Work Stories: Exploring Character, Culture, Environment

There’s love and death. And then there’s work.

Think of the stories you tell and the stories you hear from the people around you in the course of any given week. What percentage of these stories is work-related?

The topic of work is an endless source for us of amusement, frustration, joy, dread, love and hate, triumph and tragedy. Work binds us together and tears us apart, gives our lives meaning and takes it away. It is a major component of our existence, standing between us and everything else in our lives that isn’t work. It is somehow, simultaneously, fact and dream. And it is an incomparable subject for storytelling.

Participants in this workshop will read and discuss published stories and their own daily writing on the subject of work, exploring the ways in which work experience—their own and others—can serve as a pathway into the creation of meaningful fiction.