Craft Seminar: Confronting Taboo with Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
Craft Seminar: Confronting Taboo with Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
2 Sessions: Sundays, June 15 + 22
1:00-3:00pm ET
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
Called a “twisted, twisty genius” by Vulture and “ferociously intelligent” by The New York Times, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is a PEN Faulkner and Radcliffe award winning author of three novels. This two-part class is open to writers with any level of experience.
Confronting taboo is a fundamental aspect of powerful storytelling and an invitation to write our bravest, most honest work; but doing so requires us to engage those parts of ourselves and our characters that make us uneasy, restless, and fearful. In this two-part craft seminar, you will be guided through readings, exercises, and small group discussions designed to help you navigate the discomfort that taboo elicits when you are sitting before the page. The goal of the seminar is to expand the limits of your thinking and your craft and to develop the courage to ask: Who am I? And, What do I truly want to say? PDFs of readings will be provided in advance.
Workshop Highlights:
Learn to identify emotional obstacles that are blocking the work
Learn strategies for working with fear
Develop characters with complex psyches
Develop strategies for engaging with place, space, and landscape to deepen character interiority
Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi is an Los-Angeles born Iranian novelist and non-fiction writer. She is the author of Call Me Zebra, named a Best Book of the Year by over twenty publications and the winner of the 2019 PEN/Faulkner Award, the John Gardner Award, and long listed for the PEN/Open Book Award. Her other novels include Savage Tongues and Fra Keeler, for which she received a Whiting Writers' Award and a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" award. A recipient of fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University, Fulbright, the Aspen Institute, MacDowell, and Art Omi, her work has appeared twice in The Best American Short Stories (Ed. by Min Jin Lee and Lauren Groff), The Sewanee Review, The Yale Review, The New York Times, and The Paris Review among other places. She is the Dorothy G. Griffin College Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.
