Description
This class is part of our monthly genre series, Otherworldly October! Check out our other genre series classes for the month here and here.
How can a picture help us see into the unseen and inspire spooky or haunted stories? In this class, we will use old photos or other found images to explore writing fiction in the ekphrastic mode—writing that is inspired by visual art. The stories we create may be haunted in the literal sense or haunted metaphorically by the weight of history and memory.
We’ll also look at some examples of writing based on found images, from surrealist Andre Breton’s 1928 novel Nadja to Ransom Riggs’s 2011 Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. Students will then use a selection of photographs as inspiration to write their own short, haunted tales.
