Undergraduate

From the fragmented to the recurrent, from the recurrent to the intricate, from the precise to the vernacular, from the vernacular to the artificial; we'll discuss the why, the how, and the effects of a few of the possible forms and devices of poetry.

Day/Time: Wednesday, 12:40–2:40 PM

This advanced fiction workshop is for Creative Writing majors, minors, and MAPH students and other advanced students working on a substantial fiction project or portfolio. As it is primarily a workshop, please arrive with your project in progress (a story collection, a novel, or a novella), ready for critique. In the workshop, we will stress craft fundamentals such as character, setting, voice, style, plot, and structure, considering the longer form. Reading and listening to author interviews, we will also consider what it means to be an artist and how artists come to cultivate an aesthetic sensibility.

Day/Time: Thursdays, 9:40-12:40

This advanced fiction course is for Creative Writing majors, minors, and MAPH students and other advanced students working on a substantial fiction project. Most of our class time will be spent in workshop, and all students should enter this course with work already in progress, whether stories, a novel, a novella, or a visual narrative (eg. graphic novel, narrative video game) and ready to present for critique. Our focus will be on identifying emerging themes, and refining voice, character, plot, language and details to accentuate and elaborate upon those themes. In addition to a smattering of craft essays and contemporary fiction pieces chosen by the instructor, students will select and present on readings that have been influential in their own writing process. 

Day/Time: Tuesdays, 9:40-12:40

In this fundamentals course, students will investigate the complicated relationship between writers, fictional characters, and readers, toward determining what place literary empathy has in our conversation about contemporary literature. James Baldwin once observed that, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.” We will use weekly reading assignments including fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction to ask questions about what Virginia Woolf described as the “elimination of the ego” and “perpetual union with another mind” that take place when we read. Students will write critical responses, creative exercises, and a final paper on a topic to be approved by the instructor. Readings include Baldwin, Bishop, Beard, Carson, Walcott, and Woolf.

Day/Time: Wednesday, 1:50–3:50 PM

This advanced fiction course is for BA and MA students writing a creative thesis or any advanced student working on a major fiction project. It is primarily a workshop, so please come to our first class with your project in progress (a story collection, a novel, or a novella), ready for you to discuss and to submit some part of for critique. As in any writing workshop, we will stress the fundamentals of craft like language, voice, and plot and character development, with an eye also on how to shape your work for the longer form you have chosen. And as a supplement to our workshops, we will have brief student presentations on the writing life: our literary influences, potential avenues towards publication, etc.

Day/Time: Wednesday, 12:40-2:40

Travel narratives remain a perennial tool for looking outward and understanding places and cultures unlike our own. We'll look at both historical and contemporary accounts of time abroad and explore how technological advances in communication and increasingly cheap and easy travel may be changing this most enduring of forms. Travel writing has often gone hand in hand with imperial and neo-imperial projects, but more and more the global "south" visits the global "north." We'll read poetry, fiction, and nonfiction by writers like Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bishop, George Orwell, Tayeb Salih, George Saunders, James Baldwin, and Natalia Ginzburg. We'll also consider journalistic accounts by Ted Conover, Katherine Boo, and Evan Osnos, as well as documentary films by Ai Weiwei and Joshua Oppenheimer. Students will write short responses over the quarter and synthesize our texts, along with a text of their choosing, into a culminating critical paper.  

Day/Time: Tuesday, 1–4 PM

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, 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 in Adrienne Rich, then look at infusions of poetry into the form via Natalia Ginzburg, Margaret Atwood, and Anne Carson. 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: Tuesday, 9:40-12:40

This course addresses a range of techniques for writing poetry, making use of various compelling models drawn primarily from international modernisms on which to base our own writing. (Our textbook is Poems for the Millennium, edited by Rothenberg & Joris.) In this sense, the course will constitute an apprenticeship to modern poetry. We will consider the breadth of approaches currently available to poets, as well as the value of reading as a means of developing an understanding of how to write poetry. Each week students will bring poems for discussion, developing a portfolio of revised work by the quarter’s end.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 1:00-4:00

This advanced fiction workshop is for Creative Writing majors, minors, and MAPH students and other advanced students working on a substantial fiction project. It is primarily a workshop, so please come to our first class with your project in progress (a story collection, a novel, or a novella), ready for you to discuss and to submit some part of for critique. As in any writing workshop, we will stress the fundamentals of craft like language, voice, and plot and character development, with an eye also on how to shape your work for the longer form you have chosen. And as a supplement to our workshops, we will have brief student presentations on the writing life: our literary influences, potential avenues towards publication, etc.

Day/Time: Thursday, 2:40-5:40

Fiction writers say “If there’s no trouble, there’s no story”—an easier adage without the presumption of truth. This class will consider techniques for rendering “trouble” in narrative nonfiction. How can we write about the wrongs of others—and the wrongs we ourselves have committed—in a way that makes for a compelling story and an ultimately likable narrator? What makes a rendering of hate, abuse, indifference, ingratitude, or jealously compelling or empathetic in the end? What techniques—of persona, characterization, humor, pacing, or form—might help us write honestly and generously at the same time? And when generosity is not our aim, what other vehicles of connection are available to us? Readings may include essays by Jo Ann Beard, Richard Rodriguez, Shalom Auslander, Jesmyn Ward, Bret Lott, Albert Goldbarth, and Ocean Vuong.

Day/Time: Tuesday/Thursday: 11:20-12:40