Because, in any narrative, events must occur in some order, consecutively, over time, we might think of time as the short story writer's first medium. In this four-week craft course we will look at several examples of short stories that toy with time—playfully, confoundingly, philosophically, or otherwise, e.g. Lorrie Moore's "How To Talk To Your Mother" and Justin Torres' “Reverting to a Wild State,” which are both structured chronologically backward, and Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life," in which time comes untethered from chronology, loses its linearity altogether, and becomes simultaneous. We will look, too, at supplementary essays by writers including Vladimir Nabokov and Kevin Brockmeier, which offer new ways of considering time as subject, object, function, and/or principle on the fictional page. Weekly discussions on the assigned reading will be followed by generative writing exercises, enabling students to respond to the day's topics "in real time" and design their own fictional experiments in narrative manipulation. Please note that this is not a writing workshop, and feedback on student work will be informal if offered at all.

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