CRWR

The Long and the Short of it: Narrative Time
A story's end point determines its meaning. The history of a life can be covered in a sentence, a few pages or seven volumes. How do writers decide? In this advanced workshop, we'll look at different ways to handle narrative time, paying special attention to building blocks like direct and summary scene, flashback, compression, slowed time and fabulist time. We'll examine work by writers whose long stories feel like novels, like Alice Munro and Edward P. Jones, alongside those who say everything in a short single scene of a page or two, like Grace Paley and Kate Chopin. Students will be encouraged to experiment with time in both writing exercises and story revisions.By the end of the course, you will have generated significant raw material and workshopped one story. Two stories, one polished and one in draft, will be prepared for the final.

This technical seminar in poetry offers writers an opportunity to examine an essential American poetic space: the road. A core question is how one reads the road’s poetic surface versus its depths. Does journey itself lay out a clear narrative, admitting its forks, detours, and breakdowns? How is a basic American “compass” disrupted by poetic reconsiderations of “the road?” Does every road run “west?” How is the road itself as much about dislocation as it is about coherent journey?

As an orientation to a poetics of space, participants will engage critical perspectives set up by Gaston Bachelard, CS Giscombe, and Rebecca Solnit. Then, writers will develop their own critical/creative responses, exploring models established by Gabe Gudding, William Least Heat-Moon, Ed Roberson, and Muriel Rukeyser. Inviting her readers to remap historical and mythic journeys, Rukeyser resets the road as a conduit into a reassessment of national narrative through The Book of the Dead. Taking his own road east, Gudding overturns a “beat poetics” of travel in his Rhode Island Notebook. Least Heat-Moon (Blue Highways) and Roberson (MPH and Other Road Poems) invite explorations of “the road” as much in time as in space or personal journey. Overall, the course remaps that road, in the words of Giscombe, itself a “scattering [where] nothing cohered.”

Third-person narration is a crucial tool in the writer's toolbox, handy--and in some cases practically crucial--for a variety of tasks. Yet its use and various possibilities can seem intimidating to some writers who may be far more comfortable with the "I". In this seminar, we'll examine third-person point-of-view, seeking to understand its uses more fully. We'll learn about free indirect discourse, psychic distance, artifice, tone, and omniscience. We'll carefully dissect a variety of texts, including excerpts or stories from Jonathan Dee, James Agee, Jennifer Egan, Danielle Evans, Ottessa Moshfegh, and others. Students will be responsible for reading responses, short craft analyses, vigorous class participation, and several creative exercises putting what they learn into practice.

Writing fiction is in large part a matter of convincing worldbuilding, no matter what genre you write in. And convincing worldbuilding is about creating a seamless reality within the elements of that world: from setting, to social systems, to character dynamics, to the story or novel’s conceptual conceit. And whether it be within a genre of science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, or even contemporary realism, building a convincing world takes a good deal of research. So while we look closely at the tools and methods of successful worldbuilding, we will also dig into the process of research. From how and where to mine the right details, to what to look for. We will also focus on how research can make a fertile ground for harvesting ideas and even story. Students will read various works of long and short fiction with an eye to its worldbuilding, as well as critical and craft texts. They will write short weekly reading responses and some creative exercises as well. Each student will also be expected to make a brief presentation and turn in a final paper for the class.

Most passionate readers and writers have literary touchstones --those texts we return to again and again for personal or aesthetic influence and inspiration. When we are asked what book we would want with us if we were stranded on a desert isle, our touchstones are the ones that leap immediately to mind. Some texts are fairly ubiquitous touchstones: The Great Gatsby, Harry Potter and the [take your pick], The Bell Jar, Little Women, Letters to a Young Poet, Leaves of Grass. Others are quirkier, more idiosyncratic. What -- if any -- qualities do these touchstones share, within and across genres? What lessons about writing craft can be drawn from them? In this course, we'll read texts that are commonly cited as touchstones, along with fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction that students bring to the table -- their own literary touchstones. In that sense, our reading list will be collaborative, and students will be expected to contribute content as well as an analytical presentation on the craft issues raised by their selections. Our assignments will include reading responses, creative writing exercises, short essays and presentations.

“Obscenity” is a term for what is repulsive, abhorrent, excessive, or taboo in a society; and yet many artworks once considered to be obscene are now celebrated as landmarks of world literature, from the ancient poetry of Sappho to modern novels like Ulysses. In this course, we will study literary works that have been banned or censored as “obscene” to examine our own perspectives, attitudes, and assumptions as literary artists. How does obscenity shape our understanding of gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, or public and private speech? What are the uses of obscenity in constructing new possibilities for literary expression? Authors studied will include Toni Morrison, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Vladimir Nabokov, Hilda Hilst, and Allen Ginsburg; and we will supplement these readings with works of literary theory, psychoanalysis, and case law. Students will produce their own original poetry, fiction, and nonfiction to reimagine what is permissible—and possible—in language and society for contemporary literary artists.

In the aftermath of war, we attempt to make sense of the senseless. We grapple with the pieces, we organize, we mold, and we give shape to the shapeless. In this course, using the Nigeria-Biafra War as a case study, we’ll investigate the practices that constitute authorship of war. We’ll read works by writers of the war generation, like Ken Saro-wiwa, as well as those who have inherited it, like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. We’ll identify and study their methods for reconstructing the past—lived experiences, research, and the imagination. We’ll consider the ethics of leaps of the imagination as we read works of realism alongside the speculative, like Nnedi Okorafor’s AfricanFuturist comic book take LaGuardia. We’ll study narratives like Chinelo Okparanta’s queer coming-of-age story Under the Udala Trees to consider what it means to depart from the national narrative in order to recover silenced or erased voices. In critical papers, we’ll analyze how genre, form, and media inform these works. Using the questions, techniques, and practices we identify, you’ll be asked to write and research narratives using a real war as its basis.

In the same way that water is composed of two elements—hydrogen and oxygen—the personal essay essentially consists of anecdotes and reflections, i.e., facts and thoughts, or the objective and the subjective. What happened, and what what happened *means*. Our goal is to not only balance these two elements but to combine them so that they complement but also contradict one another.

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.