Technical Seminars

Love it or hate it, research is an essential part of nonfiction writing. But it’s about more than just gathering facts; diving into research means navigating the gaps, challenges, and surprises that come with combing through archives and interviewing subjects. In this course, we'll explore how research puzzles can become treasure troves of creativity and storytelling. We’ll read authors like A. Van Jordan, Stacy Schiff, and M. Nourbese Philip, who have faced these unknown realms of research head-on and emerged with powerful, compelling stories. Through lively class discussions, collective strategizing, and composing short essays, you’ll engage with difficulties like incomplete archives or unreliable sources and learn how to turn them into compelling narratives. Throughout the term, you will pursue a single multi-faceted research question that you propose in the first few weeks. To this end, you’ll also keep a research journal, tracking your discoveries, challenges, and new questions that arise as you dig deeper into your chosen topic. In addition, we’ll work together to create our own class archive, where you’ll explore primary sources and unearth hidden gems from your research adventures. By the end of the course, you’ll not only have completed a research-driven creative project but will have navigated the wilds of research, transforming every research challenge into a creative adventure.

Nowadays, we love when stories occupy a shared universe. Yet what often gives true power to the story cycle or novel-in-stories is the gaps between these connected works. The spaces left untold, where characters leave us and return changed. In this course, we will investigate the art of not telling. How do authors calibrate these gaps, showing us not too much but not too little? How do these discrepancies complicate and enrich the world of the narrative? What work do we do as readers, and how does it impact our experience? We will read connected stories from Peter Orner, Denis Johnson, Evan S. Connell, Tove Jansson and others. Students will be responsible for craft analyses, vigorous participation, and relevant creative exercises.

This technical seminar will investigate how we can use speculation as a tool in our creative nonfiction narratives. How can we bring imagination and fantasy into our discussion of "fact" and "reality," and do those ideas, in fact, change what "fact" and "reality" mean to us? We'll read Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House and Alan Weisman's The World Without Us to deepen our thinking. Students will then practice using speculation in their own nonfiction narratives through short creative exercises. They will also write analytical papers on our chosen works to investigate how each author uses speculation to support and inspire their nonfiction narratives.

In this course, we will investigate narratives of investigation. Detective stories without answers, in which characters piece together clues, trying to understand, yet something always remains elusive. Mysteries that defy conclusion and pull us deeper into the sublime, embracing what Robert Boswell calls "the half- known world." How do writers combine elements of the detective and literary genres to create and frustrate a reader's appetite for knowledge? How do writers elevate these stories to offer the spiritual alongside the factual? In addition to reading published texts from Patrick Modiano, Keith Ridgway, W.G. Sebald, Scott Blackwood, and others, students will produce craft analyses and creative work that puts course learnings into practice.

How do we convincingly recreate important episodes from our life? How do we help our readers inhabit those moments that continue to live so urgently within our memory? How much invention are we allowed to employ, and how do we ensure that such accounts remain “truthful”? In this technical seminar in nonfiction, we will explore the craft of dramatization in personal essay and memoir. We will discuss many tools that are familiar to the fiction writer, including scene-building, characterization, and dialogue, as well as aspects unique to the art of nonfiction, such as the incorporation of testimonials, research, and letters, all in the service of dramatizing significant moments from our lived experience. Students will produce reading responses, craft analyses, and short creative exercises putting learned skills into practice.

From ancient Sumerian temple hymns to 7th-century Japanese death poems to avant-garde ekphrasis in the 21st century, the history of poetry is as rich in genres as it is in forms. Why does it feel so good to write a curse? What is an ode and how is it different from an aubade? In this technical seminar we will study the origins, transcultural functions, and evolving conventions of some of the oldest-living genres of lyric poetry – the ode, the elegy, the love poem, the curse, to name a few. We will read living writers such as Alice Oswald, Danez Smith, Kim Hyesoon, and Natalie Diaz alongside historical forerunners including Aesop, Sei Shonagon, John Keats. Federico Garcia Lorca, Sylvia Plath, and Paul Celan. Students will write weekly experiments of their own in response to our readings, and for a final project they will edit a mini-anthology of a genre of their choice, including a short critical introduction.

Whenever we write stories, we are in conversation with other writers, living or dead. Sometimes that conversation is quiet and intimate—a matter of subtle influence, much as we take on unconsciously the diction and cadences of admired mentors and beloved friends. Other times, the conversation is boisterous, a meeting of minds, a deepening of our collective discourse. Still other times, the conversation gets heated. We feel the need to set the record straight, give voice to a neglected or misrepresented character, vindicate a monster or indict a hero. In this technical seminar, we will read writers responding to other writers—Victor Lavalle & H.P. Lovecraft, Haruki Murakami & Franz Kafka, Doris Lessing & Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Joyce Carol Oates & James Joyce, among others—and examine how these writers retell, modernize, and comment upon influential stories, making the stories their own while incorporating familiar elements. The emphasis of this course will be on critical writing, but students will also have opportunities to write creative responses to the readings and experiment with the craft techniques we discuss.

What we call style is more than literary flourish. Control of a story begins with a writer’s characteristic approach to the line. Style dictates and shapes immersive and impactful worlds of our creation. It’s also indicative of a work’s larger themes, philosophies, and aesthetic sensibility. In this class, we’ll examine fiction by wordsmiths such as James Baldwin, Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison, and Marguerite Duras in order to contemplate the influence that elements such as diction, syntax, rhythm, and punctuation have on a writer’s style.

T. S. Eliot once said that “good writers borrow, great writers steal.” In this class we will look at modeling as a springboard for original creativity. What makes a piece of writing original? Is it possible to borrow a famous writer’s story structure, theme, or even attempt their voice, yet produce something wholly original? How specifically are writers influenced and then inspired? Readings will pair writers with the influences they’ve talked or written about, such as Yiyun Li and Anton Chekhov; Edward P. Jones and Alice Walker; Sigrid Nunez and Elizabeth Hardwick, and George Saunders and Nikolai Gogol. Writing exercises will experiment with aspects of voice, narrative structure, point of view, tone, and use of dialog. While this is not a workshop course, come prepared to write and share work in class. Students will pursue both creative work and critical papers.

This technical seminar in poetry offers writers an opportunity to examine an essential American poetic space: the road. A core question is how one reads the road’s poetic surface versus its depths. Does journey itself lay out a clear narrative, admitting its forks, detours, and breakdowns? How is a basic American “compass” disrupted by poetic reconsiderations of “the road?” Does every road run “west?” How is the road itself as much about dislocation as it is about coherent journey?

As an orientation to a poetics of space, participants will engage critical perspectives set up by Gaston Bachelard, CS Giscombe, and Rebecca Solnit. Then, writers will develop their own critical/creative responses, exploring models established by Gabe Gudding, William Least Heat-Moon, Ed Roberson, and Muriel Rukeyser. Inviting her readers to remap historical and mythic journeys, Rukeyser resets the road as a conduit into a reassessment of national narrative through The Book of the Dead. Taking his own road east, Gudding overturns a “beat poetics” of travel in his Rhode Island Notebook. Least Heat-Moon (Blue Highways) and Roberson (MPH and Other Road Poems) invite explorations of “the road” as much in time as in space or personal journey. Overall, the course remaps that road, in the words of Giscombe, itself a “scattering [where] nothing cohered.”