Putting the Strange in Your Story

A man made famous for playing a vampire on TV is haunted by a real ghost; something is wrong at a contemporary boarding school that feels like it’s stuck in the Victorian era; a giant man swims upstream in an ice-cold river. The unusual is thriving in contemporary storytelling. Is art imitating our strange times? We will look at work from writers such as Kelly Link, Helen Oyeyemi, and Yoko Ogawa, and consider how the strange can get us closer to the truth. Expect to begin a new story.