories need a setting to ground them in place and time. This class will look at how setting can create mood and shape character. An in-class exercise will explore how to craft rich physical worlds through the use of memory and concrete and sensory detail.
Hester Kaplan is the author of two story collections, The Edge of Marriage, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction, and Unravished, as well as the novels The Tell and Kinship Theory. Her fiction and non-fiction has been widely published and anthologized, including multiple times in The Best American Short Stories series, Agni, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, Southwest Review and many others. She is a recipient of an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, fellowships from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, the Salamander Prize for Fiction, and the McGinnis-Ritchie Award for Nonfiction, among other awards. She has taught at RISD, the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT, and Lesley University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing. She is co-founder of Goat Hill Writers, a literary production and education organization based in Rhode Island and can be found at www.hesterkaplan.com.
