The Modern Gothic: Making Haunted Fictions for the 21st Century Zoom Seminar with Amber Sparks, Saturday, October, 11th, 2025

Saturday, October 11th, 2025 Live Seminar Via Zoom 10AM – 1PM Central Any questions about this class? Use the Chat Button (lower left) to talk with us. Instructor Amber Sparks is the author of an upcoming novel, Happy People Don’t Live Here, an upcoming short story collection, Did Parents In the Middle Ages Love Their Children? (both from Liveright/W.W. Norton), and four collections of short fiction, including And I Do Not Forgive You: Revenges and other Stories and The Unfinished World. Her fiction and essays have appeared in American Short Fiction, the Paris Review, Slate, Tin House, Granta, The Cut and elsewhere.   Everyone loves a good ghost story. But much like spotting a ghost in the modern world, it's trickier than it seems. How can you use the tricks, conventions, and tools that writers from Henry James to MR James to Shirley Jackson made standard, while writing something that's fresh, new, and thoroughly modern? We'll study the conventions of the gothic story, look at moder