Advanced Workshops

Secret knowledge, withheld or discovered, has explosive power in literature. Deft management and containment of secrets has dramaturgical consequences for a story’s architecture. This course will examine narratives that skillfully deploy the strategies listed by Roland Barthes in his description of the hermeneutic code: snares, equivocations, partial answers, suspended answers, and jammings. 

In the course of our close study of these strategies, we will also investigate their generative potential. We will read stories and excerpts from writers such as Miranda July, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ken Liu, and Tom McCarthy.

What does plot need to sustain itself, to make itself, as Aristotle wrote, “a whole action”? For John Barth, a story’s middle “performs its double and contradictory functions of simultaneously fetching us to the climax and delaying our approach thereto.” 

This workshop will explore the successive complications of conflict (its incremental perturbations, in Barth’s words). It will examine how writers arrive at or invent or otherwise architect their ‘middles.’ Our investigative focus will be on how accretion and cumulation are created through sequence. We will read stories and excerpts from writers such as Alice Walker, Roald Dahl, John Le Carré and Jorge Luis Borges.

“Which one of us, in his moments of ambition, has not dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose," wrote Charles Baudelaire in Paris Spleen,"... supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the jibes of conscience?” This genre-blurring workshop will explore elements of the history and practice of the prose poem, and other poems and texts that combine strategies, forms and gestures of prose (fiction, nonfiction, etc.) with those of poetry. We will also read texts that are difficult to classify in terms of genre. “Flash Fiction,” “Short Shorts,” the fable, the letter, the mini-essay, and the lyric essay will be examined, among others. We will discuss the literary usefulness (or lack of it) of genre and form labels. The class will be taught as a workshop: students will try their hand at writing in their choices of hybrid forms, and will be encouraged to experiment. Writers from all genres are welcome, as what we will be studying, discussing, and writing will involve the fruitful collision of literary genres.

What does it mean to make sense out of lived experience? How do we claim ownership of our own stories, and shape those narratives on our own terms, independent of pressures that originated elsewhere? How do we craft narrative personas that readers deem trustworthy; how do we capture voices that feel compelling, urgent, and help to reorder the fallout of our lives into a coherent structure that can offer insight, even to readers we have never met? In this advanced nonfiction workshop, we will attempt to grapple with some of these concerns. With a particular emphasis on memoir and personal essay, we will explore what it means to excavate the self and map out the vast terrain contained within. Readings will include Vivian Gornick, Leslie Jamison, Aleksandar Hemon, James Baldwin, William Maxwell, Orhan Pamuk and Thomas Browne. Class time will be split between discussion of readings and student led workshops of original essays/memoirs in progress. By the end of the quarter, students will have workshopped two pieces of writing and submitted a final portfolio.

This course aims to expand the writers' understanding of the genre and broaden their skillset by reading, discussing, responding to and challenging the notion of one cohesive and unquestionable nonfiction canon as we examine the birth and evolution of the cisatlantic essay in all its forms. From the Popol Vuh to the political mural, from the manifesto to the Facebook post, from Tecayehuatzin's elegy for the city that fell to the Spaniards in 1524 to Torrey Peters Facebook elegy for all the transgender people who fell prey to violence and indifference in 2016. Examining the development of the essay within the contained cisatlantic space will allow for, not merely, a focused dissection of what are sometimes termed the foundational elements of the genre, but also a close examination of the development of a literary identity throughout the Americas, and of the concept of Americanness throughout the cisatlantic canon. What did literary nonfiction mean to the earliest American literature? What does `America' mean to essayists writing at the borders of countries, and the edges of society? What makes the great American essay great and what American?

Students will be expected to read and discuss a broad array of cisatlantic nonfiction, respond to prompts crafted around these readings, and then to make their own contribution to this strange and defiant corner of the literary world.

This course will focus on poetry’s rich histories of poetic voicings, building multiple definitions of what voice “sounds” like, how it is constructed, how it says, and how to quiet and amplify one’s own poetic voice. We will use our readings and findings to generate our own poetic voicings for student-led workshops.

This advanced workshop engages the play of mask and persona in contemporary poetry, including how these have been utilized in poets’ theater, dramatic monologue, confessional writing, autobiographical play, and translation of poems. Participants will be invited to experiment with voice and persona in writing and consider questions such as: How does the mask offer a means of engaging core aspects of self, society, and language? Writers for discussion include John Canaday, Denise Duhamel, Duriel Harris, Ilya Kaminsky, Yang Lian, Ed Pavlic, Fernando Pessoa, and Evie Shockley.

Memoir is the most pilloried genre in literature, not without reason. Many memoirs *are* self-indulgent, and they’re inevitably fictionalized to some degree. Memory is an unreliable narrator. It’s our imagination working in reverse, and as such, it invents things. It fictionalizes, and yet we have no choice but to rely on it. The best way to learn about its pitfalls is firsthand, by writing your own.

An inquiry into the ways we write about the internet, this workshop will survey works spanning across narrative nonfiction genres, from writing by William Gibson and Naomi Klein to the rise of the YouTube video essay as a sub-genre. Students will write and workshop essays that arise from hyper-contemporary corners of the internet, defining, as they go, a new kind of ekphrasis for the digital age.

Thinking about practices is a way of focusing a conversation between creative writers, art historians, curators, and working visual artists, all of whom are encouraged to join this workshop. We ourselves will be practicing and studying a wide variety of approaches to visual art. We’ll read critics like John Yau and Lori Waxman, memoirists like Aisha Sabbatini Sloan, inventive historians like Zbigniew Herbert, and poets like Gwendolyn Brooks and Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, as well as curatorial and museum writings, catalogue essays, artists' statements, and other experimental and practical forms.
The course hopes to support students both in developing useful practices and experimenting boldly. Classes will be shaped around current exhibitions and installations. Sessions will generally begin with student-led observation at the Smart Museum, and we will spend one session on close looking in the study room at the Smart. Students will also visit five collections, exhibitions and/or galleries and, importantly, keep a looking notebook. Students will write a number of exercises in different forms (immersive meditation, researched portrait, mosaic fragment), and will also write and revise a longer essay (on any subject and in any mode) to be workshopped in class.