Undergraduate

In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway tells us that if a writer knows enough about what he is writing, “he may omit things that he knows, and the reader […] will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.” It sounds good, of course, and common sensical (no one needs to write everything they know about what they know!), but still: easier said than done. What exactly should we leave out when we write a story/a scene/a piece of dialogue? How do we decide what makes a detail crucial, and what’s best left unsaid? How much should we trust our readers? Through close reading, in-class exercises, and rigorous editing of your own writing, this workshop will help you acquire a better sense of what should go on the page and what might better be communicated between the lines. Readings will likely include Agota Kristof, Isaac Babel, Zadie Smith, Augusto Monterroso, Toni Morrison, Yiyun Li, and Patrik Ourednik.

This creative writing course, focused on the art of writing and reading poetry, addresses the fundamentals of craft. Through creative writing exercises and assignments, students will explore precise imagery, unpredictable figuration, intentional musicality, the use of line and stanza, and the relationship between form and content. Students can expect to read deeply, respond creatively, and to engage with their peers in a workshop setting. This course is designed both for writers with a passion for the genre and those who are interested in gaining experience. Successful completion of Poetry Workshop I is a prerequisite for enrollment in Poetry Workshop II.

Might there be a kind of poem that acts like a parasite latched on to a host body? A poem whose very life is the fusion of various sources, voices, discourses? This poetry workshop invites students to read and write poetry that, either overtly or subtly, engages with other texts. We’ll examine ways that poems create intertextual relationships (e.g. quoting, voicing, alluding, echoing, stealing, sampling, imitating, translating…) and test out these methods in our own writing. Students should expect to engage with the basic question of how their work relates to other poets and poems. Expect to read a substantial amount of work by modern and contemporary poets, submit new original poems for workshop, complete intertextual writing exercises, participate in discussion forums with both initial response papers and follow-up comments, critique peers’ work, and submit a final portfolio. A substantial amount of class time will be spent workshopping student work.

Brevity is the soul of wit, and in some definitions, it’s also an essential characteristic of lyric poetry. In this course, we’ll read diverse examples of relatively brief poetic forms, such as  epigrams, aphorisms, haikus, tankas, prose poems, sonnets, and other “micro” or “tiny” poems. We’ll also consider the way short forms can be linked to form longer, iterative poetic sequences. Finally, we’ll also practice revising poems for economy: that is, cutting as many words as possible from every draft. Using our readings, students will try out several short forms, revise work, and complete short critical writing exercises. 

Many creative writers who are conversant in more than one language find that literary translation offers an affinity mode of writing. Employing skills that span language study, literary analysis, and creative writing, literary translation offers young writers a way of inhabiting other voices, sharpening their writing without the burden of invention, and reading far beyond the contemporary American canon. But how do you get started translating? This studio will offer students the space to explore their sensibilities as readers so that they may discover new international literature that speaks to them as writers. We’ll start with research activities that seek to survey current literary practices in the language or world area that each student is interested in. Then, we’ll read our way into a few potential projects by bringing in tools of critical reception, close reading, and literary analysis. Finally, we’ll embark on the first phases of translation praxis through language work and creative imagining in English. Students will leave the studio with an invested project that they may continue independently or within the structure of a translation workshop.

How do we hear the voice of a text when we’re reading in another language? What makes a voice intrinsically itself? And where can we locate those qualities in the language that the voice speaks in? This workshop explores what translators read for when constructing a narrative or poetic voice in English. Students will select a long-form literary text to translate, and we will work through the drafting process by breaking the text down into short extracts that we will close-read together each week in class. In doing so, we’ll listen through the translation for evidence of how the source wants to sound, in order to discern its voice, its tendencies, and how it behaves in language. Our own translation work will be accompanied by assigned readings that represent a range of contemporary world literature in translation, paying attention to what the translator does with English to sketch a cohesive voice. We’ll build toward the polished translation of a short prose text or a selection of poems, which students will submit as part of a final portfolio, along with a translator’s note that provides critical commentary on their reading of the source text and their treatment of it in translation.

This creative writing course, focused on the art of writing and reading literary nonfiction, addresses the fundamentals of craft. Through creative writing exercises and assignments, students will explore narrative, voice, imagery, and the relationships between ethics and art, form and content, and the self and the subject matter. Students can expect to read deeply, respond creatively, and to engage with their peers in a workshop setting. This course is designed both for writers with a passion for the genre and those who are interested in gaining experience. Successful completion of Literary Nonfiction Workshop I is a prerequisite for enrollment in Literary Nonfiction Workshop II.

This creative writing course, focused on the art of writing and reading literary nonfiction, addresses the fundamentals of craft. Through creative writing exercises and assignments, students will explore narrative, voice, imagery, and the relationships between ethics and art, form and content, and the self and the subject matter. Students can expect to read deeply, respond creatively, and to engage with their peers in a workshop setting. This course is designed both for writers with a passion for the genre and those who are interested in gaining experience. Successful completion of Literary Nonfiction Workshop I is a prerequisite for enrollment in Literary Nonfiction Workshop II.

According to Mel Brooks, “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.” It isn’t easy to argue with Brooks, yet there exist numerous wildly successful marriages between violence and comedy for which his maxim doesn’t fully account. In this class, we will explore such marriages—works by Helen Garner, Juan Pablo Villalobos, Laura Vasquez, Daniil Kharms, Franz Kafka, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Isaac Babel, Ralph Ellison, and more—and we’ll attempt to better understand their success. In the process, we’ll seek to develop a clearer sense of the twisting border that separates comedic from tragic violence. Students will read the assigned works closely, discuss them with rigor, and write violent and comic fiction of their own.

All excellent fiction is made of strong sentences, strong strings of words that tempt us to linger even as they push us toward the next strong string. This class will focus on how to make such sentences. We’ll read exemplary fiction by various authors—Garielle Lutz, Lydia Davis, Gayl Jones, Paul Beatty, J.D. Salinger, Jose Emilio Pacheco, and more—and discover and discuss how their sentences operate. We’ll do exercises, in and out of class, to master our intentions. We will read student sentences and take them apart. We will force student sentences to box and do yoga and sleep and sing opera. We will smash them up and twist them to find their strengths. If they have no strengths, we will put them to death, and feed their cold bones to other, better sentences in need of more calcium. We will find all the fun and have it.