The Story Workshop Reader ISBN: 0-932026-26-5 pp., 499 List Price: $10.95

Introductory Note

If the writing of our country is to change so that it can express, in imaginative ways, the actuality of our life, who we are and can be, it is the writers who must change--and discover themselves and be discovered. The contributors to this volume are part of the Story Workshop movement in Chicago (and in other parts of the country now). Their stories--their fiction and their journalism and other writings--have startled and delighted writers, educators, reviewers and teachers from all over the country. They provide a new perspective for the discovery and development of imaginative perception and voice--personal, cultural and literary--for people from all parts of our national life.

Most of the stories in this book have been selected from well-known Story Workshop publications, with new stories from some of the represented authors. The previously published stories come from f1, Don't You Know There's a War On?, It Never Stopped Raining. Several stories from Angels In My Oven have been incorporated in this edition. The teen works are selected from f1, Look What's Happening, Baby, and Homemade Bread, and were written in Story Workshop classes conducted in public, private, parochial and alternative schools by writers whose stories also appear in this book.

The words and images and events of the PLAY sections were taken directly from Story Workshop activity. In each PLAY a Story Workshop director has chosen the words, images and events and put his or her sense of movement to their service. They are to be read as a poem or a story with a movement of their own.

The pages with three words are taken wholly from the exercise called three-words. They give the response and sense of word, voice and movement aside from any conventionalization of meaning.

The stories in this book have the clarity and excitement of seeing and voice that characterize an authentic literature.

John Schultz,
Editor, Professor Emeritus and former Chairman,
Fiction Writing Department, Columbia College Chicago

About the Story Workshop Reader and the Story Workshop Approach:

Story Workshop Anthologies of Student Writing--such as The Story Workshop Reader, The Best of Hair Trigger, and the annual Hair Trigger--have received the following reviews from writers, teachers, and educators:

"Both books [The Story Workshop Reader and Angels In My Oven] are fascinating and impressive evidence of the success of your [Story] Workshop methods. A sense of life, a sense of literary process being ripened and developed quickens nearly every piece I read. These are clearly students bringing the best of their powers to bear on the writing task while those powers are being extended in a most wonderful variety of directions. The discipline rises from the vigorous immersion of the writers with their material--as it should." -R.V. Cassill, Brown University Author of Doctor Cobb's Game and The Goss Women

"I've been very impressed with some of Schultz's [Story Workshop] techniques, and have been using them in my beginning writer's class this fall to a limited degree--and have had the most responsive and productive class I've ever had. Needless to say I'll be going into it much more thoroughly next time I teach the course....I'm enthusiastic...especially about the stressing of creativity over amateur criticism." -Oakley Hall, Director, Program of Writing University of California, Irvine

"It's the kind of writing that makes me stop what I'm doing, pick up the book, and set off to find a colleague to share it with." -Robert F. Hogan, Former Executive Secretary National Council of Teachers of English

"The Freshman English section of f1 will astound anyone who has ever had to teach or take that agonizing course." -Chicago Review