Advanced Workshops

All writing is revision, and this holds true for the practice of literary translation as well. We will critique each other's longer manuscripts-in-progress of prose, poetry, or drama, and examine various revision techniques-from the line-by-line approach of Lydia Davis, to the "driving-in-the-dark" model of Peter Constantine, and several approaches in between. We will consider questions of different reading audiences while manuscripts for submission for publication, along with the contextualization of the work with a translator's preface or afterword. Our efforts will culminate in not only an advanced-stage manuscript, but also with various strategies in hand to use for future projects. Students who wish to take this workshop should have at least an intermediate proficiency in a foreign language and already be working on a longer translation project.

Purple, lean, evocative, muscular, literary, exuberant, lucid, stilted, economical. These are all labels that critics and reviewers have used to characterize prose styles that call attention to themselves in distinct ways. Of course, what constitutes style not only changes over time, but also means different things in different literary traditions. How, then, do translators carry style over from one language and cultural milieu to another? And to what extent does style structure storytelling? We will explore these questions by reading a variety of modern and contemporary stylists who either write in English or translate into English, paying special attention to what stylistic devices are at work and what their implications are for narration, characterization, and world building. Further, we'll examine the range of choices that each writer and translator makes when constituting and reconstituting style, on a lexical, tonal, and syntactic scale. By pairing readings with generative exercises in stylistics and constrained writing, we will build toward the translation of a short work of contemporary fiction into English. To participate in this workshop, students should be able to comfortably read a literary text in a foreign language.

Are memoirs self-indulgent? Yes. But ideally the self that they indulge is the reader's, not the author's. In this class you'll learn firsthand the pitfalls of the genre, mainly by writing your own. You'll start by visiting the form's historical landmarks: Rousseau's Confessions, St. Augustine's Confessions, as well as faux memoirs, i.e., novels written in the first person. ("Call me Ishmael.")_Although your memoir is about what happened, ultimately it has to be about what what happened means. To help you figure that out, we'll start with theories proposed by Vivian Gornick in her book, The Situation and the Story, as well as To Show and To Tell, by Phillip Lopate. You'll apply these ideas in workshop via intensive line edits and searching, essayistic critiques. Every week we'll read and discuss published exemplars by Alison Bechdel, Vladimir Nabokov, Lucy Grealy, and others.

Wallace Stevens suggests that "The essential thing in form is to be free in whatever form is used." How does form provide a kind of freedom for a poet? How does it manifest itself in a poem? Does it mean we have to follow prescribed rules, or is there a more intuitive approach? This course will give students a chance to try out a range of traditional and experimental forms, both as an attempt to improve as writers and in order to interrogate form and its other, what Bataille called the formless, or "unformed" (l'informe). We'll exam in depth rhythm, meter, and the line, as well as forms such as the ballad, the villanelle, the sonnet, the pantoum, and the sestina. We'll also engage with non-traditional forms such as rhizomatic structure, serial poems, list poems, somatic exercises, and walk poems. Readings will likely include an anthology such as the Norton, Carper and Attridge's Meter and Meaning, work by contemporary poets such as A. R. Ammons, John Ashbery, Alice Notley, and Lyn Hejinian, and theoretical texts by by the likes of Bataille, Adorno, Glissant, and Deleuze. Students will be expected to submit exercises each week for workshop, write an essay, serve as discussion leaders, and complete a final portfolio of original poems.

In this advanced workshop, we will explore the range of strategies and techniques that fiction writers employ to make readers suspend their disbelief. We will consider how imagined worlds are made to feel real and how invented characters can seem so human. We will contemplate how themes, motifs, and symbols are deployed in such a way that a story can feel curated without seeming inorganic. We will consider how hints are dropped with subtlety, how the 'rules' for what is possible in a story are developed, and how writers can sometimes defy their own established expectations in ways that delight rather than frustrate. From character consistency to twist endings, we'll investigate how published authors lend a sense of realism and plausibility to even the most far-fetched concepts. Through regular workshops, we will also interrogate all students' fiction through this lens, discussing the ways in which your narratives-in-progress create their own inner logic. Students will submit two stories to workshop (one to be submitted early in the term) and will be asked to write critiques of all peer work.

This workshop-based course is suitable for any student wishing to refine and expand their understanding of how fiction gets made, and will be of particular interest to those exploring new stylistic possibilities or working in both the disciplines of prose writing and music. We'll look at the Modernists' experiments with refrain, repetition, and pure verbal music, their attempts "to find out what's behind things," as Woolf put it. We'll consider literary improvisation as Ellison meant the term: the gathering of seemingly disparate materials to synthesize something wildly new. We'll explore how musicians are often allowed (or forced) to cross cultural boundaries through texts like Baldwin's "This Evening, This Morning, So Soon" and interviews with Wendy Carlos and Fred Hersch. We'll also look at the burgeoning field of rhythmology, and use it as a bridge to examine how music also borrows from fiction, through storytelling in song and a guest lecture from a Pulitzer-Prize-nominated composer._

In this workshop, students will explore ideas about what constitutes a poet's "voice," with particular interest in vocabularies. Where do poets find their language, and how do they change it (or how does it change them)? What constraints have poets put on themselves in order to create interesting vocabularies? We'll read work by Tracy K. Smith, Geoffrey Hill, Aaron Kunin, Catullus, Federico Garcia Lorca, Emily Wilson, Jack Spicer, Aime Cesaire, Paul Celan, Anne Carson, Jeffrey Yang, Charles Baudelaire, poets in The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, and others. Students will keep notebooks of language gathered in different locations and culled from different media. They will also make work in other media to explore different notions of vocabulary.

Certain lives catch and keep our attention - they seem magnetic, illustrative, confusing, broken off, revelatory. Sometimes we suspect that through studying a life we will be able to understand a scientific discovery, an artistic creation, a political issue or an historical period; sometimes we are drawn by the drama of the life the subject lived, or by the person's introspection or testimony. This is a course for students interested in writing lives - and might be of particular interest to a variety of students: creative writers from nonfiction, fiction, and playwriting with an interest in profiles, group portraits, documentary work, or historical meditation; graduate and undergraduate students of history, art, politics, medicine, or law who imagine one day writing a biography, or who are interested in oral history, portraits, medical narrative writing, testimony, case histories, or writing for general / magazine audiences. We'll work to learn methods and techniques of interviewing, quotation, portrayal and documentation from historians and journalists, and also from playwrights, psychoanalysts, documentary photographers and archivists. Students will write weekly exercises in a variety of forms, and will complete one longer essay to be workshopped in class and revised.

This advanced fiction workshop will examine the ways we write about love in fiction: romantic love, familial love, unconventional love, etc._ Our basis will be the notion that love is ultimately self-knowledge, which lies at the core of all great fiction, and like self-knowledge it involves an endless and inexhaustible act of seeking._ We will read and discuss stories centered on the topic of love, this act of seeking, and we will do writing exercises that help us write compellingly, convincingly, and unsentimentally about deeply sentimental things._ Every student will also complete and workshop a full-length story that explores the idea of love on some level._ They will additionally write a significant revision of this story, which they will either present for a second workshop or turn in at the end of the quarter._ Please expect a rigorous but constructive workshop environment where being a critic and an editor is as essential as being a writer.

In this workshop-focused class we will focus on the early stages of both developing and writing a novel: choosing the POV, establishing the setting, developing the main characters and the dynamics between them, setting up the conflicts and seeding the themes of book, etc. As a class we will read, break down and discuss the architecture of the openings of several published novels as you work on your own opening chapters, which will be workshopped during the course.