Undergraduate

Among the foundational elements of a writer’s craft, dialogue is perhaps the most anxiety-inducing. After all, the very nature of writing dialogue requires that we defamiliarize—and fictionalize—something that we do almost every day. In this course, we will learn how to use dialogue as a strategy for developing character, hinting at subtext, and nourishing narrative ambiguity (“showing” scenes with different interpretive possibilities versus “telling” the reader what to think). We will also explore dialogue as a means of controlling the pace and flow of fiction (when and where we learn which bits of information). Finally, we will explore the ways fiction uses dialogue as a kind of sculptural blueprint, from variations between dense paragraphs and sparse lines, to stories made up solely of dialogue. Using the dialogue-driven models of writers such as Eileen Chang, Edwidge Danticat, Edward P. Jones, Nino Cipri, and Ottessa Moshfegh, writers will develop the use of dialogue in their own short fiction. The course will feature craft talks, reading discussions, week-to-week generative writing assignments, and a final presentation (on a dialogue-focused work of the student’s choice).

Writers at all levels learn through the careful reading of works they admire. While this is a workshop class, we will spend about a third of our time reading stories worth learning from, both classic and contemporary,  with a focus on the choices that writers make, the nuts and bolts of craft, with special emphasis on point of view (who speaks and why?) while also covering tone, direct and summary dialog, setting, conflict, causality, and use of time. In-class exercises will further hone your understanding of specific techniques, fire your creativity and get you writing. We will then move to writing workshop, where you will have the opportunity to present your work to the group. Critique will be respectful and productive, with emphasis on clarity and precision. By the end of the course, you will have generated significant raw material and completed at least one story, which will be revised and handed in as a final portfolio.

Purple, lean, evocative, muscular, literary, exuberant, lucid, stilted, elliptical. These are all labels that critics and reviewers have used to characterize prose styles that call attention to themselves in distinct ways. Of course, what constitutes style not only changes over time, but also means different things in different literary traditions. How, then, do translators carry style over from one language and cultural milieu to another? And to what extent does style structure storytelling? We will explore these questions by reading a variety of modern and contemporary stylists who either write in English or translate into English, paying special attention to what stylistic devices are at work and what their implications are for narration, characterization, and world building. Further, we’ll examine the range of choices that each writer and translator makes when constituting and reconstituting style, on a lexical, tonal, and syntactic scale.

From 19th century penny dreadfuls to the more recent explosion of podcasts and documentaries, true crime has long endured as a popular narrative genre. Yet, despite the genre’s popularity, there is contention around its potential exploitation of victims, romanticization of violence, and lurid positioning as “entertainment.” This course aims to critically examine the narrative tropes, appeals, and language of the true crime genre by engaging with works of true crime fiction, including both works of fiction based on “true” events (such as Underneath by Lily Hoang, Butter by Asako Yuzuki, and My Men by Victoria Kielland) and entirely fictionalized works that develop themselves as convincing True Crime facsimiles (such as Defiance by Carole Maso, My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite, and Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh). The course will include reading discussions, short weekly written responses, and a project wherein students compare and contrast two alternate “versions” of a true crime story.

In this course, we will study the range of aesthetic possibilities in concept-driven, procedural, aleatory, constrained, and avant-garde poetry. Questions of authorship, emotion, creativity, politics, imitation, and craft will be shifted by readings from Diderot and Mallarmé, the Oulipians, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, ritual-based poetics, and postconceptual/digital poetics, among others.

This course traverses the overlap of works of lyric and narrative poetry with works of autofiction to identify a range of storytelling and formal techniques for the writer curious to write in verse and prose forms as a method of cataloging the self. We will investigate the subjects (the self in the world, war, domesticity, history), forms (the ballad/song/rap, monologue, and short prose (flash fiction, prose poem)), and movements (Black Arts, Confessionalism, Infrarealism, New Narrative, AI) that expand, complicate, and borrow from ideas of narrative modes of self-expression. Sources include: Catullus, Nikki Giovanni, Alex Da Corte, Roberto Bolano, Lydia Davis, Hilton Als, Hito Steyerl, Robyn Schiff, Jenny Zhang , and others.

Perhaps no other narrative genre is more compelling or popular than the mystery. True Crime, Thrillers, and Whodunits consistently top the charts of bestsellers each year. In this Arts Core class, we will explore the mechanics of this fascinating genre. We will take the classic mystery tale written by masters like Arthur Conan Doyle and Raymond Chandler as an archetype, then examine what can be done with them. Together, we’ll dive into tales of intrigue by Poe and Kleist, psychological thrillers by Patricia Highsmith and Jeffery Eugenides, neo-noir films such as Chinatown, noir-poetry by Deryn Rees-Jones and Sean O’Brien, and postmodern mystery-parodies like those of Jorge Luis Borges. Together, we'll look at the way they hang together, the desire and fear that drives them, and the secrets they tell—or try to keep hidden. Along the way, we will attempt to design and plot our own mysteries, and find ways to improve them in a workshop setting.

This course will be a close examination of the use of spectral imagery as a craft element in narratives across genre and time. From Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” to Emily Carrol’s A Guest in the House, students in this course will be expected to put the fantastical metaphor under a microscope and explore its potential through their own creative and critical work. 

This thesis workshop is for students writing a creative BA or MA thesis in poetry, as well as creative writing minors completing the portfolio. Because it is a thesis workshop, the course will focus on various ways of organizing larger poetic “projects.” We will consider the poetic sequence, the chapbook, and the poetry collection as ways of extending the practice of poetry beyond the individual lyric text. We will also problematize the notion of broad poetic “projects,” considering the consequences of imposing a predetermined conceptual framework on the elusive, spontaneous, and subversive act of lyric writing. Because this class is designed as a poetry workshop, your fellow students’ work will be the primary text over the course of the quarter.

This class invites students to explore various relationships between science and poetry, two domains that, perhaps counter-intuitively, often draw from each other to revitalize themselves. As poets, we’ll use, misuse, and borrow from science in our poems. We’ll approach poems like science experiments and aim to enter an “experimental attitude.” From a practical point of view, we’ll try to write poems that incorporate the language of science to freshen their own language or to expand the realm of poetic diction. Furthermore, we’ll work with tropes and procedural experiments that may result in revelation, discovery, and surprise. Readings may include work by Aimé Césaire, Kimiko Hahn, Ed Roberson, Dean Young, Joyelle Mcsweeney, and Will Alexander. Students can expect to write several poems, participate in discussion forums with both initial response papers and follow-up comments, critique peers’ work, and submit a final portfolio. A substantial amount of class time will be spent workshopping student work.