Undergraduate

This workshop-based nonfiction course is suitable for any student who wants to work on long-form (1500 words and up) journalistic projects. To supplement our workshop submissions, we’ll look at a variety of texts touching on (and often combining) reporting on political, cultural, and environmental subjects. We’ll consider interviewing techniques and profile writing, as well works concerned with travel (of the non-touristic kind), sports, crime, politics, and the arts. We’ll read pieces by the likes of Katherine Boo, Eula Biss, Matthew Power, Ryzard Kapuchinski, Rivka Galchen, Jia Tolentino, Ted Conover, Alex Mar, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. The emphasis of the course will be on written narrative journalism, but other approaches and mediums will be welcomed. Ideally, students will come into the course with projects already in mind, but we will also work on developing stories and pitches and talk about navigating the print, online, and new media landscapes.

Day/Time: Wednesday, 1:50-3:50

Is there a place for poetry in a society in which reading has been declared dead—where at the very least, reading threatens to be eclipsed by scanning? In this workshop/laboratory, we will explore material whose response is a delirious “yes”—poetry that revels in charging the confines of the page and book. Exposure to an archive of modernist and contemporary visual and sound poetry, artists' books, contemporary installation and performance works, and relevant theories of media dislodgment will help us compose our own answers to the (old) question: what forms are poems obliged or inspired to take as language goes viral, in the face of total information, digitization, and post-literary culture? Readings and viewings in 20th- and 21st-century poetry and poetics, visits to local writing-arts collections, and class visits by local artists will help us generate our own works, which will be workshopped together.  Students will complete weekly assignments across media, and engage with the writing of their peers formally, while working toward a culminating piece in a medium of their choice: this final piece can take the form of a chapbook, performance, installation, or other pertinent channel.

Day/Time: Wednesday, 12:40-2:40

This workshop focuses on 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. At the end of the quarter you’ll revise your drafts and collect them in a portfolio, accompanied by a critical introduction that you’ll write. As a class, we’ll form a community of readers and writers that will support you in this process. You’ll receive feedback on your drafts from your classmates, and will respond both critically and creatively to theirs. Commenting regularly on the work of other writers will make you a better editor of your own work. At the same time, this course will 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 worlds in which they are read.

Day/Time: Friday, 10:20-12:20

Describing fiction writing as an “art” is perhaps a misnomer. Depending on who’s describing it, the process of creating a narrative is more like driving in the dark, or like woodworking, or gardening. It’s like raising a half-formed, misbehaved child and then trying to reason with it. The metaphors abound. But the techniques for creating effective fictional prose are often quite consistent. This course will begin with a weeks-long consideration of selected works of fiction where discussion will aim to distinguish the basic devices of effective storytelling. Weekly topics will range from subjects as broad as point of view and plot arrangement to more highly focused lessons on scene design, dialog, and word choice. Throughout the term, the writing process will be broken down into stages where written work will focus on discrete story parts such as first pages, character introductions, and dialog-driven scenes before students are asked to compose full-length narratives. Along the way, students will chart their processes of conceptualizing, drafting, and revising their narratives. Finally, in the latter weeks of the quarter, emphasis will shift to the workshopping of students’ full stories.

Day/Time: Monday, 10:20-12:20

In the introductory level workshop class we’ll interrogate what makes a compelling, memorable character and how to build one. We will read short stories and novel excerpts by a variety of authors with an eye to examining how characters reveal themselves to us as readers and what tools writers use to employ these revelations. Students will be required to write targeted reading responses, creative exercises, and one short story or novel chapter to be workshopped by the entire class, along with a revision of that story or chapter to be turned in at the end of the quarter.

Day/Time: Wednesday, 10:20-12:20

In this advanced fiction workshop, students will work on original short stories or chapters of longer works, with a focus on creating characters who are nuanced and three-dimensional. We will discard the word “likable” from our vocabularies, and render characters who are compelling regardless of whether their actions are “good” or “bad.” Close readings of published work and student work will help us consider what sorts of desires and conflicts force characters to make choices that fuel dramatic tension. We will discuss bad behavior by some of literature's favorite criminals, toward shaping work that is complex and full of the real contradictions human beings exhibit. Readings include Go Tell it on the Mountain, Lolita, House of Mirth, and This is How You Lose Her, as well as short stories from Ocean of Words and The Beggar Maid.

Day/Time: Wednesday, 1:30-4:20 PM

The short and the long of it. In this course, we'll be focusing on writing about visual arts by using shorter and longer forms, and while thinking about short and long durations of time. The time of encounter with a work of art, the time of its making, kinds of time the artists wanted to invoke, the endurance and ephemerality of the work, and of the experience of the work. We'll work short: wall text, compressed review, lyric fragment, and long: involved and layered sentences and elaborations. We'll work with and against different kinds of syntax, white space, and the unspoken, and read authors including John Yau, Lori Waxman, Zbigniew Herbert, Mark Strand, John Berger, Junichiro Tanizaki, and Dore Ashton, and ekphrastic poetry by Terrance Hayes, Tyehimba Jess, and Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon.

The course hopes to support students both in developing useful practices and experimenting boldly. Every class session will begin with a student-led two-work tour at the Smart Museum, and we will spend one session on close looking at works on paper at the Smart. Students will also visit five collections, exhibitions and/or galleries and keep a looking diary. Students will write a number of exercises in different forms (wall text, review, interview / portrait), and will also write two essays (which may follow one extended line or be a mosaic composite) to be workshopped in class.

This workshop-based nonfiction course is suitable for any student who wants to work on long-form (1500 words and up) journalistic projects. To supplement our workshop submissions, we'll look at a variety of texts touching on (and often combining) reporting on political, cultural, and environmental subjects. We'll consider interviewing techniques and profile writing, as well works concerned with travel (of the non-touristic kind), sports, and the arts. We'll read pieces by the likes of Katherine Boo, Eula Biss, George Orwell, Ryzard Kapuchinski, George Saunders, Geoff Dyer, Ted Conover, Maggie Nelson, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. The emphasis of the course will be on narrative journalism, but other approaches will be considered and welcomed. Ideally, students will come into the course with projects already in mind, but we will also work on developing stories and pitches.

The importance of sound to poetry, lyric poetry especially, is universally acknowledged, yet neither technical analysis of meter nor meticulous maps of vowel and consonant patterns satisfactorily describe how sound-making and listening shape poetic process and even, more controversially, poetic thinking. We will work with sounds luscious and austere, narcotic and precise, in a training of the ear as an organ of poesis.

Multiple short poems gathered into a single yet open-ended structure-this way of working has been remarkably productive for 20th- and 21st-century poets. In this workshop, you will experiment with ways of writing, accruing, counting, dispersing, shuffling, stacking, and otherwise arranging your own "little boxes." We will read and discuss a range of modern and contemporary poetic sequences as models, paying particular attention to matters of craft: How are syllables, words, lines, and stanzas effectively arranged within a short poem? How are short poems effectively arranged in relation to one another? What's the relation of parts to wholes in a poem or a sequence? What roles might repetition, variation, and echo play? We'll also think about ways the sequence can serve as an instrument of attention: How might writing "in pieces" help us notice and name things, events, feelings, and ideas that otherwise remain unnoticed or inarticulate? How might sequential composition open our writing to improvisation, unpredictability, and generative bewilderment? Poets studied may include: Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, George Oppen, Robert Creeley, Rae Armantrout, Fanny Howe, Ed Roberson, Michael O'Brien, Nathaniel Mackey, Joseph Donahue, and others. Over the course of the quarter you will write and revise an extended poetic sequence of your own, and our class meetings will mix writing activities, seminar discussion of our readings, and ongoing workshop discussion of your sequences-in-progress.