Natalie Bakopoulos

Natalie Bakapoulos Natalie Bakopoulos is the author of The Green Shore (Simon & Schuster, 2012), and her work has appeared in Tin House, VQR, The New York Times, Granta, Glimmer Train, O. Henry Prize Stories, and various other publications. Along with Eileen Pollack and Jeremiah Chamberlin, she is the co-author of Creative Composition. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan, has received fellowships from the Camargo and MacDowell foundations, and was a 2015 Fulbright Fellow in Athens, Greece. She currently teaches at the University of Michigan and Wayne State University.



Fiction Workshop: The Art of Narration

“Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context of circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say”
—Vivian Gornick, from The Situation and the Story

“Narration is an act of translation. We aren’t recording a story, we’re creating it; and a defining element of the creation is the language we use, and our arrangement of it.” —Peter Turchi, from “You and I Know, Order is Everything”

This workshop will primarily focus on student work and the issues that arise from it, such as the art of the sentence, narration, voice, the development of emotional and dramatic stakes, building of character, choices of point of view and perspective, questions of pacing and structure, and so on. In short, we’ll be exploring how to tell a good story. The workshop will be mostly generative, but writers who are already in the middle of larger projects are also encouraged to apply. All levels welcome.