Fiction Workshop w/Kathy

Hi, and welcome to InkWell’s new online workshop space! Every Wednesday at 4 pm, we’ll be recapping our workshops and posting a writing prompt here.

During today’s workshop, our first using videoconferencing, I had a lot of fun hearing everyone’s quarantine names and playing a word game.

We read a beautiful story by Julia Alvarez, called “Snow,” about a young girl arriving in New York from the Dominican Republic during the Cuban missile crisis. You can download and read the story here. I suggest you take a few minutes to think about the atmosphere Alvarez creates in the piece, and how she does it.

We discussed the story and then did some writing. Here is the prompt we used:

Write about a world that’s foreign to you (or your character). The piece could be about immigration, about travel, it could be a sci-fi story set on another planet, or about life during the current pandemic. Think about evoking the five senses when describing the setting and about the sixth sense, atmosphere, or how your character feels about their new world.

Please post your writing below!