Technical Seminars

Many if not most writers draw on their own lives. Transforming the raw stuff of experience, personal and/or family history, and intimate expertise is not, of course, as straightforward as it might seem. Does writing autobiographically necessarily equal "confession"? Or are there other ways of writing the self? Where exactly is the line between personal essay/memoir and autobiographical fiction? What pact do we form with the reader when the material is explicitly close to our own lives? What pact do we have with ourselves and the real people we write about? Readings will include works by Sylvia Plath, Leslie Feinberg, Kathryn Harrison, Akhil Sharma, Michael Cunningham, Ralph Ellison, and St. Augustine. Critical responses and creative exercises alike will help you understand the nuances, challenges, and pleasures of writing autobiographically.

Day/Time: Wednesday, 12:40–2:40 PM

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.

Day/Time: Wednesday, 10:20-12:20 PM

Who (or what) tells a story might be the most important decision a writer makes.  The narrator of a work of fiction will tell the story from a particular point in time, will have particular biases, agendas, frames of reference, lexicon, insights, and history. And all of those factors contribute to their perspective—in fact, a story’s narrative could be understood as the delivery of the narrator’s perspective to the reader. In this seminar, we will examine perspective in works of fiction, with an eye towards discovering the elements that comprise a given perspective and also what we might learn as writers from the work. Along with the reading material, assignments will include reading responses, creative writing exercises, and presentations. 

Day/Time: Tuesday, 1:00-4:00 PM

Few things are as effective in capturing the attention of a reader than well crafted scenes. The creation of the illusion of movement, time and the sensory experience is by no means an easy task, however, and it must take into consideration pacing, punctuation, spatial references and white space among a vicissitude of other elements. In addition, there is the added difficulty of the nonfiction scene, the role of research, the limitations of first-person accounts and the distortion of memory. This course is intended to address these questions through a series of readings, lectures and writing prompts designed to dissect the matter at hand and equip the writer with the necessary tools to build a well-paced and effective scene.

Day/Time: Thursday, 2:40-5:40

From the fragmented to the recurrent, from the recurrent to the intricate, from the precise to the vernacular, from the vernacular to the artificial; we'll discuss the why, the how, and the effects of a few of the possible forms and devices of poetry.

Day/Time: Wednesday, 12:40–2:40 PM

This class will explore the intermarriage of the poem with the essay or book-length work of nonfiction. We'll explore a range of works that share with the poetic an attention to and innovative use of form, highly imagistic language, and the use of white space or occasional line breaks. At times such works employ elevated diction; at other times vernacular prosity. Some of these works leave off narrative, others care deeply about the telling of a story. In each case, we'll think about the intersection of form and content. Why this form for this story (or non-story)? What has been gained? What seems intentionally lost? Writers studied may include Claudia Rankine, Anne Carson, Patricia Hampl, Eve L. Ewing, Maggie Nelson, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Lia Purpura.

This course aims to investigate, through a range of readings and writing exercises, various units of composition and the ways that they interact with each other in poems. We will study and imitate traditional formal approaches, such as the poetic foot, meter, caesuras, sprung rhythm, rhymed stanzas, and refrains. We also will study and imitate modernist and contemporary "units," such as the word (approached, for example, etymologically or connotatively), the free verse line, the variable foot, vers libre, serial form, the sentence (the "new" sentence, but also modulations of basic syntax), the paragraph, the page, and forms of call and response. This reading intensive course will draw from a selection of mostly modern and contemporary poetry, poetics, and criticism. Students will be expected to submit weekly technical exercises, complete several short critical responses, write a longer essay, and submit a final portfolio of revised material.

This seminar looks primarily at fiction that blurs the line between imagination and experience. We'll look at highly memoiristic "autofiction" by the likes of Rachel Cusk, Renata Adler, Annie Ernaux, and Hitomi Kanehara. Authors who have addressed the same subjects in both works of fiction and nonfiction, including Kathryn Harrison and James Baldwin, will also be of interest to us. As will nonfiction novels and/or highly novelistic journalism by George Orwell and Truman Capote. This course is primarily intended for fiction writing students interested in exploring different approaches to autobiography or curious about the possibilities opened up by such genre bending works. But it will also appeal to any student interested in contemporary and 20th-century literature. The emphasis will be on critical writing, but there will also be opportunities for creative exercises and responses.

In conversations on literary craft, plot and structure are often used interchangeably. Yet, while plot refers to a causal sequence of events, structure is a broader term concerned with narrative patterning. This includes thematic layering, pacing, the order of scenes, perspective shifting, and more. In this course, we will examine structural arrangements in both canonical and contemporary works of fiction by Franz Kafka, Rachel Ingalls, Jenny Zhang, and others. We'll look at scene, repetition, listings, disruptive elements, digressive voice, seemingly shapeless storylines, and how these variables factor in creating structure. In every instance, we will look at how structure accommodates and naturally derives from the story, rather than impose itself upon it like some alien force. While this is not a workshop course, come prepared to write and casually share work in class. Students will pursue both creative work and critical papers.

"Make a poem the way nature makes a tree," wrote Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro. In this course we'll think about how poems about places and objects are made, and how formal decisions can be used to enact a setting or scene. We'll also look at poems that take other works of art, namely photographs and paintings of landscapes and still lifes, as starting points. Students will consider not only conventional questions of form, such as line, meter, diction, stanzas, but also radical departures from such conventions, such as visual juxtapositions, calligrams, sound poems, and sculpture.