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• The Honest Island: Greg Jackson

  • When
    June 26, 2025
  •  
    10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
  • Location
    REMOTE

  Register

  Peter Hoppock launches the summer series with a discussion of Greg Jackson's  breathtaking high-wire act of writing craftsmanship, The Honest Island,  which was first published in the New Yorker in November 2024. 

   The Honest Island by Greg Jackson  chronicles the last few days a man named Craint spends on an island where he doesn’t speak the native language, has no idea how he got there, and doesn’t remember his life before arriving there. Tension builds after he befriends a new visitor to the island and begins in earnest to question who he is, why he is there, and what possible future he might have. His struggles to understand mirror the reader’s struggles to understand what the truth is.

  Peter Hoppock will discuss how the author blends the exterior setting in poetic evocations of place with provocative explorations of the protagonist's interiority as he struggles to reconnect with his identity.

  Hosted by: Sam Farler

  DOWNLOAD DISCUSSION MATERIALS HERE:

  • The Honest Island
  • Notes on The Honest Island
  • Greg Jackson- Deborah Treisman Interview  

  BIO: Peter Hoppock kicks off the Summer Sessions calendar for the fifth year in a row. He has published numerous short stories and novellas in a variety of literary magazines, both online and print, including Adelaide, Curbside Splendor, The Write Launch, Dillydoun Review, and more. He has co-edited two anthologies of short stories and creative non-fiction for OCWW, published by Windy City Press: Turning Points (2021), and Meaningful Conflicts (2023).  His short story Blues For Rashid was selected by Palasatrium for their June 2023 publication, and his novella Precipice  won honorable mention in the 2024 Black Orchid Novella Award Contest. 

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• Supernova: Kosiso Ugwueze

  • When
    July 24, 2025
  •  
    10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
  • Location
    REMOTE

  Register

  Sam Farler will lead a discussion of Kosiso Ugwueze’s short story Supernova.

  Supernova is the story of a suicidal young woman who is kidnapped and held for ransom in the jungle of northern Nigeria. 
  It explores the dark shadow early childhood abandonment has cast across her life, alternating between the stages of the kidnapping and key events of her life.  Noteworthy is how the story treats childhood trauma without being heavy-handed.

  Ugwueze was born in Nigeria and raised in Southern California.  She earned an MFA from Johns Hopkins and has served as managing editor of the Hopkins Review.  For Supernova Ugwueze received the 2023 New England Review Award for Emerging Writers.  The story was included in Best American Short Stories 2023.

  Hosted by: Anne Beall

  DOWNLOAD DISCUSSION MATERIALS HERE:

  • Supernova
  • Kosiso Ugwueze Bio

  BIO: Sam Farler is a writer based in St. Charles.  His focus is the impact of trauma and mental illness on perceptions of self and others.  He has been writing full-time since 2018, completed a first memoir in 2024, and is currently working on a second.  He has taken craft classes and participated in writing workshops at the University of Texas, Austin; University of Chicago; StoryStudio Chicago; Storm Writing School; The Loft and others.

  He volunteers teaching coping skills for adult children of parents with borderline personality disorder. An active member and OCWW Zoom host since 2020, Farler serves as project manager and a critique group leader for our 80th anniversary anthology.  

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• North Country - The Edge of the World: Roxanne Gay

  • When
    August 21, 2025
  •  
    10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
  • Location
    REMOTE

  Register

  Roxane Gay’s short story North Country, a 2012 Best American Short Stories selection, focuses on Kate a young African- American academic grappling with the loss of her stillborn child. The North Country’s wintry backdrop at once represents the natural setting and her state of mind; it is an apt metaphor for disconnection, isolation, and the loneliness of grief. Gay effectively employs other craft elements such as scene and summary, theme, character, and plot to evoke emotion and insight in the reader. Finally, Gay’s dry humor and raw honesty make this story poignant and unforgettable. 

  Roxane Gay is an American essayist, fiction writer, editor and cultural critic known for her witty and empathetic style. Her writing is concerned with the themes of feminism, race, gender identity, sexual violence and body image. She is the author of  best-selling collections Ayiti (2011) and Bad Feminist (2014), a 2014 novel An Untamed State, the short story collection Difficult Women (2017), and the memoir Hunger (2017) for which she was a National Book Critics Circle Finalist in Autobiography.  

  Hosted by: Della Leavitt

  DOWNLOAD DISCUSSION MATERIALS HERE:

  • North Country
  • Supplemental Materials

  BIO: Moira Sullivan has been participating in writing groups since 1993. She hosted a community open mic at the former Café Express in Evanston and continues to write poetry and short stories. She served as an associate editor for “RHINO: the poetry forum,” and participating in the Highlights Program. In graduate school, she collected political poetry in Brazil and became a professional translator and marketer at a global humanitarian association. Her short story The Pawnbroker’s Deal appeared in the collection titled Further Persons Imperfect (2007). Her story Caught in the Net appeared in Turning Points, the 75th Anniversary OCWW Anthology (2021) and her story Man of the House appeared in OCWW’s Meaningful Conflicts: The Art of Friction anthology (2023). An OCWW member since 2018, she currently serves on the promotion committee and on the board as Secretary. These days you might find her working on a sci-fi novel at a local Evanston cafe as a member of the 2024-25 cohort in the “Novel in a Year Program” sponsored by Story Studio.

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