Technical Seminars

This technical seminar course will look at fiction and some film to explore the use and function of setting in narrative works. We will consider its uses beyond simply as a tool in world-building or backdrop creation, looking into how it informs character, defines perspective, affects mood, pushes plot, and even makes us see the world differently. Students will read various works of long and short fiction with an eye to their use of setting, as well as critical and craft texts. They will write short weekly reading responses and some creative exercises as well. Each student will also be expected to make a brief presentation and turn in a final paper for the class.

In this class we'll analyze the architecture of nonfiction. We'll start by studying the primary elements of composition: the sentence, paragraph, and section. (Or chapter, in the case of a book.) We'll begin with Verlyn Klinkenborg's treatise, Several Short Sentences about Writing; also, because the sentence has so much in common with the line and thus poetry, lyric essays, which verge on verse. Sentences accrete into paragraphs, each with its own internal structure, one that leads to the next paragraph and eventually to the overall structure, one composed of every previous element, like a set of Russian nesting dolls. We'll take apart those structures. If it's a chain of events we'll study their order, and ask why they're often better out of chronologic order. If the piece is a train of thought we'll look at the way each paragraph forms a boxcar, so to speak, in that train, one pulled along by a central, sometimes unspoken, question or conflict. In some cases-Didion's White Album-we'll analyze the absence of any meaningful structure. Other readings include Katherine Boo, David Grann, Natalia Ginzburg, and theoretical texts such as John McPhee's Draft Number Four.

This reading and writing seminar will acquaint students with one of the essential tools of fiction writers: characterization. We will read primary texts by authors including Baldwin, Flaubert, Munro, and Wharton, as well as critical work by Danticat, Forester, and Vargas Llosa, toward exploring how some of literature's most famous characters are rendered. How do writers of fiction create contexts in which characters must struggle, and how does each character's conflicts reveal his or her nature? Students will complete both creative and analytical writing exercises, reading responses, and a paper that focuses on characterization in a work of fiction.

The goal of this course will be to understand the methods and mechanisms of effective narrative pacing in creative nonfiction by carefully dissecting a variety of texts, ranging from Woolf's "The Death of the Moth," to Solzhenit_s_yn's The Gulag Archipelago, and Bechdel's Fun Home. Students will be expected to actively participate in class discussion, read from a broad assorted of texts, and complete a series of corresponding creative writing prompts testing the principles discussed in class.

Day/Time: Monday, 10:30-1:20

Some of the most compelling works of fiction are built around moral, social, and psychological dilemmas. Characters are set loose in a dark woods of ambiguity and conflicting values, where they reveal themselves (and their/our humanity) through the decisions they make, the actions they undertake. Such stories present a dramatized prism of arguments and resist easy "lessons." Rather, they end with a question mark that invites conversation between reader and narrative long after the story has ended. The challenge for writers, of course, is to avoid polemic, instead exploring this moral, social, and psychological terrain in a way that is even-handed and flows organically out of character. In this technical seminar, we will read fiction (by writers like James Alan McPherson, Graham Greene, Tayari Jones, and Cynthia Ozick, among others) that centers on an uneasy choice between moral positions. We will examine how the dilemma shapes conflict and plot, and, perhaps most important, how the writer invites the reader to get lost in a dark woods alongside the story's characters. 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: Thursday, 9:30-12:20

At the core of fiction writing is dramatization, which allows the reader to "see" the world and characters of our story and to experience the ideas and emotions that we want to resonate. The primary vehicle for dramatization is the scene, and in this technical seminar, we'll look at all the elements of a traditionally well-made scene in a work of fiction-dialogue, action, characterization, description, etc.-and investigate the effects of each element and how they all work together to support the overall narrative. What are the various functions of a scene, beyond characterization and drama? Where is the best place to begin and end? What is the most effective way to organize and juxtapose our scenes over the course of a short story, a chapter of a novel, or an entire novel? How might we move beyond the traditional ideas of action and dialogue and expand our notion of what a scene is and what it can do? During the quarter, we'll look at exceptional scenes in short stories, novels, plays, movies, and even television shows, with an eye also on how all these genres of dramatic writing use scenes similarly and differently and what we might learn from these dynamics as fiction writers. Along with the reading material, assignments will include reading responses, creative writing exercises, short essays, and presentations.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 2:00-4:50

Every writer of personal nonfiction knows that ultimately the story isn't about them: it's about something larger, perhaps universal, and their personal story is merely a means to that end. The key to this paradox is the synecdoche, or the part that stands for the whole. The universe in a grain of sand, the one story that tells many people's story. Anne Fadiman did it in_The Spirit Catches You and Then You Fall Down, her book about a Hmong immigrant in the United States. So did Joan Didion, in_Where I Was From; by telling the story of her family, she told the story of California, and by telling the story of California she told the story of the West and thus of America. Rian Malan did the same for South Africa in _My Traitor's Heart: by telling the story of his family he told the story of Apartheid, and thus of our segregated world. We'll look at how these and other writers locate the universal in their particulars, and discuss how to apply their example to your own writing._

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, most likely include major works by Keats, Dickinson, Hopkins, Stevens, Frost, Eliot, and Mallarm_, as well as Lyn Hejinian's My Life, Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette, and James Tate's The Ghost Soldiers. 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.

Writing fiction is in large part a matter of convincing world-building, no matter what genre you write in. And convincing world-building is about creating a seamless reality within the elements of that world: from character dynamics, to setting, to social systems, and even the story or novel's conceptual conceit. And whether it be within a genre of realism, historical fiction, or science fiction, building a convincing world takes a good deal of research. So while we look closely at the tools and methods of successful world-building, we will also dig into the process of research. From how and where to mine the right details, to not just how to do research, but how research can make a fertile ground for harvesting ideas and even story. Students will read various works long and short fiction with an eye to its world-building, as well as critical and craft texts. They will write short weekly reading responses and some creative exercises as well. Each student will also be expected to make a brief presentation and turn in a final paper for the class.

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, 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, Ryzard Kapuchinski, and Katherine Boo. Finally, we'll look at some radio and film works that deliberately and/or "ecstatically" smudge the truth, by Orson Welles, Banksy, and Werner Herzog. The focus of this course is very much on responding critically to each text and the larger question of genre. But there will also be opportunities for creative exercises. As such this course is particularly meant for Creative Writing majors in fiction but will appeal to any student interested in contemporary literature.