People speak of time as sensation, as a creature or an element with distinct and variable physical properties.  The clock goes around steadily; days pass; the pages of the calendar reliably turn.  And yet steady reliability is far from how time feels.  Time “flies”; it “drags”; a moment “feels like forever.”  The subjective departs from the objective; sensation prevails over fact.  In fiction, the microscopic and fleeting can dilate to occupy pages; years pass in a sentence; a life concludes in two beats.

Unfamiliar places warp and disquiet our “normal” sense of time—in reading as in life—and so we become differently susceptible to sensation, to time as sensation.  This workshop will delve into that susceptibility, that warping disquiet.  We’ll look closely at how time functions in various fictions, how the past impinges on the present, and at how disruptions of an orderly clock-bound impulse erupt into the unbound universal.