CRWR

It’s where it all began. Often, the questions that drive narrative and underpin a lifetime’s inquiry originate in childhood’s rich ore. It remains the subject of many great works of literature and is one terrain that each writer, student or master, can claim sovereignty over.

In this beginning workshop, we will look closely at a number of texts that deal with childhood with an eye towards generating work of our own. We will study the basic craft elements of point-of-view, setting, character, and voice. In addition to studying literary fiction, we will consider one or two children’s fiction and YA texts as well. Through in-class exercises, and imitative and generative writing, we will bring a quality of care and attention to writing about the lifestage known as ‘childhood.’ In the second half of the quarter, the emphasis will be on workshopping student’s original work.

We will study writers such as Sayaka Murata, Roald Dahl, Roddy Doyle, Edmund De Waal.

Flannery O’Connor writes, “the fiction writer has to realize that he can’t create compassion with compassion, or emotion with emotion, or thought with thought. He has to provide all these things with a body; he has to create a world with weight and extension.”

In this class, we will focus on how prose creates worlds of weight and extension. How do we weave, through the fabric of words, flesh and blood characters whose actions carry heft. We will consider how embodied action amalgamates with voice, setting, dramatic tension, and other story elements. And, through in-class exercises and imitative and generative writing, we will look to hone our control over embodied action. 

Together, we’ll study writers such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, and Patricia Highsmith, with a focus on how they give words warp and weft. In the second half of the quarter, the emphasis will be on workshopping student’s original work.

This course will examine this genre from its beginnings in ancient and medieval literature (eg in epic, chivalric, and pilgrimage lit), to the modern road novel, travelogue, and buddy film. We will explore why this form is so essential to the storytelling imagination, and the ways we might adapt it to our own needs today.

This beginning workshop takes up the tradition of the modern short story. Always attentive to ancient story values like plot and closure, we will take as our model the specifically twentieth and twenty-first century form that uses scenic-method and open-ended construction to tell a distinctly modern kind of story. Reading authors like James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, Mavis Gallant, and Joy Williams for lessons in technique, as well as several short critical texts, students will compose their own stories to be workshopped in class. A spirit of discovery and experiment will be encouraged.

This beginning fiction workshop approaches long-standing issues of craft through engagement with stories that have been published by BOTH EMERGING AND CELEBRATED writers within the last two years. We will find classic narrative techniques (like scenic method, plot reversal, and closure) operating in newly published work, but we’ll also look for promising experiments, novelties of form, and blurred boundaries. Authors read in this class have included Bruna Dantas Lobato, Annie Ernaux, Sterling HolyWhiteMountain, and ’Pemi Aguda. After several weeks devoted to reading and the trial of basic techniques, students will compose stories to beSPACEworkshopped in class. A spirit of discovery and experiment will be encouraged.

This studio course introduces students to essential graphic design skills and concepts. Through a series of hands-on assignments, we’ll explore how graphic information—type, image, composition, and layout—shapes the way we communicate and understand the world. Students will experiment with accessible tools like photocopiers and laser printers, and work through the phases of the design process: from research, conception and ideation, to sketching, evaluation and the development of form, to final execution and production.

“It’s very boring to talk about winners,” Umberto Ecco once said. “The real literature always talks about losers.” In this class, we shall embrace all manner of failures, no-accounts, and deadbeats, those unlikely central characters around which good fiction often rotates, considering how they intrigue us with their flaws and failings, but also how they can present pitfalls at the levels of plot (lack of agency), tone (reward vs. punishment), and reader sympathy. Through an array of short fiction, as well as selected poems, films, and an illustrated novel, this course aims to uncover the ways narrative craft can infuse stories driven by shiftless and inept protagonists with a sense of curation, poignancy, and meaning. Students will also attempt their own short story versions of “loser lit,” to be workshopped by the class. All are welcome. Expectations will be very low.

According to Albus Dumbledore, "To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure." And to the well-organized fiction writer, it can be the same. In this class, we’ll explore mortality as a literary device, considering how it not only brings a measure of incident to our stories, but also how it infuses the pages with darkness, sentiment, and consequence. The downside, of course, comes when too much darkness swamps a story with pessimism; when sentiment tilts into sentimentality; or when the consequences of such high stakes test a reader’s ability to suspend disbelief. Through readings of mostly short fiction, we’ll uncover how death can trigger stories of aftermath, how it can operate as a climax to build toward, or how it makes space for unexpected outcomes. Students will also write their own stories—about death, containing death, starring the character Death, or perhaps something more death-adjacent—which we’ll workshop as a group, focusing on the ways in which mortality sets tone, drives plot, and influences style.  

Describing fiction writing as an “art” is perhaps a misnomer. Depending on who’s describing it, the process of creating a narrative is more like driving in the dark, or woodworking, or gardening. The metaphors abound, but the techniques for creating effective fictional prose are often quite consistent. This course will begin with a weeks-long consideration of selected works of fiction where discussion will aim to distinguish the basic devices of effective storytelling. Weekly topics will range from subjects as broad as point of view and plot arrangement to more highly focused lessons on scene design, dialog, and word choice. Throughout the term, the writing process will be broken down into stages where written work will focus on discrete story parts such as first pages, character introductions, and dialog-driven scenes before students are asked to compose full-length narratives. Along the way, students will chart their processes of conceptualizing, drafting, and revising their narratives. Finally, in the latter weeks of the quarter, emphasis will shift to the workshopping of students’ full stories.

“The novel is exhaustive by nature,” Steven Millhauser once wrote. “The short story by contrast is inherently selective. By excluding almost everything, it can give perfect shape to what remains.” The short story label, however, often feels imperfect, since it covers such a broad swath of literary forms. While micro- and flash-fiction renditions can resemble poems, longer prose narratives often press into murkier territories such as that of the novella or the connected collection. Through readings and workshops of students’ own fiction, this course will explore the parameters of the short story, its scope and ambitions, its limitations as well. We’ll read established masters alongside newer literary voices, breaking down their work not simply as examples of meaningful fiction, but as road maps toward a greater awareness of what makes a short story operate. Discussion will revolve around basic elements of narrative craft—point of view, pacing, language, etc.—in an effort to define the ways in which any story can be conveyed with economy, precision, and power.