Undergraduate

The Anxiety of Getting Started

"Every story is perfect until you write the first sentence - then it's ruined forever." So said prolific fiction writer J. Robert Lennon. This craft-focused course is geared towards those who don't quite know how to begin, who might be afraid of writing, and who feel burdened by their own inhibitions and expectations. With creative exercises, readings, and workshops, we'll find ways to warm up our writerly voices and use them as a guiding force in creating short fiction. We'll learn how to mine the readings - by an eclectic mix of authors including Miranda July, Noviolet Bulawayo, John Cheever - for specific techniques and skills to apply to our own work. We will workshop our writings throughout the term. By the end, we will have built up a modest but powerful portfolio.

In this course we ask: How is historical material made-figured/disfigured by loss, desire, violence, suffering, exhaustion, death; by restlessness and the unbearable, abyssal, vertigo of living inside time? Where is the aperture of experience? The apparitions, which partition night, its many voices, bodies which are forgotten, and then remembered, why? What is the time of writing, of reading? This course goes a little back and a little forward between the two world wars, hoping to track an itinerary of history material, its incandescence, between situations of mourning and mystical experience. Students will be asked to keep a reading notebook as well as to produce weekly creative responses for class discussion

What if we think of writing as waste management? "To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now," said Samuel Beckett then, famously, but: What does this mean? In this course, we will explore the many ways in which writers have tried to answer this question. Alongside our readings, students will be asked to keep a notebook, with the instruction to keep everything that is for them a signature of thought. In this way, a pinecone or a piece of garbage is as much "writing" as anything else. Together, we will create an archive for the quarter, of everything that is produced and/or consumed under this aegis of making. This class is designed to pose questions about form and the activity of writing, in turn, the modes and methods of production not only as writers, but as persons.

Critical and Creative Work in Fact-based Narrative Forms

In this core course, students will investigate the complicated relationship between truth and art, by reading, watching, and writing works adapted from an historical record or "based on a true story." Weekly reading assignments will include fiction, poetry, memoir, and film, and students will write both critical essays and creative exercises that explore the overlaps and divergences between journalistic and artistic truth. Readings: Aristotle, Bechdel, Carson, Keats, Northup, and Zucker.

The advantage of working within a non-genre is best understood as a spatial metaphor: the house of fiction has kicked us out, but so what? That only means we are free to roam a limitless landscape, mingling with other genres and establishing new traditions. In recent years publishers have begun to recognize that nonfiction writers are necessarily hybrid creatures, and as a result we are witnessing an explosion of exciting books that challenge our impulse to categorize literature. To name a few pioneers: Claudia Rankine, Joe Wenderoth, Anne Carson, Solmaz Sharif, and Jenny Boully. In this course, students will close read a variety of works that dissolve the lines between poetry and prose and visual art, exploring what is becoming known as “the performative essay.” Our aim will be simple: to playfully experiment with innovative sources of narrative momentum each week, and to share our original hybrid works for energetic workshop discussions. A revision of the workshop essay, along with a critical essay on a reading of your choosing, will be turned in at the end of the quarter.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 3:30-6:20 PM

 

This course aims to expand the writers' understanding of the genre and broaden their skillset by reading, discussing, responding to and challenging the notion of one cohesive and unquestionable nonfiction canon as we examine the birth and evolution of the cisatlantic essay in all its forms. From the Popol Vuh to the political mural, from the manifesto to the Facebook post, from Tecayehuatzin's elegy for the city that fell to the Spaniards in 1524 to Torrey Peters Facebook elegy for all the transgender people who fell prey to violence and indifference in 2016. Examining the development of the essay within the contained cisatlantic space will allow for, not merely, a focused dissection of what are sometimes termed the foundational elements of the genre, but also a close examination of the development of a literary identity throughout the Americas, and of the concept of Americanness throughout the cisatlantic canon. What did literary nonfiction mean to the earliest American literature? What does `America' mean to essayists writing at the borders of countries, and the edges of society? What makes the great American essay great and what American? Students will be expected to read and discuss a broad array of cisatlantic nonfiction, respond to prompts crafted around these readings, and then to make their own contribution to this strange and defiant corner of the literary world.

Day/Time: Thursday, 12:30-3:20


 

Poetry after Modernism has been shaped by Ezra Pound’s directive to “Make it new.” Yet Pound himself derived this slogan from the most ancient of sources—an inscription on the washbasin of the first Shang dynasty king Ch’eng T’ang (1766-1753 BC). In this advanced poetry workshop, we will study some of the ways that contemporary poets revisit ancient texts from various cultures in order to open up new aesthetic and historical dimensions in our own poetry. Students will enjoy considerable freedom in how they conceive of their own poetry's relationship to diverse histories; from one week to the next, they may choose to write in a historical genre or form (the Latin hexameter, the Japanese haibun), in response to some ancient work (the Sundiata epic of old Mali, the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead), or they may invent their own ways to "make it old." Texts may include Armand Schwerner’s The Tablets, Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, Aga Shahid Ali’s Call Me Ishmael Tonight, Christopher Logue’s War Music, and Cecilia Vicuña’s New and Selected Poems, to name only a few possibilities.

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

 

This advanced writing workshop will explore the many ways in which poets since antiquity have approached the idea of “the long poem.” In a world of ever-decreasing attention spans, we’ll begin by considering what might motivate such a work today, and will read a wide range of contemporary texts, from linked sequences, to “middle-distance” or multi-part poems, to book- (or books-) length projects, that offer a rich variety of responses. Over the course of the quarter, students will conceive and develop a sustained poetic project that extends beyond the parameters of the conventional “lyric” poem. In addition to students’ original work, primary texts to be considered may include excerpts from Homer's Illiad, H.D.'s Helen in Egypt, Anne Carson’s “Glass Essay,” Robin Coste Lewis’ “Voyage of the Sable Venus,” Alice Oswald’s Memorial, Inger Christenson’s Alphabet, and A.R. Ammon's Garbage.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 2:00-4:50
 

In this advanced fiction workshop, we will examine and write narratives set at college, the so-called campus and varsity novels (and, in our case, short stories). We will try to capture the attendant promise and uncertainty of life on the cusp of adulthood, asking what it means to come of age, to age, to experiment, and possibly, to regress. We’ll attempt to veer away from cultural cliché and caricature to portray the truth of life on campus and come to grips with the way you live right now, as we consider what it means—to borrow the title of one novel—to make our home among strangers. Students will read published works and submit two stories or novel excerpts for workshops. Please expect a rigorous but constructive workshop environment where being a critic and an editor is essential.

Day/Time: Wednesday, 10:30-1:20
 

A story’s end point determines its meaning. The history of a life can be covered in a sentence, a few pages, or seven volumes. How do writers make these choices? In this advanced workshop, we’ll look at different ways to handle narrative time, paying special attention to building blocks like direct and summary scene, flashback, compression, slowed time and fabulist time. We’ll examine work by writers whose long stories have the sweep of novels, like Alice Munro and Edward P. Jones, alongside those who say everything in short single scenes of a page or two, like Grace Paley and Justin Torres. Students will be encouraged to experiment with time in both writing exercises and story revisions. Each student will workshop two stories, with strong emphasis on focused and productive peer critique and in-class commentary.

Day/Time: Thursday, 12:30-3:20