C.J.Hribal: You Want It Darker – Grappling with the Dark in Poetry and Fiction (January 2019)

Writers are “supposed” to write likeable characters with narrative arcs that bend towards, if not justice, at least redemption. But what if things instead bend sinister, descend into the dark, and possibly stay there? How does one write poetry or fiction that engages with the calamitous, the violent, the pessimistic, the tragic, while avoiding the gratuitous?