Writing Family
Instructor: Noor Rehman
We often assume that love and understanding form the basis of a family, yet close relations also offer a fertile ground for conflict and, as a consequence, storytelling. Parents, children, and relatives negotiate their identities, desires, fears, and needs within the family matrix. Given how people are raised and treated, they may feel prompted to obey, betray, withdraw, or rebel against their parents and partners. The beliefs and actions of parents have a lasting impact on their children, shaping how they eventually respond to their adult relationships and to life itself. At the end of the day, people do not only respond to relationships and events; they also perceive things through the prism of their internalized past.
This workshop aims to engage with questions surrounding conflict in family life and its representation in fiction: How do characters negotiate their needs, desires, and conflicts? How do writers portray conflicted emotions and use them to consolidate the identity and trajectory of characters in their stories? How do writers maintain consistency in the emotional landscape of their characters while making transformations and reversals possible and believable? Why is it important to understand the emotional and psychological undercurrents behind the actions of characters? In exploring these questions, the workshop will focus on a number of short stories and examine emotional conflicts within the family constellation.
"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
About Noor
Hailing from South Waziristan, Wana, Noor Rehman completed his Bachelor’s degree in English Literature at Government College University, Lahore. He later pursued an MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) from the University of Central Florida, Orlando, as a Fulbright Scholar. He is currently part of the Faculty of English at Forman Christian College University (FCCU) and is querying literary agents for his debut novel, Love and Other Sorrows, set in the Tribal Areas of Pakistan during the 1970s and 1980s.