The GWG Presents:
Sepulchral beetles, mellifluous aardvarks, tinted glasses amid tall grasses, pet scythes, surreal thighs, storks on houses rolling their eyes: strange details revivify prose by sharpening it. Unusual language resurrects possibilities in prose by making it alive to the fantastic, or dead to the dull. Strangeness builds momentum and characterization. In this workshop, we will explore descriptive techniques that build complexity and narrative suspense into language and descriptions at the level of the image and line, learning from Herta Müller, Danilo Kis, Gary Indiana, Daniil Kharms, and others. You will learn how to move a story by story juxtaposition, by alternating a thing with what “it is called” in the city versus the village, for example, as shown by Herta Müller’s technique of defamiliarization. You will leave with generative exercises that hone new creative skills, like writing dioramas, miniature forms, pieces narrated by objects, and the strange world of children. In a world that reifies being normal, nonfiction and fiction writers can reach towards the weird in each of our experiences in order to reveal the unbelievable strangeness beneath the banality of everyday life.
Where: Online via Zoom
Date: September 23, 2025
Time: 19:00-20:30 CEST
Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. Recent books include a creative nonfiction chapbook, Ribald (Bull City Press Inch Series (2020) and Dor, which won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize (2021). Her debut fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Books Prize (2018). Alina's poems, essays, and fiction can be found in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, Poetry, BOMB, Crab Creek Review, and others. She serves as editor, reviewer, and critic for various journals and is currently working on a novel-like creature. Her latest poetry collection, My Heresies, was released by Sarabande in April 2025.
