“Writing Your Edge” will challenge you to raise the stakes in your own creative life. Robert Arellano leads an exploration on the ‘state of the story’ at its cutting edge—and asks you to consider where your writing might benefit from visiting the uncharted boundaries. Selections from recent ‘breakout’ narratives will face off against timeless examples of literary innovation—including a few surprising classics from close to home in Oregon. Writing metafiction, creative nonfiction, or pulp originals like noir; building inner conflict, intensifying struggle, rendering atmosphere ravishing and raising the stakes—whether you’re discovering new territory in genre literature or rewriting the rules of the sentence, Arellano will offer pointers for where to go out dancing on the edge of narrative experimentation.

Robert Arellano earned bachelor’s and graduate degrees at the Brown University Program in Creative Writing, where he also taught fiction workshops for 10 years as a visiting lecturer. His stories have been published in Tin House, The Believer and The Village Voice and selected for recent anthologies like New Jersey Noir, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, and The Brown Reader. He is the author of six novels, most recently Curse the Names and the 2010 Edgar Allan Poe Award-finalist Havana Lunar. He is a 2014 Oregon Literary Fellow and Professor of Creative Writing at Southern Oregon University.