Undergraduate

This workshop invites students to experiment at the formal level, playing with variations of "difficult forms," which include various invented forms, tweaks on received forms (such as Dickinson's common meter), as well as 20th and 21st century forms, such as collage, cutups, juxtaposition, serial form, procedural form, borrowed form, and prose poems. We'll focus on the tension between formal elements (such as word choice, image, syntax, line, and rhythm) and the sometimes reckless spirit of risk-taking and chance. Course readings will include peers' poems, work by a range of poets, essays, and interviews. Along with contributing poems to workshop, students will be expected to keep a creative workbook, participate in in-class discussions, write imitations of assigned readings, write an essay, submit a final portfolio, and attend at least one Creative Writing event.
Day/Time: Wednesday, 1:30-4:20

In this course, we will examine character-driven novels about worlds in the midst, on the brink, or during the aftermath of social change. We'll observe the strategies that authors deploy to construct a compelling and immersive world, and we'll catalog the methods they use to alter social systems and social order. Who has power and who doesn't? How is power maintained and how is it subverted? How does the human spirit engage with a world beyond its comprehension? And how do authors, using characters as the vehicle, illuminate larger thematic and moral questions? This class will concentrate on longer works (novels, novellas, and novels-in-stories), and we will workshop the first 30_40 pages of your manuscript, focusing in particular on its promises and possibilities. The end goal is for you to leave the class with the beginning of your novel, a synopsis, a chapter outline, and a plan for how to proceed with your project.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 9:30-12:20

In this workshop-based course we'll investigate how strangeness and magic function in short fiction. We'll read stories by Edgar Allen Poe and Vladimir Nabokov, as well as from contemporary writers like Kelly Link, Carmen Maria Machado, Aimee Bender, Alice Sola Kim, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, and Stephen Millhauser, examining how these authors portray the fantastical and impossible. We'll also read excerpts from essays by Viktor Shklovsky, Sigmund Freud, and Charles Baxter, exploring concepts such as defamiliarization, verisimilitude, and the uncanny. We will contemplate how magical realism and surrealism differ from sci-fi and fantasy genre writing, and ask how we, as writers, can make the quotidian seem extraordinary and the improbable seem inevitable, and to what end? Students will complete several short creative exercises and two short stories that utilize magic or strange effects. Students will also be expected to write thoughtful, constructive critiques of peer work. Throughout the course, we'll consider how the expectations of literary fiction might constrain such narratives, and how we can engage with and transcend these archetypes.

Day/Time: Wednesday, 9:30-12:20

In this advanced fiction workshop, students will read and write stories of migration. We will use research and imagination to construct narratives about the ways in which human beings move across time and place, and to work on creating characters who are forged and reforged by their cultural, linguistic, and familial contexts (both familiar and unfamiliar). Historical research will be a key component. Half of each class meeting will be devoted to the careful consideration of student work. Readings include fiction by Edwidge Danticat, Gish Jen, Chang Rae Lee, Jamaica Kincaid, Akhil Sharma, and Gene Luen Yang.

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

In this workshop-focused class we will focus on the early stages of both developing and writing a novel: choosing the POV, establishing the setting, developing the main characters and the dynamics between them, setting up the conflicts and seeding the themes of book, etc. As a class we will read, break down and discuss the architecture of the openings of several published novels as you work on your own opening chapters, which will be workshopped during the course.

Day/Time: Wednesday, 10:30-1:20

The goal of this course will be to understand the methods and mechanisms of effective narrative pacing in creative nonfiction by carefully dissecting a variety of texts, ranging from Woolf's "The Death of the Moth," to Solzhenit_s_yn's The Gulag Archipelago, and Bechdel's Fun Home. Students will be expected to actively participate in class discussion, read from a broad assorted of texts, and complete a series of corresponding creative writing prompts testing the principles discussed in class.

Day/Time: Monday, 10:30-1:20

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, 9:30-12:20

At the core of fiction writing is dramatization, which allows the reader to "see" the world and characters of our story and to experience the ideas and emotions that we want to resonate. The primary vehicle for dramatization is the scene, and in this technical seminar, we'll look at all the elements of a traditionally well-made scene in a work of fiction-dialogue, action, characterization, description, etc.-and investigate the effects of each element and how they all work together to support the overall narrative. What are the various functions of a scene, beyond characterization and drama? Where is the best place to begin and end? What is the most effective way to organize and juxtapose our scenes over the course of a short story, a chapter of a novel, or an entire novel? How might we move beyond the traditional ideas of action and dialogue and expand our notion of what a scene is and what it can do? During the quarter, we'll look at exceptional scenes in short stories, novels, plays, movies, and even television shows, with an eye also on how all these genres of dramatic writing use scenes similarly and differently and what we might learn from these dynamics as fiction writers. Along with the reading material, assignments will include reading responses, creative writing exercises, short essays, and presentations.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 2:00-4:50

We all know them-The Great Gatsby, The Lord of the Flies, The Bell Jar, and other books that seem to have been taught or read in every high school in the country since the dawn of time. In this cross-genre Fundamentals course, we'll re-examine these and works by the likes of Henry Miller, Sandra Cisneros, Allen Ginsberg, and Zora Neale Hurston. We'll think about the cultural history of what makes a classic high school read, about coming-of-age stories, and what it means to be educated, enlightened, and/or entertained. We'll think, too, about how we learn to read, write, and speak back to texts as adults (whatever that means). You'll write creative exercises, critical responses, and a final paper on a work of your choosing.
Day/Time: Tuesday, 12:30-3:20

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.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 9:30-12:20