2017-2018

We often say of film adaptations: it's not as good as the book. But what can we, as readers and writers, learn from that unsuccessful transition to the screen? And more intriguingly, what can we learn from the successful ones, the films that are just as good if not better than the original written work-or so vastly different that they become their own entity? In this class, we will be reading works of short fiction and also "reading" their film adaptations, focusing on this relationship between storytelling on the page and storytelling on the screen and what is both lost and gained in that transition. If filmmaking requires a different language than fiction writing, a different approach to things like character, plot, atmosphere, even thematic development, what can we learn from that approach that we can apply to our own fiction, even if we have no interest in making films? We'll investigate this question in the work of writers like Alice Munro, E. Annie Proulx, and Arthur Schnitzler, and filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and Nicolas Roeg.

This course will explore a range of literary responses to the anthropocene period, understood as the geological age in which the prevailing economic and social paradigms of humans have conditioned changes in climate and the environment. We will begin with foundational texts in environmental perception and activism (John Ruskin's "Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century") and modernist works engaging with urban landscapes (William Carlos Williams's Paterson), opening onto a wide range of contemporary texts that engage the natural and constructed environment in crisis. We will encounter poetry by authors such as Cecilia Vicu-a, Andrea Zanzotto, Robert Grenier, Ed Roberson, Kamau Brathwaite, Juliana Spahr, Marcella Durand, Rodrigo Toscano, and Evelyn Reilly; prose by Jonathan Skinner, Jed Rasula, David Buuck, and Dee Morris; and art by Robert Smithson, Andy Goldsworthy, and Mierle Ukeles, among others. Students will be asked, week by week, to produce short creative pieces in response to an environmental issue or debate that interests them.

Focusing on the theory, history and practice of poetic translation, this seminar includes sessions with invited theorists and practitioners from North and South America, Europe, and Asia. Taking translation to be an art of making sense that is transmitted together with a craft of shapes and sequences, we aim to account for social and intellectual pressures influencing translation projects. We deliberately foreground other frameworks beyond "foreign to English" and "olden epochs to modern"-and other methods than the "equivalence of meaning"-in order to aim at a truly general history and theory of translation that might both guide comparative cultural history and enlarge the imaginative resources of translators and readers of translation. In addition to reading and analysis of outside texts spanning such topics as semantic and grammatical interference, gain and loss, bilingualism, self-translation, pidgin, code-switching, translationese, and foreignization vs. nativization, students will be invited to try their hands at a range of tactics, aiming toward a final portfolio of annotated translations.

This class is required if you're writing a BA or MAPH thesis in nonfiction or working on your portfolio for the minor. The class itself is entirely workshop, meaning that you and your classmates will provide the vast majority of material for discussion. You'll spend as much time editing other people's writing as you will working on your own. I emphasize editing because writing is essentially rewriting, and editing other manuscripts is the fastest way to gain the objectivity and skill you need to edit your own. By teaching others you'll teach yourself, preparing you for the real life of the writer outside the academy. That's why your first assignment will be to create your own syllabus: your own, self-directed program of outside reading, with smart, succinct reasons for each choice. All writers are ultimately self-taught, and this class is intended to be a step in that direction.

This course is an advanced seminar intended primarily for students writing a Creative BA or MA thesis, as well as Creative Writing Minors completing the portfolio. Because it is a thesis seminar, 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 advanced fiction workshop is for Creative Writing majors, minors, and MAPH students and other advanced students working on a substantial fiction project. It will be primarily a workshop class and all students are expected to enter this course with a story collection, a novel, or a novella already in progress, ready to be submitted and critiqued. The class will stress narrative arc and different kinds of conflict, though we will also discuss such fundamentals as POV and narrative distance, voice, character development, structure, setting, and dialogue as needed, in order to best shape a given work toward the writer's own vision of that work. Keep in mind that writers don't work in a vacuum-we should have a strong sense of how our own work fits in with the work of other writers. With this in mind, each student will also be expected to make several short presentations on the writing life: literary influences, writers' processes, explorations of craft elements, literary journals, etc.

This advanced fiction workshop is for Creative Writing majors, minors, and MAPH students and other advanced students working on a substantial fiction project. In workshop discussions, we'll read and critique student work with an eye toward solidifying what you've learned and produced in previous writing courses. We'll continue to address fundamental principles of storytelling and prose writing, but hope to bring a further degree of subtlety and curiosity to our discussions. We'll also refine and expand our tastes as readers and writers by considering fiction by the likes of Tolstoy, Roberto Bola-o, Lydia Davis, Alice Munro, and James Baldwin. Finally, students will choose outside texts that have in some way influenced or informed their own creative projects and present and lead discussion on them.

This advanced fiction workshop is for Creative Writing majors, minors, and MAPH students and other advanced students working on a substantial fiction project. Each of you will work on two chapters and the outline of an individual, book-length manuscript. Together, we will use the workshop to explore strategies for creating new material, revising the pages you have, and building structures that sustain and support long-form works. Readings include works by Baldwin, Carson, Hemon, Yan, and Wharton.

This advanced fiction workshop is for Creative Writing majors, minors, and MAPH students and other advanced students working on a substantial fiction project. It is primarily a workshop, so please come to our first class with your project in progress (a story collection, a novel, or a novella), ready for you to discuss and to submit some part of for critique. As in any writing workshop, we will stress the fundamentals of craft like language, voice, and plot and character development, with an eye also on how to shape your work for the longer form you have chosen. And as a supplement to our workshops, we will have brief student presentations on the writing life: our literary influences, potential avenues towards publication, etc.

The stories we avoid are often as important as the ones we embrace. This idea can pose one of the most difficult hurdles for writers as they find and develop a distinctive voice and style. When we tell a story, whether through personal narrative, research, reportage, or criticism, we are implicitly asking for our reader's empathy and acknowledgment. But how does one do this when the subject at hand is taboo? In this reading and writing workshop, we will explore the challenges of writing about subjects often avoided or ignored in public discourse: menstruation, lactation, childbirth, maternal ambivalence, death and dying, sex, perversion, violence, and other uncomfortable subjects that force us to forego sentimentality and received knowledge. We'll discuss how other writers do this: reading works such as Emily Witt's Future Sex, Meghan Daum's Unspeakable, Rivka Galchen's Little Labors or Barry Lopez' Sliver of Sky. Students will choose a single topic to research and to write about throughout the quarter, both in short assignments and in a longer piece to be workshopped by the class.