CRWR 10200. Beginning Fiction Workshop. 100 Units.
This beginning-level fiction writing class uses a wide range of exercises and activities to help students discover their oral and written voices. Point of view, seeing-in-the-mind, gesture, audience, and other aspects of story are emphasized so that students can attempt to incorporate basic storytelling principles, forms, and techniques into their own writing. The major goals of the class are to guide students to discover and use the power of their individual voices, heighten their imaginative seeing and sense of imaginative options, and develop their overall sense for story structure and movement. Students select at least one of the assignments undertaken, rewrite it extensively, and attempt a complete story movement (short story or novel excerpt) of publishable quality
Terms Offered: Autumn, Winter, Spring
Prerequisite(s): Open bid through cMore
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 30200
CRWR 10300. Beginning Poetry Workshop. 100 Units.
Based on the premise that successful experimentation stems from a deep understanding of tradition, this course will help students gain a foundation in poetic constructions while encouraging risk-taking in expression and craft. It will expose students to ways that poets have both employed and resisted patterns in meter, line, and rhyme, and it will ask students to experiment with constraints as a way of playing with formal limitations in their own poems. Students will also explore innovations in diction, syntax, and voice, and apply what they learn from these investigations in workshop discussions. While delving into work by both canonical and emerging poets, students will draft and revise a significant portfolio of their own poems
Terms Offered: Autumn, Winter, Spring
Prerequisite(s): Open bid through cMore
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 30300
CRWR 10400. Beginning Creative Nonfiction. 100 Units.
In this workshop you are free to write about anything at all as long as you do so in an intimate and personal, rather than academic, voice. To that end you will try your hand at a true story—be it a memoir, travelogue, anecdote, character study, essay or argument—and submit it to your classmates, who will edit and critique it. Together we will refine our narratives and our prose, primarily by insisting on rigorous reflection and total honesty. Finding your voice takes time, but we have only ten weeks. So come to the first day of class with ideas and work already underway and ready to share. Be prepared to finish three total rewrites of your work in progress. We will also read and discuss published exemplars of the form. You will leave this class with a polished work sample to use for admission to more advanced courses
Terms Offered: Autumn, Winter, Spring
Prerequisite(s): Open bid through cMore
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 30400
CRWR 12000. Intermediate Fiction Workshop. 100 Units.
This intermediate fiction workshop will build on the fundamental elements of craft laid out in Beginning Fiction Writing and encourage you to begin cultivating your own aesthetic—not merely your own writing style, but more importantly your unique perspective on the world that necessarily informs and is informed by that style. We will read a selection of writers (like Raymond Carver, Paul Bowles, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Haruki Murakami, Lorrie Moore) who have very unique and identifiable voices, and then complement those readings with writing exercises that will help you contextualize, refine, and expand your emerging voice. As always, there will be an emphasis on the workshop process so that you are actively engaging with your own work and the work of your peers. For the course, you will complete one full-length story, which you will present for class critique, and then write a significant revision of that story, which you will either present for a second workshop or turn into me at the end of the quarter. Please come to class prepared to share your work, your ideas, your enthusiasm, and your honesty
Terms Offered: Autumn, Winter, Spring
Prerequisite(s): Consent of instructor
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 32000
CRWR 12103. Reading as a Writer. 100 Units.
How does a writer read? Not for a seminar, which is the first contradiction this course must face. A poet may cultivate distracted reading, a novelist may undertake research of scholarly scope and rigor. To read for writers is to read for generative use in writing. Two examples central to this course will be Lydia Davis' translation of Flaubert's Madame Bovary with her own 'Ten Stories from Flaubert' and Julian Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot, and Ted Berrigan's Sonnets read alongside the poems by Frank O'Hara which they imitate. Members of this class will learn to read creatively, and to perpetrate literary (mis)readings, including translation, parody, homage, recovery of lost voices and physical treatments of books. Students will write reflections upon the experience of reading literature from the perspective of a writer throughout the quarter, as well as experimenting with creative imitations of literary precursors
Terms Offered: Winter, Spring
Prerequisite(s): Open bid through cMore
Note(s): This course meets the general education requirement in dramatic, musical, and visual arts.
CRWR 12104. Introduction to Genres: Four Western Myths. 100 Units.
Consider the proposition that myths inform the fabric of our thought, from its structures to its particularities. If this is so, how do we understand the power these myths exert on our imaginations? Is this power always benign? Is there a malevolent shadow these myths can cast on our collective soul? Let’s examine four myths that arise out of the Western tradition. Two of them are old: the story of King Oedipus and the myth of the Holy Grail. The other two are newer: the story of The Wizard of Oz, the first complete American myth, and the story of “Star Wars,” as much a commentary on myth as a myth itself. Both of these newer myths have insinuated themselves into the popular imagination, in ways that the earlier myths are so ingrained they have the ability to be continually made novel. In this course, you will read texts that transmit these myths (Sophocles, Chrétiens de Troyes, and L. Frank Baum), you will consider films that depict these myths (Edipe Re by Pasolini, The Da Vinci Code by Howard, The Wizard of Oz by Fleming, and Star Wars by Lucas), you will examine theories that interpret these myths (Freud, Weston, Lévi-Strauss, and Campbell, respectively), and, finally, and perhaps most importantly, you will generate your own versions of these myths in various creative forms: poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, screenplays, and drama
Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Open bid through cMore
Note(s): This course meets the general education requirement in dramatic, musical, and visual arts.
CRWR 13000. Intermediate Poetry Workshop. 100 Units.
Poets often turn to the constraints and conventions of lyric forms (sonnets, sestinas, pantoums, etc.) as a way to generate material and experiment within a poetic tradition. The history of poetry, however, is as rich in genres as it is in forms. How is genre different from form? How do the two intersect? How have different genres evolved over time? In this course we will study various traditional genres (the elegy, the epistle, the dramatic monologue, for example) alongside such "non-poetic" genres as the essay, the obituary, and the travelogue, in the hopes of expanding and refining our encounter with the art
Terms Offered: Autumn, Winter, Spring
Prerequisite(s): Consent of instructor
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 33000
CRWR 14000. Intermediate Creative Nonfiction. 100 Units.
In this course we will examine what is creative about so-called creative nonfiction. What makes a personal essay or literary journalism different from straight journalism or editorial opinion? By what alchemy do we transmute facts into art? Through daily and weekly reading, writing, and editing you will learn to combine the facts of the matter at hand with your own retrospection and reflection. Your grade will be based on the artistry you display in balancing the factual with the personal and in recognizing how they can both complement and contradict one another. This is a workshop, so come to the first day of class with work underway and ready to share. Be prepared to write every day of the week and to finish two complete rewrites of an essay of fifteen or so pages. We will also read and discuss published exemplars of the form
Terms Offered: Autumn, Winter, Spring
Prerequisite(s): Consent of instructor
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 34000
CRWR 22100. Advanced Fiction Workshop. 100 Units.
This advanced fiction workshop is for students who have taken Beginning or Intermediate Fiction Writing and produced a body of work, large or small, that reflects their developing aesthetic and style. In our workshops, we will focus on the fundamentals of craft like language, voice, and plot and character development, but with an eye also on expanding our perspective on our subject matter and the form we use to write about it. To that end, we will read a selection of writers (like Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, Donald Barthelme, Alice Munro, George Saunders, Tim O’Brien) who experiment with form, who unravel the rules of a well-made story and reconstitute it in order to tell their own particular narratives in a more meaningful way. Our goal in this class is to create a constructive, critical atmosphere that facilitates and demands the process of revision, and that expands the horizon of expression for each student while also refining their emerging voice. For the course, you will complete one full-length story, which you will present for class critique, and then write a significant revision of that story, which you will either present for a second workshop or turn into me at the end of the quarter. Please come to class prepared to share your work, your ideas, your enthusiasm, and your honesty
Terms Offered: Autumn, Winter, Spring
Prerequisite(s): Consent of instructor
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42100
CRWR 23100. Advanced Poetry Workshop. 100 Units.
In this course, we will examine various formal, theoretical, and sociological currents in contemporary American poetry as a means of provoking and informing our own creative work in the lyric field. While the class will be a “writing workshop” first and foremost, we will also study recent books of poetry from a variety of contemporary “schools” at work in the fertile, sectarian, and maddeningly complex landscape of today’s lyric writing. We will also attend poetry readings by some of these authors here at the university in order to explore the world of contemporary verse as fully as possible. It is important to keep in mind, however, that this is ultimately a course about your work as a poet. Throughout the semester, we will read one another’s writing within the broad context of contemporary American poetics, and yet we will respect the solitary and idiosyncratic nature of the lyric enterprise as well
Terms Offered: Autumn, Winter, Spring
Prerequisite(s): Consent of instructor and prior experience with poetry writing
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 43100
CRWR 24100. Advanced Creative Nonfiction Workshop. 100 Units.
The goal of this workshop is to attempt the kind of nonfiction published by magazines aimed at the smart, general reader: the New Yorker, Harper's, and the Atlantic Monthly, as well as smaller journals. You may write a personal essay, argument, memoir, character study or travelogue, as well as a more journalistic profile of a person, place, or culture. We also welcome reportorial, researched, and investigative pieces. No matter what rubric your nonfiction falls under, we will help you to distinguish between what Vivian Gornick has called The Situation—that is, the plot, or facts at hand—and The Story, the larger, more universal meaning that arises naturally from these facts. By developing the two and by tying them more artfully you will make your piece as appealing as it can be to editors and a discerning audience. Come to the first day of class with ideas and work underway and ready to share. Be prepared to write every day and to finish three full revisions of your work in progress. We will also read and discuss successful published work. You will leave this class with a polished sample of your best work
Terms Offered: Autumn, Winter, Spring
Prerequisite(s): Consent of instructor
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 44100
CRWR 26100. Writing the Graphic Novel. 100 Units.
This course provides for the development of raw ideas into storytelling in graphic form, from the most simplistic scrawl and doodle to multi-page, complex comics. Students will develop graphic narratives of varying lengths, culled from their own sketches, notes, and memories gathered throughout the class. A wide variety of storytelling and graphic “languages”—spanning from hieroglyphics to Hitchcock—will be discussed and dissected, as students employ a variety of tools and approaches to build a language of symbols and icons entirely their own
Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Consent of instructor
CRWR 27103. Advanced Screenwriting. 100 Units.
This course requires students to complete the first draft of a feature-length screenplay (at least ninety pages in length), based on an original idea brought to the first or second class. No adaptations or partially completed scripts are allowed. Weekly class sessions include reading of script pages and critique by classmates and instructor
Instructor(s): J. Petrakis Terms Offered: Winter, Spring
Prerequisite(s): TAPS 27311 and consent of instructor based on eight-page writing sample in screenplay format
Note(s): Class limited to eight students
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 47103,TAPS 25500