Short Story Masterclass with Stephanie Wambugu: Force & Brevity

In this craft seminar, students will read a single short story and bring the strategies gleaned from close reading to their own work of short fiction. In his distinctive and hypnotic story Going For a Beer, Robert Coover allows us to see the capaciousness of short fiction. In a handful of pages he condenses a marriage and a life into a sweeping narrative that makes us attentive to the way that time moves. We see just how much can be condensed in this short span.

The seminar will be devoted not only to how Coover achieves this effect but also to the ways we can write ambitious and forceful stories that feel as consequential as a longer work.

Stephanie Wambugu lives in New York City. She was born in Mombasa, Kenya and grew up in New England. Her work appears in The Nation, Granta, frieze, Bookforum and The Drift. Her debut novel Lonely Crowds was published by Little, Brown in 2025.

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