Writing Short Stories with Michelle Elvy

Want to improve your creative writing and get feedback from a published author? Then this workshop is for you.

In this practical session Michelle Elvy will guide you through a set of writing exercises to work through the essentials of short story writing. The session will include three main elements of short story writing: 1) character development / motivation, 2) setting / mood and 3) tension / pacing. At the centre of the discussion will be a focus around voice – yours and your characters'.

Michelle Elvy is a writer and editor based in Ōtepoti Dunedin. Her work has been widely published and anthologised, and her books include the everrumble (2019), long-listed for the Guardian’s Not-the-Booker Prize, and a new hybrid collection of stories, the other side of better (2021). Michelle is founder of National Flash Fiction Day and Flash Frontier: An Adventure in Short Fiction, and reviews editor of Landfall. She has co-edited the anthologies Best Small Fictions (since 2015), Bonsai: Best small stories from Aotearoa New Zealand (CUP 2018), Ko Aotearoa Tātou | We Are New Zealand (OUP 2020) and 'Love in the Time of COVID: A Chronicle of a Pandemic', which she is presently curating with Witi Ihimaera, with an anthology forthcoming 2023.

We are very happy Michelle is able to lead this workshop at short notice because Catherine Chidgey is unable to travel.