CRWR

Gossip, rumor, scandal, hearsay: from Heian period Japan to contemporary gossip columns, marginal channels of information have been an essential vehicle for storytelling, information transmission, and entertainment. In this class, we will explore the role of marginal, subversive, and communal forms of communication as both a tool and a topic in literature. From pushing plot forward to challenging power dynamics, we will examine the practical and ethical potential of gossip in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Students will read broadly across genres and styles then apply what they've learned in two creative pieces culminating in a final reflective paper that details the writer’s choices in revision and their creative pieces’s connection to the class topic.

This creative writing course, focused on the art of writing and reading fiction, addresses the fundamentals of craft. Through creative writing exercises and assignments, students will explore characterization, point of view, plot, scene work, and worldbuilding. Students can expect to read deeply, respond creatively, and to engage with their peers in a workshop setting. This course is designed both for writers with a passion for the genre and those who are interested in gaining experience. Successful completion of a Fiction Workshop I is a prerequisite for enrollment in Fiction Workshop II.

Many physicists posit that time is not linear—and in fiction, it doesn’t have to be either. Within a single story, we can be pulled to the to the past, the future, and a liminal space existing outside of time. In this course, we will investigate how authors manipulate our perception of time, in both conventional and unconventional ways, to deliver information and drive tension, to both orient and disorient us within the narrative. How do these moves impact our perception of meaning, the indelible, and the sublime?

This creative writing course, focused on the art of writing and reading literary nonfiction, addresses the fundamentals of craft. Through creative writing exercises and assignments, students will explore narrative, voice, imagery, and the relationships between ethics and art, form and content, and the self and the subject matter. Students can expect to read deeply, respond creatively, and to engage with their peers in a workshop setting. This course is designed both for writers with a passion for the genre and those who are interested in gaining experience. Successful completion of Literary Nonfiction Workshop I is a prerequisite for enrollment in Literary Nonfiction Workshop II.

This creative writing course, focused on the art of writing and reading literary nonfiction, addresses the fundamentals of craft. Through creative writing exercises and assignments, students will explore narrative, voice, imagery, and the relationships between ethics and art, form and content, and the self and the subject matter. Students can expect to read deeply, respond creatively, and to engage with their peers in a workshop setting. This course is designed both for writers with a passion for the genre and those who are interested in gaining experience. Successful completion of Literary Nonfiction Workshop I is a prerequisite for enrollment in Literary Nonfiction Workshop II.

This creative writing course, focused on the art of writing and reading literary nonfiction, addresses the fundamentals of craft. Through creative writing exercises and assignments, students will explore narrative, voice, imagery, and the relationships between ethics and art, form and content, and the self and the subject matter. Students can expect to read deeply, respond creatively, and to engage with their peers in a workshop setting. This course is designed both for writers with a passion for the genre and those who are interested in gaining experience. Successful completion of Literary Nonfiction Workshop I is a prerequisite for enrollment in Literary Nonfiction Workshop II.

This studio invites students to explore the way literary language blurs barriers between self and other, enacting a poetics of fluidity in various ways, including figurative language, identity, and somatic poetry exercises. This course will take a wide variety of sources and experiences as inspiration for poetry and prose writing. Cross-genre texts will range widely, likely including film, cave paintings, art, narrative fiction, poetry, and performance work. Authors/artists may include Werner Herzog, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Christian Dotremont, Renee Gladman, Haruki Murakami, Antonin Artaud, Ariana Reines, Yoko Ono, Will Alexander, Kim Hyesoon, and John Ashbery. Students will be able to respond with creative texts in various genres. Requirements will include weekly participation in writing experiments, a reader’s journal, a presentation, and a final portfolio.

In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway tells us that if a writer knows enough about what he is writing, “he may omit things that he knows, and the reader […] will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.” It sounds good, of course, and common sensical (no one needs to write everything they know about what they know!), but still: easier said than done. What exactly should we leave out when we write a story/a scene/a piece of dialogue? How do we decide what makes a detail crucial, and what’s best left unsaid? How much should we trust our readers? Through close reading, in-class exercises, and rigorous editing of your own writing, this workshop will help you acquire a better sense of what should go on the page and what might better be communicated between the lines. Readings will likely include Agota Kristof, Isaac Babel, Zadie Smith, Augusto Monterroso, Toni Morrison, Yiyun Li, and Patrik Ourednik.

This creative writing course, focused on the art of writing and reading poetry, addresses the fundamentals of craft. Through creative writing exercises and assignments, students will explore precise imagery, unpredictable figuration, intentional musicality, the use of line and stanza, and the relationship between form and content. Students can expect to read deeply, respond creatively, and to engage with their peers in a workshop setting. This course is designed both for writers with a passion for the genre and those who are interested in gaining experience. Successful completion of Poetry Workshop I is a prerequisite for enrollment in Poetry Workshop II.

Might there be a kind of poem that acts like a parasite latched on to a host body? A poem whose very life is the fusion of various sources, voices, discourses? This poetry workshop invites students to read and write poetry that, either overtly or subtly, engages with other texts. We’ll examine ways that poems create intertextual relationships (e.g. quoting, voicing, alluding, echoing, stealing, sampling, imitating, translating…) and test out these methods in our own writing. Students should expect to engage with the basic question of how their work relates to other poets and poems. Expect to read a substantial amount of work by modern and contemporary poets, submit new original poems for workshop, complete intertextual writing exercises, participate in discussion forums with both initial response papers and follow-up comments, critique peers’ work, and submit a final portfolio. A substantial amount of class time will be spent workshopping student work.