Ross Showalter

Ross Showalter, fiction writer and essayist. Mr. Showalter’s stories, essays, and criticism have appeared in Electric Literature, Strange Horizons, Catapult, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. His work has been included in Entropy Magazine's Best of 2019 Online Fiction List.

Instructor Statement:

We tell stories to share what’s happening in our heads. My job as a writing teacher is to show how a story can be told, how people tell stories, and the choices available in telling stories. As a writer who works in both realism and surrealism, I’ve learned that, regardless of genre, stories that are successful are stories confident in their choices. Whether you have a story set in a dining room or in a distant land, I can show how small and big choices affect your narrative. You’ll learn how to identify the characteristics of a story, like point-of-view, characterization, and conflict, and you’ll use those characteristics to better understand how your own story functions. In examining how your stories work, I aim to guide you to understand how you can write a story with confidence.