Getting Weird: Crafting Surreal Short Stories

Getting Weird is an 8-week short fiction workshop that focuses on writing strangeness into the everyday, as a method for exploring and disrupting questions of race, gender, sexuality, climate change, capitalism, and other big topics. Participants will read a wide range of writers who delve into the weird, such as Paige Cooper, Giada Scodellaro, Renee Gladman, Hiromi Goto, Mariana Enriquez, Carmen Maria Machado, and Callum Angus. They will be given an array of writing prompts, designed to investigate different aspects of surreal fiction, and will also have the opportunity to give and receive feedback on short pieces of writing.

Weird fiction contains elements of the eerie, the uncanny, and the surreal, and encourages high levels of playfulness and perceptiveness, two key elements of compelling storytelling. Weird fiction can also serve as a strong vehicle for writers from underrepresented groups to remake the world in ways that decenter white, colonial, hetero-cis-normative worldviews. Prompts will include the following topics:

• Weird micro-fiction
• Engaging the senses
• Weirdness at work (parsing the rituals of capitalism and labour)
• Gender euphoria/queer weirdos
• Reworking ancestral mythologies
• Dream logics

Participants will receive prompts the week before each session (except before the first meeting), and will be given a rota (workshopping schedule) in advance. Each participant will have at least one opportunity to submit one piece of writing (up to 2000 words) to the group, which will be discussed in-session by their peers, with additional feedback provided by the instructor. These submissions should be based on one or more of the prompts given in the workshop. Participants should be prepared to do the following homework between sessions: responding to writing prompts, reading one assigned piece of fiction, providing feedback to their peers.

This workshop is open to new fiction writers, as well as writers who already have a developed fiction practice. Participants should emerge from the workshop with one or two solid short story drafts, and a confidence in their ability to unsettle the status quo on the page.

H Felix Chau Bradley is the author of Personal Attention Roleplay (Metonymy Press), which was a finalist for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and the Kobo Rakuten Emerging Writer Prize in 2022; and the chapbook Automatic Object Lessons (House House Press). Their writing has appeared in carte blanche, ESPACE art actuel, the Humber Literary Review, Maisonneuve Magazine, the Montreal Review of Books, PRISM International, Weird Era, Xtra and elsewhere. They live in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal), and work as an editor for Metonymy Press, This Magazine, and Le Sigh. They were recently awarded QWF’s carte blanche Prize.