With lesson titles like 'exploring taboo and darkness', I was hooked. In Joyce Carol Oates’s new collection, she explores the idea that the bereaved wife is a kind of guilty party, who deserves everything — most of it violent — that comes her way. is in full domestic gothic mode.Like any bride, Abby Hayman is hopeful that she’s stepping into a new and happy life. A while back, a friend of mine recommended MasterClass - a series of online courses delivered by world-leading experts. Click inside this post to see the full subscription box review! In this short story in only 11 pages the reader comes to know and understand Simon and Mariella. New Masterclass: Joyce Carol Oates Teaches the Art of the Short Story . The first member of her family to finish school, Joyce Carol Oates won a scholarship to university and went on to become a remarkably prolific writer - she has two novels out this year. Oates’ view of art as mystic experience produces a rigid, constrictive framework for analysis that discriminates against individualism, personality, and the romantic tradition. She has a gift of creating characters that speak to you on many levels. “Art,” she contends, “is the sacralizing of its subject,” and therefore iconoclasm may be perceived as failure, limitation, or even neurosis. Everything Joyce Carol Oates writes is good. A young woman is haunted by a past she doesn’t understand in this brief but powerful story of domestic violence. Since then, several of the writing classes have popped up my Facebook feed, but none inspired me to click until Joyce Carol Oates appeared, promising to deliver fourteen classes on the art of the short story. In her latest novel, Oates (My Life as a Rat, 2019, etc.)