Undergraduate

This advanced fiction workshop is for students who wish to continue to refine and develop their understanding of the art form. In our outside readings, we'll consider fiction writers who've written about music and musicians, including James Baldwin, Geoff Dyer, Thomas Bernhard, and Dana Spiotta. And we'll read works written by musicians, like Charles Mingus'_ Beneath the Underdog_and Rafi Zabor's_The Bear Comes Home._However, we won't limit ourselves to music as subject matter. We'll examine T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" and Ralph Ellison's_Invisible Man_as works profoundly influenced by jazz and improvisatory methods of composition, and we'll look at stories like "Rondo," by Susan Neville, which uses musical form as its structural principle. Finally, we'll consider experiments in what we might call verbal music by James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Ben Marcus. In our workshops, you are absolutely not required to write_about_music. Rather, the course will allow us to consider new methods of composition, both on the narrative and sentence level.

This class is for any student who has taken at least one other fiction workshop at the University and is interested in or already working on a novel. In the first few weeks of the course, we will read and discuss a selection of first chapters from some exemplary and diverse novels (like The Great Gatsby, Invisible Man, Beloved, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, The Age of Innocence, Lolita, and The Virgin Suicides) and discuss what a first chapter can-even should-do and the different ways that it can do these things. How do certain novels introduce its characters, its plot, its setting, its principle concerns and philosophies? How do they dive into the narrative in ways that intrigue or even challenge us? How do certain opening chapters teach us how to read the rest of the novel? These and other crucial questions will be addressed throughout the course, particularly during our workshops, where everyone will present the first chapter or two of their novel-in-progress. Along with the fundamentals of craft like language, characterization, plotting, and structure, etc., we will look at how we can adjust or rethink our opening chapters so that we can move forward more effectively with the larger project.

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.