The Writer's Studio: Mental Illness and the First Person

On May 22, please join us for Mental Illness and the First Person, a Writer's Studio workshop hosted by Rose Himber Howse.

Some of literature’s most storied narrators are also its most afflicted. How can modern fiction writers respond to this tradition without glorifying or flattening characters who are hamstrung by their own minds? How do we parse the line between condition and personhood, and what impact does that have on voice, plot, and theme? To answer these questions, we’ll study the work of Adam Haslett and Otessa Moshfegh, and then turn to a series of exercises intended to enrich participants’ own work.

Rose Himber Howse is a queer writer from North Carolina. She is a current Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University and was a 2021-2022 Steinbeck Fellow in fiction at San Jose State University. She’s also a recent graduate of the MFA program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she served as fiction editor of The Greensboro Review. Rose’s fiction and essays appear in Joyland, The Carolina Quarterly, YES! Magazine, Sonora Review, and elsewhere.