Undergraduate

"Time is a created thing," according to Lao Tzu. In this course, we will look at how fiction writers "create" the sense of time in their stories, and how they grapple with temporality as an organizing narrative force. To that end, we will study how and why writers implement flashbacks, flash forwards, memories, jump cuts, and repeating scenerios, among other techniques. We will look at both straightforwardly chronological and intuitively nonchronological timelines, and discuss how different temporal approaches create different stories. Readings may include works by Roberto Bolaño, Lauren Groff, and William Maxwell. In addition, please come to class prepared to engage with creative exercises.

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

Some of the most compelling works of fiction are built around moral, social, and psychological dilemmas. Characters are set loose in a dark woods of ambiguity and conflicting values, where they reveal themselves (and their/our humanity) through the decisions they make, the actions they undertake. Such stories present a dramatized prism of arguments and resist easy "lessons." Rather, they end with a question mark that invites conversation between reader and narrative long after the story has ended. The challenge for writers, of course, is to avoid polemic, instead exploring this moral, social, and psychological terrain in a way that is even-handed and flows organically out of character. In this technical seminar, we will read fiction (by writers like James Alan McPherson, Graham Greene, Tayari Jones, and Cynthia Ozick, among others) that centers on an uneasy choice between moral positions. We will examine how the dilemma shapes conflict and plot, and, perhaps most important, how the writer invites the reader to get lost in a dark woods alongside the story's characters. The emphasis of this course will be on critical writing, but students will also have opportunities to write creative responses to the readings and experiment with the craft techniques we discuss.

Day/Time: Thursday, 9:30am-12:20pm

From ancient Sumerian temple hymns to 7th-century Japanese death poems to avant-garde ekphrasis in the 21st century, the history of poetry is as rich in genres as it is in forms. Why does it feel so good to write a curse? What is an ode and how is it different from an aubade? In this technical seminar we will study the origins, transcultural functions, and evolving conventions of some of the oldest-living genres of lyric poetry – the ode, the elegy, the love poem, the curse, to name a few. We will read living writers such as Alice Oswald, Danez Smith, Kim Hyesoon, and Natalie Diaz alongside historical forerunners including Aesop, Sei Shonagon, John Keats. Federico Garcia Lorca, Sylvia Plath, and Paul Celan. Students will write weekly experiments of their own in response to our readings, and for a final project they will edit a mini-anthology of a genre of their choice, including a short critical introduction. 

Tuesday 12:30pm-3:20pm

"At certain moments," writes Italo Calvino of his early literary efforts, "I felt that the entire world was turning into stone." Slowness and speed govern not just the experience of writing but also the texture of our fictional worlds. And this is something we can control. Sublimely slow writers like Faulkner or Duras can make time melt; spritely magicians like Bulgakov and Rushdie seem to shuffle planes of reality with a snap of their fingers. This seminar gathers fictions that pulse on eclectic wavelengths, asking in each case how narrative tempo embodies a fiction's character. Our exercises will play with the dial of compositional speed, testing writing quick and slow; alternately, we'll try to recreate the effects of signature texts. Weekly creative and critical responses will culminate in a final project.

Day/Time: Thursday, 2:00pm-4:50pm

The question of which point of view to use is central to any fiction writer beginning a story or a novel, but what does it mean to choose one point of view over another? Who is narrating the story and how does she present herself? Is the narrator speaking directly to the reader, as a character in the story itself? Is she hiding in the shadows, trying to be as invisible as possible? Does she have a god-like omniscience, narrating from on high? Or does she exist in a liminal state, narrating through both a character and herself simultaneously through “free indirect discourse"? How does a writer's choice of POV and narrative distance affect such things as voice, rate of revelation, and even worldbuilding? How does it affect the reader's experience? And how can a writer maximize their choice of POV to best serve the story they want to tell? Students will read various works of long and short fiction in different POVs to study their effects, as well as critical and craft texts. They will write weekly reading responses as well as creative exercises. Each student will also be expected to give a presentation and write a final creative / analytical paper for the class.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 11:00am-1:50pm

John Gardner said that the writer’s task is to create “a vivid and continuous fictional dream.” This technical seminar will focus on the role of detail in maintaining this dream. In this course we will deconstruct and rebuild our understanding of concepts like simile, showing vs. telling, and symbolism, asking what these tools do and what purpose they serve. Drawing from fiction and essays from Ottessa Moshfegh, Barbara Comyns, Zadie Smith, and others, students will practice noticing, seeing anew, and finding fresh and unexpected ways of describing. We will also examine what is worthy of detail in the first place, how detail functions outside of traditional scene, and the merits and limits of specificity, mimesis, and verisimilitude. Finally we will consider what it means to travel across a landscape of vagueness and euphemism as we search for the quality of “thisness” that James Wood claims all great details possess. In addition to assigned readings, students will be responsible for reading responses, short craft analyses, vigorous class participation, and several creative exercises and peer critiques applying these lessons.

Day/Time: Thursday, 11:00am-1:50pm

This reading and writing seminar will focus on works of literature that have found shape and substance via documents such as letters, diary entries, newspaper clippings, legal documents, medical records, and more. Students will analyze the causes and effects of the archival impulse on various craft elements, including: dramatic pacing, narrative persona, structure, and theme. Students will conduct independent research according to the genre of their choosing (from memoirs to novels and poems) and write short critical reading reports throughout the quarter. All the while, students will compose and/or compile their own archival materials for creative experiments that test the limits and possibilities of the craft.

Day/Time: Thursdays, 11:00am-1:50pm

We live in an era marked by human-driven environmental change, an epoch distinguished not only by the reality of anthropogenic impacts, but of human witness. Never before, writes Elizabeth Rush, have humans been here to tell the story of collapse, extinction, adaptation, and memory. In this workshop, we will read and write eco-memoir, a hybrid form of literary nonfiction that blends the work of ecology, history, and personal narrative to understand more fully how memory is bound to ecosystems. Some might simply call this memoir, following J. Drew Lanham’s view that the writing of memoir is also the writing of environment. This course will ask how the memoirist looks at place, taking up W.G. Sebald’s thinking that places seem to “have some kind of memory, in that they activate memory in those who look at them.” Students will practice using the tenets of literary memoir-writing to engage with the theoretical frameworks of such environmental thinkers as Donna Haraway and Jedidiah Purdy. We will ask: to what extent is remembering a collective act? How might the eco-memoir represent the uneven consequences of ecological disruption? What narrative structures does the story of an ecosystem take? Students will write two-full length essays or memoir chapters. Readings will include texts by Kendra Atleework, Elizabeth Bush, Linda Hogan, J. Drew Lanham, W.G. Sebald, and visiting writers.

Day/Time: Monday, 9:30am-12:20pm

This course will examine how the historical archive can be a source for poetry writing, seeking to develop frameworks for interpreting the experiences that poets enact through archives. Deeper questions to be examined involve the relation between poetic form and historical knowledge; the relation between imagination and memory; between material histories and their inscription; between poets and their historical and biographical pasts; and between the critical and creative, the historical and biographical, and the exteriors and interiors of literature, history, myth, and politics. Because this is an advanced workshop, we will rely on mutual exchange dedicated to improving writing. Critique will therefore be our core activity, guided by our readings and professor instruction, but driven primarily by original student work and discussion.

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

“Which one of us, in his moments of ambition, has not dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose," wrote Charles Baudelaire in Paris Spleen,"... supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the jibes of conscience?” This genre-blurring workshop will explore elements of the history and practice of the prose poem, and other poems and texts that combine strategies, forms and gestures of prose (fiction, nonfiction, etc.) with those of poetry. We will also read texts that are difficult to classify in terms of genre. “Flash Fiction,” “Short Shorts,” the fable, the letter, the mini-essay, and the lyric essay will be examined, among others. We will discuss the literary usefulness (or lack of it) of genre and form labels. The class will be taught as a workshop: students will try their hand at writing in their choices of hybrid forms, and will be encouraged to experiment. Writers from all genres are welcome, as what we will be studying, discussing, and writing will involve the fruitful collision of literary genres.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 12:30-3:20PM