Fail Like a Genius: Writing Better Prose Through Minor and Major Setbacks with Kristopher Jansma (in person at HVWC)

This two-hour Master Class will examine the lessons we can learn from the many failures of our greatest fiction writers. Students can generate fresh work through a series of hands-on exercises inspired by our discussions of the lost, unfinished, and just plain bad works of the authors we love most.

NB: This is a two hour Master Class in Prose capped at 10 students. It will take place in person at HVWC before Kristopher’s reading with Tracy O’Neill. We hope you will stay for the reading after the class. Please make sure not to come to the the Center before 12:30 since it will be closed until then.

Kristopher Jansma is the author of the forthcoming book Revisionaries:What We Can Learn from the Lost, Unfinished, and Just Plain Bad Work of Great Writers  (Quirk Books, 10/15) as well as the novel Our Narrow Hiding Places (Ecco, 8/13). His previous novels are Why We Came to the City and The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards and he is the winner of the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award and a Pushcart Prize, as well as the recipient of an honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award. His short fiction has been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Story, and ZYZZYVA. His nonfiction has been published in the New York Times, The Sun, The Millions, Salon, Real Simple, The Believer, and Electric Literature. Kristopher is an associate professor of English and the director of the creative writing program at SUNY New Paltz.