Advanced Workshops

In this course, we'll work to write about people and communities who are in crisis, on the verge of crisis, or looking back at crisis. We'll discuss reporting, interviewing, oral history, historical research, working from photography and video, and the ethical situation of the writer. We'll read works by writers such as Liu Xiaobo, Elena Poniatowska, Claudia Rankine, Rebecca Solnit, Edwidge Danticat, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Philip Gourevitch, Arundathi Roy, Leslie Marmon Silko, Rachel Carson, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, on subjects including migration, exile, prison, totalitarian regimes, dissidence, questions of reparation and reconciliation after systematic violence, and environmental activism. Students will undertake significant research and produce a substantial essay to be workshopped in class.

If, as claims the Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago, "the novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers," then how vast must be the space of poetry, which contains, after all, among its many streams, the verse novel? In this course we will explore some of the major and minor lyric tributaries that feed the sea of poetry, following such currents as the elegy, the ekphrastic poem, the dramatic monologue, and the eclogue, while considering the many branchings where they meet and overlap. We will read lists, letters, essays, and travelogues, and examine the endless ways generic conventions, in addition to formal ones, play a generative role in poetic innovation. Primary texts for this course will include weekly writing assignments alongside readings from a wide range of literary precursors.

Students will write and turn in two full-length stories or novel chapters for this workshop-based class. While we won't ignore such fundamental elements of fiction writing as POV and narrative distance, characterization, setting, and dialogue, the class will pay special attention to the relationship between character arc and narrative structure, as well as the various kinds of conflict that act as engines for a story or novel. In addition to submitting and reading for workshop, expect to read and discuss at least one novel and a selection of short stories.

This advanced fiction workshop is for students who wish to continue to refine and develop their understanding of the art form. In our outside readings, we'll consider fiction writers who've written about music and musicians, including James Baldwin, Geoff Dyer, Thomas Bernhard, and Dana Spiotta. And we'll read works written by musicians, like Charles Mingus'_ Beneath the Underdog_and Rafi Zabor's_The Bear Comes Home._However, we won't limit ourselves to music as subject matter. We'll examine T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" and Ralph Ellison's_Invisible Man_as works profoundly influenced by jazz and improvisatory methods of composition, and we'll look at stories like "Rondo," by Susan Neville, which uses musical form as its structural principle. Finally, we'll consider experiments in what we might call verbal music by James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Ben Marcus. In our workshops, you are absolutely not required to write_about_music. Rather, the course will allow us to consider new methods of composition, both on the narrative and sentence level.

This class is for any student who has taken at least one other fiction workshop at the University and is interested in or already working on a novel. In the first few weeks of the course, we will read and discuss a selection of first chapters from some exemplary and diverse novels (like The Great Gatsby, Invisible Man, Beloved, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, The Age of Innocence, Lolita, and The Virgin Suicides) and discuss what a first chapter can-even should-do and the different ways that it can do these things. How do certain novels introduce its characters, its plot, its setting, its principle concerns and philosophies? How do they dive into the narrative in ways that intrigue or even challenge us? How do certain opening chapters teach us how to read the rest of the novel? These and other crucial questions will be addressed throughout the course, particularly during our workshops, where everyone will present the first chapter or two of their novel-in-progress. Along with the fundamentals of craft like language, characterization, plotting, and structure, etc., we will look at how we can adjust or rethink our opening chapters so that we can move forward more effectively with the larger project.

The advantage of working within a non-genre is best understood as a spatial metaphor: the house of fiction has kicked us out, but so what? That only means we are free to roam a limitless landscape, mingling with other genres and establishing new traditions. In recent years publishers have begun to recognize that nonfiction writers are necessarily hybrid creatures, and as a result we are witnessing an explosion of exciting books that challenge our impulse to categorize literature. To name a few pioneers: Claudia Rankine, Joe Wenderoth, Anne Carson, Solmaz Sharif, and Jenny Boully. In this course, students will close read a variety of works that dissolve the lines between poetry and prose and visual art, exploring what is becoming known as “the performative essay.” Our aim will be simple: to playfully experiment with innovative sources of narrative momentum each week, and to share our original hybrid works for energetic workshop discussions. A revision of the workshop essay, along with a critical essay on a reading of your choosing, will be turned in at the end of the quarter.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 3:30-6:20 PM

 

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.

Day/Time: Thursday, 12:30-3:20


 

Poetry after Modernism has been shaped by Ezra Pound’s directive to “Make it new.” Yet Pound himself derived this slogan from the most ancient of sources—an inscription on the washbasin of the first Shang dynasty king Ch’eng T’ang (1766-1753 BC). In this advanced poetry workshop, we will study some of the ways that contemporary poets revisit ancient texts from various cultures in order to open up new aesthetic and historical dimensions in our own poetry. Students will enjoy considerable freedom in how they conceive of their own poetry's relationship to diverse histories; from one week to the next, they may choose to write in a historical genre or form (the Latin hexameter, the Japanese haibun), in response to some ancient work (the Sundiata epic of old Mali, the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead), or they may invent their own ways to "make it old." Texts may include Armand Schwerner’s The Tablets, Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, Aga Shahid Ali’s Call Me Ishmael Tonight, Christopher Logue’s War Music, and Cecilia Vicuña’s New and Selected Poems, to name only a few possibilities.

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

 

This advanced writing workshop will explore the many ways in which poets since antiquity have approached the idea of “the long poem.” In a world of ever-decreasing attention spans, we’ll begin by considering what might motivate such a work today, and will read a wide range of contemporary texts, from linked sequences, to “middle-distance” or multi-part poems, to book- (or books-) length projects, that offer a rich variety of responses. Over the course of the quarter, students will conceive and develop a sustained poetic project that extends beyond the parameters of the conventional “lyric” poem. In addition to students’ original work, primary texts to be considered may include excerpts from Homer's Illiad, H.D.'s Helen in Egypt, Anne Carson’s “Glass Essay,” Robin Coste Lewis’ “Voyage of the Sable Venus,” Alice Oswald’s Memorial, Inger Christenson’s Alphabet, and A.R. Ammon's Garbage.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 2:00-4:50
 

In this advanced fiction workshop, we will examine and write narratives set at college, the so-called campus and varsity novels (and, in our case, short stories). We will try to capture the attendant promise and uncertainty of life on the cusp of adulthood, asking what it means to come of age, to age, to experiment, and possibly, to regress. We’ll attempt to veer away from cultural cliché and caricature to portray the truth of life on campus and come to grips with the way you live right now, as we consider what it means—to borrow the title of one novel—to make our home among strangers. Students will read published works and submit two stories or novel excerpts for workshops. Please expect a rigorous but constructive workshop environment where being a critic and an editor is essential.

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