Thursdays on the Stoop is a series of free, virtual writing workshops led for and by our community members. With topics ranging from generative prompts to editing strategies, these informal workshops are sure to shake up your Thursday routine. RSVP below to get the link.

A ghost is an amorphous thing, but a haunted house is a construction. The heavy urns, the veranda, the patterned carpet, the warm fireplace, the blue room, the library’s iron stairs: all make Eleanor Vance feel “like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster” in Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. How do we make wicked houses come alive in prose? How do we guarantee their physical construction to envelop the reader’s mind? In this one-hour free session, we will discuss the craft of building a haunted house in three parts: the physical construction, how to manipulate the mood of literary space, and finally, how to use contemporary culture or personal experience to adapt the classic framework to your own artistic endeavors. Examples will be given from writers like Gaston Bachelard, Edith Wharton, and Jamil Jan Kochai. Through the hour, writing prompts will be paired with these prose examples, so writers will leave with three generated elements to ultimately revise together into a future haunted house story. This is a supportive and relevant class for anyone writing the mood of an unhappy or evil domestic space. Prose writers of all genres are welcome.

Zinnia Smith’s work is published with TSR: The Southampton Review, East, Voicemail Poems, and Peach Mag, among others. She’s included in the speculative anthology WORLDS IN WHICH ed. by Fargo Nissim Tbakhi. She was the 2018 recipient of Fugue's writing contest in prose, and a semi-finalist for both the American Short Fiction's American Short(er) Fiction writing contest and the Ralph Angel Poetry Prize by Foundlings Press. She received a 2024 Mass Cultural Council Grant for Creative Individuals. www.zinniasmith.com