Undergraduate

In her seminal essay “On Being Ill,” Virginia Woolf writes, “Literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear. […] On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes.” This seminar will actively examine these bodily interventions in writing, and explore the merits of engaging deeply and precisely with the taboo subjects of sex, aging, illness, bodily change, and bodily difference. We will also discuss the concept of embodied writing—and the embodiment of physical experience through writing—using the body-centered prose of Bruno Schulz, Annie Ernaux, Rebecca Brown, Yasunari Kawabata, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, and other writers. Assignments will include short critical and creative responses, a presentation, and a critical essay.

Day/Time: Mondays, 1:30-4:20pm

This technical seminar will investigate the purposes and possibilities of beginnings in fiction. Students will read opening lines, paragraphs, pages, and occasionally chapters, from Aimee Bender, Miranda July, Dorthe Nors, Kobe Abe, and others, asking: what work do these beginnings do—and why, to what end? Of course, this means we will also read the stories that follow, to analyze these introductions in the framework of their narratives. How do openings guide—or mislead—the reader? How should they balance introduction and momentum? How do they orient us, not only to character, setting, and conflict, but also to elements like tone and sensibility, to a story’s own sense of itself? What archetypes or common “moves” can we identify and use? What are the implications and meanings of beginnings—of starting in a particular place and way, when a story might very well start in any number of places? And how do such authorial decisions ripple through the story? Students will be responsible for reading responses, short craft analyses, vigorous class participation, and several creative exercises putting what they learn into practice.

Day/Time: Wednesdays, 10:30am-1:20pm

The advantage of working within a non-genre is best understood as a spatial metaphor: the house of fiction has kicked us out, but so what? That only means we are free to roam a limitless landscape, mingling with other genres and establishing new traditions. In recent years small presses have begun to celebrate the hybrid impulses of nonfiction writers, and as a result we are witnessing an exciting explosion of books that challenge our impulse to categorize literature. To name a few pioneers, many of whom are women of color: Claudia Rankine, Solmaz Sharif, Jenny Boully, Anne Carson, and Natalie Diaz. In this course, students will unlock a new way of reading and writing postmodern works that dissolve the lines between poetry, prose, visual and performance art, exploring what is becoming known as “the performative essay.” Central to our aim is defining the limits and possibilities of literature that subverts our expectations and defies description. Topics will include Viktor Shklovsky’s defamiliarization, Andy Graff’s Foundational Narrative Design, and deviation from John Gardner’s “fictional dream.” Each week, students will playfully experiment with prompts targeting innovative sources of narrative momentum and share original hybrid works in progress. Self-assessments, conferences, and workshops will be student-led. To conclude the quarter, students will perform revisions of the workshop essay and reflect on the power of performative works to incite social change.

Day/Time: Fridays, 11:30am-2:20pm

This workshop will explore literary translation as a mode of embodied reading and creative writing. Through comparative and iterative readings across multiple translations of both poetry and fiction, we will examine the interpretive decisions that translators routinely encounter when assigning an English to a work of literature first written in another language, as well as the range of creative strategies available to translators when devising a treatment for a literary text in English. Students will complete weekly writing exercises in retranslation and English-to-English translation, building to the retranslation of either a short piece of fiction or selection of poems. No foreign language proficiency is required to participate in this course. 

Day/Time: Monday, 1:30-4:20pm

In the same way that water is composed of two elements—hydrogen and oxygen—the personal essay essentially consists of anecdotes and reflections, i.e., facts and thoughts, or the objective and the subjective. What happened, and what what happened means. The artistry of the essay consists of not only balancing these two elements but combining them so that they complement but also contradict one another. In this workshop you’ll write multiple drafts of your own attempt at the form while line editing and critiquing your classmates’ attempts. At the same time we’ll read (and write about) foundational essays that are in overt dialogue with one another, starting with “Why I Write,” by George Orwell, and “Why I Write,” by Joan Didion. We’ll read James Baldwin in conjunction with the seminal essay he inspired Adrienne Rich to write, then look at infusions of poetry into the form via Natalia Ginzburg and Margaret Atwood. We'll end by reading Didion’s essay, “Goodbye to All That,” paired with Eula Biss' cover version, also titled "Goodbye to All That." You'll leave knowing the recent history, basic theory, and practice of nonfiction's most fundamental form.

Day/Time: Friday, 1:30-4:20pm

A long tradition of scientific and environmental writing animates the genre of creative nonfiction. In this introductory workshop, you will develop a writing practice and deepened understanding of nonfiction through readings and prompts focused on expressing ecological realities and scientific facts through literary art. Writing prompts will offer techniques in translating jargon into lyricism, data into story. Bring your love of memoir and personal essay, and we will also trouble notions of nature and reconsider how language shapes our relationship to the environment. In exciting the boundaries of the essay, we might, as David Quamman puts it, write wild thoughts from wild places. Throughout the course of the quarter, we will examine our own work and others' from a critical perspective, looking carefully at tenets of voice, language, and form. We will finish the course with a more nuanced understanding of creative nonfiction as a whole, as well as our position within the field and the changing world more generally. Readings will include texts by Linda Hogan, Lacy Johnson, Helen MacDonald, Arundhati Roy, Esmé Weijun Wang, and *visiting writers.*

Day/Time: Friday, 9:30-12:20pm

Given the recent shift to remote learning and its challenging effects on mental health, this course is designed to get us out of our heads and back into our bodies, minimizing the time we spend looking at the screen through activities and prompts that stimulate physical awareness, support wellness, and enhance creativity. An active writing life demands a refined ability to stay present and receptive to ideas that not only inspire possibility but animate our hands into action. If we view the relationship between sensory experience, memory, and imagination as a triangle of interdependence, then by exercising the gifts of perception writers can gain access to a wealth of "raw material" that sparks discovery of unconscious themes and associations while forging a path for reader accessibility and immersion within the world of a story. Many issues of craft— setting, scene, imagery, characterization— boil down to a writer's intuitive understanding of how corporeality informs emotion and spirituality. From scavenger hunts to yoga, photography, cooking, and dancing, students will exercise the integration of the nervous system and the business of creation, developing original drafts that can be felt in the spine and enriched with a robust workshop experience. Given the multidimensional nature of our practice, students will have the option to pursue multimedia and cross-genre projects. Students with disabilities are strongly encouraged to join in this exploration of the senses.

Day/Time: Wednesdays, 1:30-4:20pm

Creative nonfiction is an often difficult to define genre. Frequently caught up in ontological and political controversies, and perpetually torn between allegiances to journalism, science, philosophy and art. This course will serve as a brief introduction into the genre by focusing on its history, primary influences and some of the major subgenres which compose it today. From the lyrical, narrative and hybrid, to science writing, reportage, the memoire and even illustrated journalism straight from warzones. This will be accomplished through reading, lectures, discussions and guided writing prompts.

Day/Time: Mondays, 10:30am-1:20pm

This workshop is an introduction to writing and revising poems, and the related art of giving helpful feedback to other writers. One of the course’s goals is to help you reflect on your writing as a process. Most weeks you will write drafts that focus on the poetic concepts we are studying. You’ll receive feedback on your drafts from your classmates during workshop and will respond both critically and creatively to theirs. At the end of the quarter, you’ll revise your drafts and collect them in a portfolio, accompanied by a critical introduction. At the same time, this course will also introduce you to poetry from a variety of time periods, languages, and approaches to content and structure. You’ll learn to apply critical tools and terminology by drafting poems that experiment with elements such as form, voice, rhythm, imagery, translation, and creative response. We’ll discuss not only how poems are written, but also why they are written and what relationship they have to the contexts in which they are written and read.

Day/Time: Fridays, 10:30am-1:20pm

This course explores basic approaches to writing poems through careful reading and discussion of modern and contemporary poets. We’ll practice poetic elements, such as rhythm, diction, syntax, and metaphor, at the same time that we explore the movements of mind and the moods that lyricism makes available. The class will practice literary community building by discussing peers’ poems in workshops, by responding to poems and essays by contemporary and modern poets and critics, and by attending literary events on campus. For the first few sessions, our discussions will focus primarily on readings. As we move forward, we will spend the majority of time workshopping student work.

Day/Time: Monday, 12:30pm-3:20pm