During my sabbatical, I had the opportunity to be a guest writer for a weekend at the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop -- an outstanding workshop for writers of science fiction, fantasy and horror literature, run each summer out of St. Anselm college in New Hampshire (a place you may recognize from the recent presidential primaries) by my former editor from Dell Books, Jeanne Cavelos.

Today, Odyssey posted their latest podcast: a recording of my guest lecture on "Humor in Fantasy Writing" from July 2007. Here's the full description of the event from their site:

Michael A. Arnzen was a guest lecturer at Odyssey 2007. Michael led the class in a wild exercise that revealed some of the qualities that make us laugh and discussed the fascinating connections between humor and horror. In this fun and illuminating podcast, Mike explores the characteristics of humor. What qualities are necessary for humor? When is the weird and gross funny? Mike reads his amazing story "Domestic Fowl" and discusses how you can develop a comic perspective, how to be funny without trying, and how to make humor arise organically out of your story. How is a funny story different than a joke? What joys does comedy provide the reader?

You can download this lecture on the Odyssey Podcast page, or even subscribe to all the Odyssey lecture podcasts on iTunes.

If any of your students is (or if you yourself are) a writer of fantasy stories, horrific tales, or science fiction odysseys, you ought to consider the Odyssey workshop. We get a number of Odyssey graduates in our Master's program in Writing Popular Fiction at Seton Hill, so I can attest that it is not only a well-run and fun program, but that it also produces great writers who are very savvy about the genre and publishing.
--
I'll no doubt be writing a lot about horror genre writing workshops this term, since I'm running an undergrad course in Horror & Suspense this term. See also my horror writing blog, The Goreletter, for a post on this, Odyssey, and other Horror Writing Courses & Academics in 2008.

You can ping this entry by using http://blogs.setonhill.edu/mt/mt_tb-awoisdlkfj.cgi/11490 .