CRWR

This course introduces students to poetry writing by guiding students through generative exercises focused on imagery and diction, then revising the material with an eye toward formal shaping choices. We read diverse contemporary and classic poets, write several poems, and workshop peer work weekly, culminating in a portfolio of new poems as a final project.

Beginning Fiction Workshop: Crafting Complex Characters

In life and in fiction writing, character development is often synonymous with major challenges: obstacles that demand deep investigation, adaptation, and change. Using the character-driven models of Tove Ditlevsen, Ottessa Moshfegh, Lucia Berlin, Edwidge Danticat, Eileen Chang, and other writers, this Beginning Fiction Workshop will explore strategies for crafting complex characters: illustrating their motives, perspectives, and arcs of evolution. Through a combination of generative writing exercises and writing workshops (wherein students will share original work and receive critical feedback from the class), each student will produce at least one complete short story.

In this class we will encounter short fiction in many forms, considering a range of narrative lengths, concepts, and writing styles, examining all of them from a craft perspective in an effort to decipher the ways in which stories can be put to paper with an efficiency of prose without sacrificing richness of language or conceptual creativity.

Brevity is the soul of wit, and in some definitions, it’s also an essential characteristic of lyric poetry. In this course, we’ll read diverse examples of relatively brief poetic forms, such as epigrams, aphorisms, haikus, tankas, prose poems, and sonnets, to generate our own writing. Finally, we’ll also practice revising poems for economy: that is, cutting as many words as possible from every draft. Students can expect to complete weekly prompts, give a presentation, participate in workshops, and turn in a final portfolio.

This class will explore how visitations, hauntings, suspense, uncertainty, grotesquerie, uncanny repetitions, unholy resurrections, phenomenal midnight meetings, and other gothic manipulations of matter, time, and space figure in a range of poems and texts. Because hesitance, fragment, the ever- presence of history, and notions of closure come into play whenever ghosts and others returning from beyond make visitations, our conversation will inevitably turn to the question of the openness of text, and in addition to gothic themes, we will examine form and strategy to wonder together how language turns and returns upon itself like the vampire that rises again and again in various shape-shifting guises. What is natural? What is unnatural? What is supernatural? How do the inexplicable and the explicable meet in poems? And how do poems vex the unstable categories of the past and the present?

Like so many essential and life-sustaining processes—relationship maintenance, money management, digestion—revision is something we often talk about without “really” talking about it (to use the words of writer Matthew Salesses). Yet by refusing (or failing) to “really” talk about revision, writers deny themselves the opportunity to actively engage with the potentialities of their work: the different shapes, forms, and shifts it might take. In this class, we will demystify the revision process by analyzing the works of writers—such as Anna Kavan, Annie Ernaux, Lily Hoang, Edwidge Danticat, and Suzanne Scanlon—who have pursued radical revisions to their projects, including expansions (short stories developed into novels), compressions (longer works condensed into shorter pieces), point of view changes, and dramatic stylistic transformations. With a combination of creative exercises and workshops, we will also work toward our own radical revisions.

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.

This workshop will focus on the boundaries that all of us knowingly and unknowingly impose on ourselves as writers, whether out of inexperience, external pressures, or an evolving (often imperfect) sense of our own ambitions and capabilities. Such boundaries can limit and paralyze us but can also bring clarity to our emerging voice, and it’s in experimentation and risk-taking that we can minimize the former and maximize the latter. To that end, this course will examine the work of writers who offer distinct visions of the world through innovative and often controversial approaches to storytelling. With their example in mind, everyone will also workshop a piece of fiction that attempts a significant risk in form or content, which will be significant and “risky" relative to each author. This class will push everyone not necessarily to be “experimental” writers, but to be bolder about the formal as well as emotional, thematic, and aesthetic possibilities in their fiction, so that they’ll discover more effective and honest ways of telling the stories they want to tell.  

While aspiring writers usually grasp quickly how to write direct dialog—we hear it all around us, in public and private spaces—narration is a trickier enterprise. In this writing workshop, we will look at the narrator as personality, a voice that exists to tell the story, but not always to enter it. The narrator can be a constant, like an elbow in the side, or effaced, touching down to only give us the basics of time and place. They can be all knowing, summarizing scenes, people and events from a distant, God-like vantage, or reportorial, speaking in present tense as events unfurl. Some narrators make us laugh but are conning us with their charm; others explain the psychology of events like a great therapist or moralize like a member of the clergy. We will read a wide range of examples from writers like Edward P. Jones, Anton Chekhov, Salman Rushdie, Amy Hempel, Yiyun Li, and Louise Erdrich. Students will be encouraged to experiment in both writing exercises and story revisions. By the end of the course, you will have generated significant raw material and workshopped one story, which you will revise for the final.

This technical seminar will investigate the purposes and possibilities of beginnings in fiction. Students will read opening lines, paragraphs, pages, and occasionally chapters, from Aimee Bender, Miranda July, Dorthe Nors, Kobe Abe, and others, asking: what work do these beginnings do—and why, to what end? Of course, this means we will also read the stories that follow, to analyze these introductions in the framework of their narratives. How do openings guide—or mislead—the reader? How should they balance introduction and momentum? How do they orient us, not only to character, setting, and conflict, but also to elements like tone and sensibility, to a story’s own sense of itself? What archetypes or common “moves” can we identify and use? What are the implications and meanings of beginnings—of starting in a particular place and way, when a story might very well start in any number of places? And how do such authorial decisions ripple through the story? Students will be responsible for reading responses, short craft analyses, vigorous class participation, and several creative exercises putting what they learn into practice.