Writing the Macabre—Horror in Creative Nonfiction with Sayantani Dasgupta

Get Lit! Programs is a non-profit literary arts organization housed within Eastern Washington University. Our program is responsible for Get Lit! Festival, the region’s only annual week-long literary festival. Get Lit! has grown over the last twenty years from a single day of back-to-back readings to a four day celebration of literature that brings a diverse line up of highly sought-after authors to our region, while also highlighting our talented local literary community. The festival offers free and low cost readings, writing workshops, craft classes, poetry slams, panel discussions, literary happy hours, and much more. Get Lit! Programs also runs Writers in Residence, a program that places published authors in local schools to teach 10-week creative writing courses to students who may not normally have access to a creative writing curriculum. It is our mission, both in our festival programming and our educational outreach, to advance the arts, celebrate diversity, and empower creativity.

EWU's Get Lit! Programs

Join us for our nonfiction-horror craft class with Sayantani Dasgupta, author of Fire Gir, where we will learn to weave genre and reality!

Catalyst Building

Please come to room 303 in the Catalyst Building to join us for this craft class!Horror, as a literary theme, exists in every writing genre, be it supernatural, science fiction, fairy tales, folk lore, environmental nonfiction, and even memoir and dark comedy. Consuming horror can be an escapist and cathartic experience but writing it can be challenging given the weight of our daily, complex lives more so in light of the Covid-19 pandemic. This craft talk/workshop will study techniques used by authors as diverse as Ludmilla Petrushevskaya (fairy tales), Nathaniel Philbrick (narrative nonfiction), and Sonali Deraniyagala (memoir) to see how they incorporate horror within their writing. There will be writing prompts to help us dig into our own minds and memories so we may write true stories about even our most ordinary experiences that will still challenge the reader’s sense of the Self and the world.

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