Beginning Workshops

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 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." Through readings of published stories and workshops of students' own fiction, this course will explore the parameters of the short story, its scope and ambitions, its limitations as well. We'll read established masters like Edgar Allen Poe, Raymond Carver, and Alice Munro as well as many newer literary voices, 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 full-length 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.

"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.

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.

How to Read Like a Writer: When someone says that a piece of writing is "beautiful" what does that mean? Why do you sometimes sigh with pleasure after reading a short story? In this discussion class, we'll be analyzing short stories (including your own) to discover the many different ways writers are able to create beautiful, moving works of art. We will be using craft analysis, the historical basis for learning to be a writer and in the process, we'll read some playful writers such as Chekhov, Joyce Carol Oates, Flannery O'Connor, George Saunders and Kelly Link. We will also be reading about the philosophy of writing, as described by Cixous, Barthes, Bachelard and Wood. And best of all, you'll be presenting your own manuscripts for critique in this workshop-based class. By the end of the quarter, we will have honed our skills as attentive readers, developed as writers of clear, sophisticated prose, and read some fiction that will linger in our imaginations, hopefully for life.

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.