
Writing Family
Instructor: Noor Rehman
"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
We often assume that love and understanding make the basis of a family, and yet family life also offers fertile grounds for conflict and, as a consequence, storytelling. Parents, children, and relatives negotiate their identity, 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 respond to their adult relationships and to life itself. At the end of the day, people don’t only respond to relations and events, but observe things through the experiences they internalize from their parents and families.
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 drift of characters in their stories? How do writers trace consistency in the emotional landscape of their characters and make transformations and reversals possible and believable? Why is it important to understand the emotional/psychological undercurrents behind the actions of characters? In exploring these questions, the workshop will focus on a number of short stories and explore emotional conflicts within the family constellation.

About Noor
Hailing from South Waziristan, Wana, Noor Rehman completed his bachelor's degree in English Literature at Government College University Lahore and pursued an MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) from the University of Central Florida, Orlando, as a Fulbright Scholar. He is part of the Faculty of Languages and Literature at the University of Central Punjab (UCP) and is currently working on his debut novel, Clay Bodies, set in the Tribal Areas of Pakistan during the 1970s and 1980s.