Tumultuous times call for chroniclers who observe, distill, and reshape. “When reality is surreal, only fiction can make sense of it,” was the logline for the New York Times collection of pandemic short stories. We will hone these chronicling skills through exercises which tap the material around us to generate fiction and root it in a particular place and era, whether set in NYC today or a far-away land in the future. As seeds for new work, we will listen to naturally-occurring tales—like StoryCorps interviews—as well as collect them ourselves. Exercises and stories will be shared with the group. Course prerequisite: open eyes and ears.