Undergraduate

The very inception of nonfiction as a genre is irrevocably intertwined with the confessional mode. From St. Augustine to Rousseau, from Thomas DeQuincy to Maggie Nelson, from Mary McLane to Sarah Viren, Literary Nonfiction can hardly be conceived of without the sincere offering of personal vulnerability known as the confession. But what makes a confession a literary? What is considered a worthy revelation? What is the line between vulnerability and voyeurism? And how should we deal with nonfictional inheritance of guilt, religion and “Truth”? 

This course is designed to tackle these questions both abstractly and concretely by reading from the masters and applying these concepts directly to the essays produced within the workshop setting. Students will be expected to turn in 2-3 confessional essays, alongside reading responses and workshop letters throughout the course of the quarter. 

Some of the most compelling pieces of writing across all genres deal with, and often feature, the concept of Evil at their center. Whether they address it directly through a character, like Bulgakov’s Professor Woland in Master and Margarita, or as a concept in Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. Whether the narratives are anchored in the concreteness of real crime, like in Capote’s In Cold Blood, and sometimes they revel in the abstraction of sin, as in Milton’s Paradise Lost, they always dare to ask, “What and why is evil?” Why might character cower at the thought of that which awaits us in the dark, like in HP Lovecraft’s Dagon, and why might a real 19-year-old woman in Bute, Montana anticipate it with bated breath, like in Mary MacLane’s I Await the Devil’s Coming. This course is designed to explore this question alongside authors who devoted their lives to understanding the role of evil in literature and life, to contemplating its necessity, its appeal, its frivolity, and its betrayal. The course will be divided into three sections, each section devoted to a specific genre during which two to three texts will be explored, discussed, and analyzed in class, and at the end of which one analysis paper will be due, culminating in a final analytical and creative piece. 

Many are read to as children, some even learn to read before they show any interest in speaking, but most—regardless of language, background or nationality—will first experience stories by overhearing them. Most children’s first literature, in fact,  will come from grandparents, cousins and close friends retelling bits and pieces of their everyday lives. Later, when these children grow up to be writers, they will ask themselves questions about the mechanics and ethics of how to retell these stories that both are and are not our own. 

From Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago,” to Brian Doyle’s “Thirsty for the Joy,” from John Hershey’s “Hiroshima” and Art Spiegelman’s “Mouse” to Rebecca Skloot’s “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” the world of nonfiction writing is rife with second, third, and fourth hand stories in which the essayist must learn to negotiate the researched history of people and places, with the malleability of secondhand memory. How do we believably and respectfully tell others’ stories? How do we learn to find them? How do we draw these stories out, jot them down? How do we know when to make them our own and when to leave them in the liminal space of another’s inaccessible and inscrutable experience? This course is designed to tackle these specific questions through workshops, writing prompts and guided discussions of assigned texts.

The main goal of this course will be to understand the reasons, traditions and methods behind the practice of literary adaptations. From Joyce Carol Oates's "Blue Bearded Lover," to Anne Sexton's "Cinderella", to Angela Carter's "Wolf-Alice" and Marina Carr's "By the Bog of Cats," there are stories that continue to resonate through the centuries, and others that are made to resonate through the labor of new story tellers. Each text will be explored both independently and within the context of its adaptive genealogy. Students will be expected to read each text carefully, come prepared to actively participate in class discussion and respond to both academic and creative writing prompts based on assigned texts and class lecture.

Across the several decades of her career, Joan Didion continually grappled with the myths, realities, facts and illusions of her home state in essays and memoirs. Though she lived in New York City for the last 35 years of her life, some of her most indelible work focuses our attention on images of the so-called “Golden West”: the hippie movement in San Franciso in "Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” the Manson Family murder trial in "The White Album,” the Donner Party in Where I Was From, as well as Patty Hearst, Alcatraz, the Reagans and wildfire season, to name a few of many. In this class, we’ll study several of her California-centered works and write our personal essays about place, history, our moment in time and where we are from. We'll also attempt to understand the hallmarks of her prose style, her enduring appeal, the issue of her celebrity, among other possibilities. 

*This course can count as a Technical Seminar credit for those on the Legacy Major. 

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.

It’s where it all began. Often, the questions that drive narrative and underpin a lifetime’s inquiry originate in childhood’s rich ore. It remains the subject of many great works of literature and is one terrain that each writer, student or master, can claim sovereignty over.

In this beginning workshop, we will look closely at a number of texts that deal with childhood with an eye towards generating work of our own. We will study the basic craft elements of point-of-view, setting, character, and voice. In addition to studying literary fiction, we will consider one or two children’s fiction and YA texts as well. Through in-class exercises, and imitative and generative writing, we will bring a quality of care and attention to writing about the lifestage known as ‘childhood.’ In the second half of the quarter, the emphasis will be on workshopping student’s original work.

We will study writers such as Sayaka Murata, Roald Dahl, Roddy Doyle, Edmund De Waal.

Flannery O’Connor writes, “the fiction writer has to realize that he can’t create compassion with compassion, or emotion with emotion, or thought with thought. He has to provide all these things with a body; he has to create a world with weight and extension.”

In this class, we will focus on how prose creates worlds of weight and extension. How do we weave, through the fabric of words, flesh and blood characters whose actions carry heft. We will consider how embodied action amalgamates with voice, setting, dramatic tension, and other story elements. And, through in-class exercises and imitative and generative writing, we will look to hone our control over embodied action. 

Together, we’ll study writers such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, and Patricia Highsmith, with a focus on how they give words warp and weft. In the second half of the quarter, the emphasis will be on workshopping student’s original work.

This course will examine this genre from its beginnings in ancient and medieval literature (eg in epic, chivalric, and pilgrimage lit), to the modern road novel, travelogue, and buddy film. We will explore why this form is so essential to the storytelling imagination, and the ways we might adapt it to our own needs today.