Fantasy Workshop: World Building (in-person seminar series)

Instructor: Warren Rochelle
$60 Members | $65 Nonmembers
Saturdays, 11/5/22 and 11/12/22 | 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. EDT

Before signing up for this in-person seminar, please read the following statement about requirements to enroll:

All in-person students must be fully vaccinated and provide WriterHouse staff with proof of vaccination. For fall term, masks are optional, but in the event of significant Covid-19 upticks, students must be prepared for the mask policy to change and to transition to a virtual platform if necessary. No refunds will be issued if in-person classes/seminars need to transition to an online format.

What is on the menu for tea-time in Hobbiton? Why is having a centaur as a weekend guest a “very serious thing indeed?” What’s a good time of day to meet with a vampire? What magical herbs might your next-door neighbor witch have in their garden? Details matter. They reveal a time, a place, a culture—all of which are vital in the creation of a believable fantasy world, whether it’s high or low fantasy, medievalesque or contemporary or ….

In this two-day workshop, we will discuss the answers to the above questions and other examples of world building presented in Tolkien, Lewis, Le Guin, and others, in both high and low fantasy. We will work on world building in the first class, and present and critique our work in the second class.

At the end of the seminar, the goal is for students to have made or written:

• Map (rough draft). Optional.
• The beginning of a story or a scene, in details that reveal some aspects of the imagined world and the people who inhabit it.

Warren Rochelle lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, and has just retired from teaching English at the University of Mary Washington. His short fiction and poetry have been published in such journals and anthologies as Icarus, North Carolina Literary Review, Forbidden Lines, Aboriginal Science Fiction, Collective Fallout, Queer Fish 2, Empty Oaks, Quantum Fairy Tales, Migration, The Silver Gryphon, Jaelle Her Book, Colonnades, and Graffiti, as well as the Asheville Poetry Review, GW Magazine, Crucible, The Charlotte Poetry Review, and Romance and Beyond. He had also published a critical work on Ursula K. LeGuin and academic criticism of speculative fiction in various journals.

His short story, “The Golden Boy,” was a finalist for the 2004 Spectrum Award for Short Fiction. His short story “Mirrors,” was published in Under A Green Rose, a queering romance anthology, from Cuil Press. “The Latest Thing,” a flash fiction story, was published in the Queer Sci Fi anthology, Innovation in 2020.

Rochelle is also the author of four novels: The Wild Boy (2001), Harvest of Changelings (2007), and The Called (2010), all published by Golden Gryphon Press, and The Werewolf and His Boy, published by Samhain Publishing in September 2016. The Werewolf and His Boy was re-released from JMS Books in August 2020. The Wicked Stepbrother and Other Stories was published by JMS Books in late September 2020.

He is presently working on a novella continuing one of the stories in his collection. He wanted to know what happened next.

Register by Mail: Print the Fall 2022 Registration Form and mail it with your payment to the address on the form.

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