WELCOME TO THE HVWC CALENDAR: home of all our upcoming readings, events and workshops. You can view by list or calendar (see right menu to choose). Click the colored tabs below to show only specific options. Our workshops run as multi-session series or one-day “intensives.” Note, we list the multi-session courses on the first day they meet only. The full dates of the session are described in the course descriptions. You would need to scroll back to the start date if you needed to enroll for something already underway. But do let us know if you want to join something in midstream since we need the blessing of the instructor. Questions? Email us.
Workshops – This category encompasses all one-day and multi-week classes, whether in person or via Zoom.
Readings – Our readings are in many different genres and take place in person, on Zoom, or both!
HVWC Recurring Events – This category encompasses such regular favorites as Open Mic, Open Write, and Submission Sunday.
Special Events – These other creative experiences are sure to interest our creative community!
Quantum Mechanics of Tension with Zeyn Joukhadar (via Zoom)
December 8 @ 12:30 pm - 2:30 pm
$130.00
If a story is perpetual movement, and structure is a means of organizing that movement, then tension is the fuel that gets us where we want to go. In the novel, we usually refer to everything that stores a narrative charge in terms of ‘tension’ or ‘stakes,’ but in reality the battery that supplies a work with its forward momentum is often much more complex. In this two-hour master class, we will begin by discussing the basics of how to create and maintain tension in fiction. From there we’ll move further afield with some close readings, exploring the implications of queer quantum entanglements for the invisible architectures of theme, the narrative leaps and layerings of the lyric, and the ways that structure itself can propel a work by holding disparate ideas in close, charged proximity. Throughout, we’ll do some short exercises to explore what these concepts have to offer for our own writing processes.
NB: This class will be taught on Zoom (Sunday, December 8, 12:30-2:30 PM ET) and will be capped at 15 students. Registrants will receive the Zoom link to the email address they use to register. It will arrive immediately after registration so please check your spam folder if you do not receive it. It will also be sent the day before class as a reminder. Please review the course policies page before registering for any classes. Please email [email protected] with any questions.
Zeyn Joukhadar is the author of the Lambda Literary and Stonewall Book Award-winning novel The Thirty Names of Night as well as The Map of Salt and Stars, which won the Middle East Book Award. His work has appeared in Electric Literature, Salon, The Paris Review, [PANK], the anthologies Letters to a Writer of Color, Kink, This Arab Is Queer, and elsewhere, and has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Joukhadar serves on the board of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI) and mentors emerging writers of color with the Periplus Collective.