Making Strange
Flannery O’Connor once said of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis: “The truth is not distorted here, but rather distortion is used to get at the truth.” The techniques of defamiliarization, or what the Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky called “making strange,” can spark fresh and thrilling possibilities in any writer’s prose. In this workshop, a range of writing prompts, in-class exercises, and conversations will encourage each participant to investigate these possibilities. As well as generating and sharing work in progress, we’ll look at published fiction that may inspire our own inventions and give us the courage to try something unexpected.
Leni Zumas won the 2019 Oregon Book Award for her national bestselling novel Red Clocks, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Neukom Prize for Speculative Fiction. Red Clocks was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and was named a Best Book of 2018 by The Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, and the New York Public Library. Zumas is also the author of Farewell Navigator: Stories and the novel The Listeners. She lives near Portland, Oregon, and directs the MFA program at Portland State University.