About the Project
During each week of Winter Quarter, the Program in Creative Writing will circulate prompts inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron. Students can submit their responses in any genre (poetry, fiction, nonfiction, dramatic writing, etc.) and engage multiple mediums (text, video, images, and/or audio). Unlike the deserted villa sheltering ten Florentines in the original text, the home for our collective storytelling quarantine will be virtual. This means students may submit a response every week or come and go from the project as they please. We hope that the experience of telling each other stories will bring us closer together in new and surprising ways during this time of physical separation.
We welcome individual contributions and collaborative submissions (and we will actively facilitate this collaboration). We encourage stories that stray creatively from the material of the frame/prompts as well as any that engage with the original Decameron or the tales, myths, songs, and images that inspired Boccaccio. The full story collection will be tied together with a completed frame narrative and presented here on this site.
Decameron Redux is Maroon Cup point eligible. Submit your work to earn points for your house!
Join our email list for weekly prompts and more updates on ways to engage with the project.