Variant Literature is excited to announce Write Weirder Fiction: On Leaning into Your Own Strangeness, a free fiction workshop led by Brandon Ahmad Haffner. Register here.
Publishers and editors often ask for “new” and “surprising” work they’ve “never seen before.” But how do we actually do that? Given marketplace pressure to write sellable fiction with clear “comps” and the antiquated traditions of many MFA workshops, it can be difficult to find the courage and the right tools to create truly “surprising” work.
By taking a close look at the strategies of fiction writers whose style is uniquely their own, this workshop will help demonstrate where “surprise” in fiction comes from and guide us to a place where we feel ready to permit our own strangeness onto the page.
Thursday, June 18th, 2026
Time: 4:00 PM PT / 6:00 PM CT / 7:00 PM ET
Duration: 90 minutes
Live on Zoom
Free to attend. Click here to register.
Brandon Ahmad Haffner earned his MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and his BA from Indiana University in Bloomington. His stories appear or are forthcoming in the Cincinnati Review, Sewanee Review, Harvard Review, New Orleans Review, Carolina Quarterly, and other journals. He has received artist-in-residence fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, VCCA France, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts & Sciences. He has also received fellowships from International Literary Seminars in Tbilisi and Nairobi and from the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. From 2019 to 2023, he chaired the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature. He edits fiction for Variant Lit and contributes to The Richmonder. Currently he is an associate professor of creative writing at Longwood University and lives in Richmond, Virginia.
Variant Literature is a digital literary magazine and small press founded in 2019. Variant publishes poetry, short stories, and flash prose, and is committed to supporting diverse voices and writers at all stages of their careers.