Undergraduate

This course is an introduction to the linked practices of reading and writing poetry. We will begin with major stylistic experiments of the last century-finding common ground in familiar idioms. We will discuss significant topics, movements ,and styles of the period while identifying formal strategies. As we practice these strategies in our writing, we will move backward in time, to less familiar terrain-expanding our sense of context while increasing our technical repertoire and defamiliarizing ourselves with our assumptions about what poetry is, what it should do, and how it should do it. Weekly reading and writing assignments will challenge students to expand their technical repertoire. And the historical breadth of the course will give students an opportunity to explore the expansive field of poetry as a historically dynamic phenomenon. But the true educational experience will come in uniting these activities, when the student begins to read as a writer and write as a reader. This creative relation to the world of symbols will open them to the world as such and the world as such to their writerly minds. Ultimately, this is a course in inventive perception.

This reading and writing seminar will acquaint students with one of the essential tools of fiction writers: characterization. We will read primary texts by authors including Baldwin, Flaubert, Munro, and Wharton, as well as critical work by Danticat, Forester, and Vargas Llosa, toward exploring how some of literature's most famous characters are rendered. How do writers of fiction create contexts in which characters must struggle, and how does each character's conflicts reveal his or her nature? Students will complete both creative and analytical writing exercises, reading responses, and a paper that focuses on characterization in a work of fiction.

To give testimony is to bear witness and to provide evidence. To give testimony is also to draw the reader or listener into an individual point of view. In this course, we will study the first-person voice in various forms of personal testimony. Drawing from a mix of memoirs, personal essays, letters, fiction and other first-person narratives, we will analyze the techniques and rhetorical devices used by writers, standup comedians, memoirists in transporting the listener or reader into unknowable, unfamiliar experiences. Expect to engage with texts by authors such as Franz Kafka, Patricia Lockwood, Richard Pryor, and William Maxwell. We will compose our own personal writings through creative exercises. A critical paper is also due.

This workshop will explore the underlying mechanics that have made plays tick for the last 2,500 odd years, from Euripedes to Shakespeare to Buchner to Caryl Churchill, Susan Lori-Parks, and Annie Baker, etc. Students will be askedto shamelessly steal those playwrights' tricks and techniques (if they're found useful), and employ them in the creation of their own piece. Designed for playwrights at any level (beginning or advanced), the workshop's primary goals will be todevelop a personal sense of what "works" on stage within the context of what's worked in the past, and to generate a one act play, start to finish.

In this classyou can write about anything you want, as long as you adhere to the truth. What that truth is, only you can say; our job is to help you find it, as well as the best form for conveying it. Nonfiction is inherently interdisciplinary and this class reflects that: I welcome essays, lyric essays, criticism, memoir, travelogues, oral histories, and profiles, as well as reported and journalistic features. Also rants, radio stories, and graphic nonfiction, i.e., comics. Whatever your form or format, the process is the same: you submit your work in progress and your classmates edit and critique it. These critiques aren't for the faint of heart; they require meticulous line editing, rigorous reflection, and total honesty.They require you to put as much effort into your classmates' work as you do into your own. We'll start by reading foundational theoretical texts, including Vivian Gornick's The Situation and The Story and Phillip Lopate's To Show and To Tell. After that I'll choose published examples that demonstratesolutions to the specific narrative problems we've found in last week's student work. You'll leave this class with the writing sample and skills you'll need for admission to advanced workshops.

We'll examine creative nonfiction from all of its sides beginning with the rhetorical precision of Aristotle and moving through the rigorous interiorself-mapping of Montaigne, the looping denials of DeQuincey, and then into the modern modes courtesy of Audre Lorde, Virginia Woolf, David Foster Wallace, Arundhati Roy, and others.

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. Additionally, students will keep detailed notebooks, as well as developing critical skills for understanding poetry in the form of classroom discussion.

The Line

The focus of this beginning course will be on one of the most conspicuous elements of poetry: the line. If for no other reason, we often identify a poem as a poem because it is written lines. Why? What is it that makes the line such a distinguishing aspect of poetry? This class will deliberately practice various forms of line making, ranging from traditional metrical lines to modern "free verse," with forays into the wilderness of prose itself. We will read work that conceives of lines in radically different ways --for example, as a rhythmic unit, as a container, as a vehicle of exploration, as ideological marker, or as an intertextual allusion. Furthermore, we will attempt to trace the ways that the intersections of lines and syntax affect a poem's sense of voice. Readings will include a range of poems and essays by contemporary and canonical writers.

This course will be roughly one-third lecture/discussion and two-thirds workshopping of student work. We'll read and analyze primarily contemporary short fiction, by writers like Edward P. Jones, Mary Gaitskill, Ben Fountain, Z.Z. Packer, George Saunders, and Sherman Alexie. Discussions will tend to be focused around one particular subject each week: setting, dialogue, character, perspective, etc. We'll also address more subtle concepts like psychic distance, free-indirect style, and movement through time. Students will present their own work to the group for critique and discussion. We'll seek to both hone our skills as attentive readers and to further develop as writers of clear, sophisticated prose.

Writing the Short Story: "The novel is exhaustive by nature," Steven Millhauser once wrote. "The short story by contrast is inherently selective. By excluding almost everything, it can give perfect shape to what remains." This course will consider the particular spaces that short fiction occupies in the literary landscape as a means to giving students a clearer understanding of how to compose brief and high-functioning narratives. Through readings of published stories and workshops of students' own fiction, we'll explore the parameters of the short story, its scope and ambitions, its limitations as well. We'll read established masters like Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, and Joy Williams as well as newer voices such as Wells Tower and Anthony Doerr, breaking down their stories, not simply as examples of meaningful fiction, but as roadmaps toward a greater awareness of what makes a short story operate. Over the course of the quarter, students will submit stories for consideration in workshop, as well as other experimental efforts in short-short and micro fiction. Discussion will revolve around basic elements of story craft-point of view, pacing, language, etc.-in an effort to define the ways in which a narrative can be conveyed with economy, precision, and ultimately, power.