2017-2018

What do poets do with surplus, with extras, leftovers, and other excesses of production? Is there a creative use to put them to? When viewed in the context of ecology and economy, what are the ethical dimensions of working with surplus? Or are there also ethics and aesthetics of the useless? With these guiding questions, this course will introduce students to methods for a creative approach to waste, and develop revision practices that draw on the reuse of material surplus. We will consider forms of excess (literary, artistic, economic, material, etc.) and their creative applications. We'll examine diverse types of waste and things that "waste", including literal trash, ruins, the body, time, the dream, and everyday texts (such as emails, text messages, rough drafts, conversations, and ephemeral media). Ultimately, this course will help students engage in the revision process. Reading may include A.R. Ammons' Garbage, Eliot's The Waste Land, Jen Bervin's Nets, Bernadette Mayer's Midwinter Day, Andr_ Breton's Mad Love, Joyelle McSweeney's Dead Youth, or The Leaks, George Perec's An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, and Shakespeare's Sonnets.

Students will write and turn in two full-length stories or novel chapters for this workshop-based class. While we won't ignore such fundamental elements of fiction writing as POV and narrative distance, characterization, setting, and dialogue, the class will pay special attention to how Narrative Questions (that is, questions that sustain the tension of a narrative) as well as the rate of character revelation can be used to both drive and pace a story or novel. In addition to submitting and reading for workshop, expect to read and discuss at least one novel and a selection of short stories.

There are choices we're making at the sentence level that conjure specific tonal environments in our Non-Fiction. These tonal choices are mostly idiosyncratic to each writer, part of our syntactic DNA. This won't be a class in changing anyone's inherent tonal choices. It will be a class where we'll practice how to listen to our writing so that we can recognize the choices we've made and how best to accentuate them in revision. We'll look at some of the great sentence makers: Woolf, Baldwin, Didion, Sontag, Als, Sebald (still a knock-out even in translation), DFW, Rushdie, and others. We will be looking very closely at sentence level construction. We'll read some poets because they make it all look so easy sometimes. We'll analyze the interaction between the tone and content of each essay, watching how that interaction can be causal, inseparable, playful, discordant, impossible, etc.

This past year, the Nobel Prize Committee controversially awarded the Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition." But what does "new poetic expressions" mean? In this course, we will look at works which fall inside and outside of the poetic tradition (including artworks, films, songs, and so on) in order to ask: What are we saying when we say "poetic"? What values are we ascribing to this practice and how do we delineate its formal and/or "expressive" powers? Students will be asked to keep a reading notebook as well as to write essays on the subject.

As readers, we can all sense when a narrator doesn't seem "convincing" as a character. Would anyone say such a thing? we wonder. What makes a first-person voice seem "real" to readers? How does this voice naturally move - whether in moments of boredom, of distress, of passion? Ultimately, what we're asking as writers is, How can interiority truly be achieved? In this reading course, we will examine the first-person voice in contemporary fiction by authors such as Garth Greenwell, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Banana Yoshimoto - always with a craft-specific eye on how we can fine-tune our own narrators' voices.

In this fundamentals course, students will investigate the complicated relationship between writers, fictional characters, and readers, toward determining what place literary empathy has in our conversation about contemporary literature. James Baldwin once observed that, "You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive." We will use weekly reading assignments including fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction to ask questions about what Virgina Woolf called "perpetual union with another mind." Students will write critical responses, creative exercises, and a final paper on a topic to be approved by the instructor. Readings include Baldwin, Bishop, Beard, Carson, Walcott, and Woolf.

This workshop will explore the underlying mechanics that have made plays tick for the last 2,500 odd years, fromEuripedes 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 class you 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 the 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 demonstrate solutions 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.

Poems are meeting places, Robert Creeley said. They offer locations but they also locate us, as writers and readers, in literal and figurative ways. And sometimes they dislocate us too. This beginning workshop will explore poetry writing through the lens of location, from considering place-based writing to thinking about textual and performative strategies that capture or engender movement, stasis, flux. We'll look to artists, writers, poets, dancers for inspiration and orientation: William Cowper, On Kawara, Gertrude Stein, Marguerite Young, C.S. Giscombe, Charles Olson, Alice Notley, Tonya Foster, Virgil, Gaston Bachelard, Adrienne Rich, Robert Venturi, Sally Gross. Reading, writing, and workshopping assignments will consider "location" (and locomotion) as theme, technique, and opportunity to investigate and play with our own senses of locality as individuals and as a writing community. In addition to writing poems, weekly assignments might find you taking walks, making maps, conjuring imaginary geographies, crafting spatial histories, and discovering embodied movement practices.

This course will begin with a weeks-long consideration of selected works of short fiction where discussion will aim to isolate the basic techniques and devices of effective storytelling. Weekly topics will range from subjects as broad as plot arrangement and character development to more highly focused lessons on scene design, dialog, and word choice. Throughout the term, the writing process will be broken down into stages where students will be asked to chart their processes of conceptualizing, writing, and revising a narrative. Finally, in the latter weeks of the quarter, emphasis will shift to the workshopping of students' own fiction.