Beginning Workshops

In this beginning-level fiction workshop, we will focus on the relationship between writer, reader, and story -- in other words, point of view. Who is telling a story?  To whom?  For what purpose and at what distance?  As we read fiction by writers like Lorrie Moore, Jose Saramago, Breece D’J Pancake, George Saunders, Kazuo Ishiguro, and others, we'll consider how point-of-view choices affect storytelling at all levels: character, voice, plot, structure, and significant detail. Most important, through weekly writing exercises and peer critique, we’ll experiment with a wide range of storytelling personae and points of view, from the intimate unreliability of the first-person narrator to the judicial distance of the magisterial voice. You will also be required to produce a full-length story for workshop, letters of critique for each of your peers, and a substantial revision of your short story.

Mondays, 9:30-12:20

Basics of Narrative Design | This course will begin with a weeks-long consideration of selected works of fiction where discussion will aim to distinguish the basic techniques and devices of effective storytelling. Weekly topics will range from subjects as broad as point of view and plot arrangement 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 written work will focus on discrete story parts such first pages, character introductions, and dialog-driven scenes before students are asked to compose full-length narratives. Along the way, students will chart their processes of conceptualizing, drafting, and revising their narratives. Finally, in the latter weeks of the quarter, emphasis will shift to the workshopping of students’ full stories.

Thursdays, 9:30-12:20 

Autobiography is what happens when you're writing about something else. This course practices the art of letting the personal bleed into traditionally impersonal forms and is ideal for beginning students eager to experiment with creative possibilities. We'll read Anne Carson shaken by loss but trying to think through Emily Brontë, Joan Didion documenting her own bewilderment as a journalist in the 1960s, Michael Clune interrogating the allure of childhood videogames, and Eula Biss contemplating American racism in the context of her own Chicago neighborhood. The second half of the course will focus on autobiographies that are reframed by contact with other forms of attention—Claudia Rankine's politically disciplined anecdotes, Barry Lopez's nature writing, Virginia Woolf's rigorous exposition of her own consciousness as she reads a book. In each half of the course you will submit an original piece for peer workshopping, first a piece of criticism informed by autobiography, second an autobiographical essay informed by another discipline or pursuit. Directed prose exercises, edited by the instructor and returned for revision, will sharpen your technical self‐mastery. Polished revisions of workshop pieces will be due at the quarter's end.

Instructor(s): Benjamin Lytal
Day/Time: Thursday, 12:30-3:20

Real Characters

What does it mean to study another person’s life—a real person—and craft the collected pieces into a work of nonfiction? How can we write about them with authority? How do we turn people into nonfiction characters? As students report and write profiles in this nonfiction workshop, we will explore the practice and limits of this popular genre. Through weekly writing exercises and reading assignments, we will study different techniques of gathering facts--interviewing and observing subjects, using secondary sources, providing social and historical context. We will develop the abilities to depict people through physical detail, dialogue and action. In considering the extent to which we can and can’t know the real people we portray, we will also explore how writers (along with documentary filmmakers, historians, sociologists, writers of case studies) address these limitations in their work. Students will complete a short profile each week, and they will write one longer, workshopped and revised profile.

Day/Time: Wednesday, 9:30-12:20
 

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 two short essays.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 9:30-12:20
 

The Short Story

This class is an introduction to the writing of literary fiction. Our purpose will be to learn techniques that will help us to hone our skills as writers, observers, and thinkers. To that end, we will explore basic elements of fiction writing (plot, character, setting, point-of-view, dialogue, conflict, etc.) and read literature as writers. This means that we will be concerned foremost with how stories are crafted, and we will attempt to create a language in order to articulately describe what rivets us as readers. A strong component of this course is developing an appreciation of writing as a communal endeavor. As such, you are required to attend literary events in the community. As a member of a writing community, be prepared to respectfully read and respond to the work of others—both the work of students and published writers. Expect to invest a significant amount of time reading and writing inside and outside of class.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 9:30-12:20

The Short Story

“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 Joy Williams as well as many newer literary voices, breaking down their stories, not simply as examples of meaningful fiction, but as road maps 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.

Day/Time: Thursday, 9:30-12:20