How to Tell a Story

Led by award winning author and University of Alabama writing professor Sarah Cheshire, this interactive talk will explore some unorthodox ways that writers structure their stories. Inspired by the hoarder house in which she was raised, Professor Cheshire’s work explores tensions between emptiness, excess, and decomposition through found text, fragmentation, and genre-bending narrative forms. The event will include a brief guided creative exercise (you’re gonna write a little bit on your phone), using ephemera to prompt self-reflection and non-linear storytelling.

Sarah Cheshire is a full time instructor at the University of Alabama, where she has designed and taught courses including Narrative Hybridity, Contemporary Southern Gothicism, and Creative Collaboration. While pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama, she served as nonfiction editor for the nationally-acclaimed Black Warrior Review literary magazine. She is the author of the award-winning novella “Unravelings” (Etchings Press, 2017), and her work been published in a variety of journals, including The Heavy Feather Review, The Rumpus, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Creative Nonfiction, Scalawag Magazine, RiverTeeth, and Brevity. In 2018, she was awarded the AWP Kurt Brown Prize for Creative Nonfiction and was a finalist for the Disquiet International Prize.