CRWR

“If you want a compelling story, put your protagonist among the damned”—Charles Baxter

While crisis is to be avoided in life, when it comes to narrative, trouble is your friend. In this beginning workshop, you'll explore the ways writers create conflict in their stories, be it internal or external, spiritual or physical, romantic, financial or familial. We'll look at how writers use specifics of craft--including point of view, scene and summary dialog, causality, interiority, place, and narrative time--to create conflict that feels organic, foregrounded and inevitable. We’ll read and model masters of the form like ZZ Packer, George Saunders, Jhumpa Lahiri and Yiyun Li, and do weekly writing exercises that encourage you to take creative risks and hone new skills. Each student will work toward a final portfolio of one polished, revised story, with strong emphasis on focused and productive peer critique and in-class commentary.

You’ve heard this one before.  Fairy tales are some of our most durable stories, and they are durable in two ways: they can survive not only the passage of time but the distortions of creative retellings.  In the first third of this class we will study folk tales from varied traditions, learning to recognize basic elements of storytelling such as closure, plot twist, and economy.  In the middle third of class we will write and workshop our original retellings, using the old tales as a frame in which to practice modern techniques like scenic narration, incidental detail, and interiority.  Finally, in the last third of the class you’ll write and workshop an original fairy tale.  Students will be responsible for weekly response papers and detailed critique of classmates’ workshop submissions.  Tales will be drawn from around the world; our modern models may include Franz Kafka, D.O. Fagunwa, Angela Carter, Italo Calvino, Yoko Tawada, and Ludmilla Petrushevskaya.

Much of the tradition of Western storytelling relies on scene-driven narratives propelled by rising action toward an inevitable apex. Often natural disasters are illustrated the same way: hurricanes, invasion of new species, infectious disease, and oil spills are cast as singular events with a beginning, middle and end. This advanced workshop will explore how to push beyond the event. We will examine how forms of nonfiction, from investigative journalism to lyric essays, push against the hegemony of the “event” to tell a longer, slower story of disruption across the nexus of time and space. Following Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence, readings will focus on places and communities whose narratives do not fit tidily into beginning-middle-end story structures. Workshop will ask students to consider how their work might recognize the contexts of extraction, commodity flow, climate change, and borders surrounding the “events” driving our stories.

In “The Body Keeps the Score” Bessel van der Kolk writes, “The greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves.” Many trauma survivors begin writing reluctantly, even repulsed by the impulse to query their woundedness. The process is inhibited by stigma surrounding the notion of victimhood, entities that would prefer a survivor's silence, plus our tendency to dismiss and devalue ones suffering in relation to others. Students in this class will shed some of these constricting patterns of thinking about trauma so they may freely explore their stories with confidence, compassion, curiosity, and intention. We'll read authors who have found surprise, nuance, and yes, healing through art, honoring the heart-work that happens behind the scenes. Half of class-time will include student-led workshops of original works in progress. Paramount to our success will be an atmosphere of safety, supportiveness, respect, and confidentiality. By the quarter's end each student will leave with a piece of writing that feels both true to their experience and imbued with possibility. 

What is a book? This supposedly obsolete medium has undergone vital metamorphosis over the course of the past century, migrating from text into the visual and performing arts, as well as online. As contemporary writers we will consider what it means to contribute to its evolution, thinking about new forms that the "poetry collection" can take, as well as more emergent forms of the book as project—or process. Authors to be studied include Sappho, Basho, Mina Loy, Bruno Munari, Bread and Puppet Theater, Susan Howe, Anne Carson, Ann Hamilton, Buzz Spector, Bhanu Kapil, Don Mee Choi, Jen Bervin, Mei-Mei Burssenbrugge, Stephanie Strickland, Tan Lin, Edwin Torres, Nanni Balestrini, Douglas Kearney, and Amaranth Borsuk. Be prepared to think about poetry from the scale of the syllable to the scale of the entire bound (or unbound) work.

In this workshop-focused class we will focus on the early stages of both developing and writing a novel: choosing the POV, establishing the setting, developing the main characters and the dynamics between them, setting up the conflicts and seeding the themes of book, etc. As a class we will read, break down and discuss the architecture of the openings of several published novels as you work on your own opening chapters, which will be workshopped during the course. 

In this advanced fiction workshop, students will work on novel-length projects, completing one to two polished chapters and an outline of a full novel. We will explore how to structure a book that is both propulsive and character-driven, and how to create a compelling, unique narrative voice.  Works by James Baldwin, Edith Wharton, Ha Jin, Vladimir Nabokov, and Akhil Sharma will help us consider the crucial relationship between characters and their contexts.  

This course is for students with works-in-progress, whether a story collection or a novel, who feel stuck in their manuscripts. In weekly workshop sessions, we'll re-examine what's actually at stake in the narrative draft. We'll help each other dive deeper in our writing, to rediscover submerged aspects of the narrative that can be further explored - and what to do once we've uncovered them. With accompanying readings of novel excerpts and stories, we'll also examine how to incorporate next-level techniques such as re-sequencing the plot, imposing metaphorical value, and thematic layering of storylines.

In some ways, writing a first-person narrator seems like the most straightforward and natural kind of storytelling in the world. But as any writer who has made the attempt knows, that simple little “I” comes with an array of pitfalls – and possibilities. In this advanced fiction workshop, we will look at the many styles and approaches to first-person point of view: central narrators who are at the heart of the plot, peripheral narrators who witness and stand a little apart, the singular “I” vs. the plural “We,” direct address (often mislabeled as second-person narration), and the spectrum of unreliability. We will read and discuss fiction by writers like Jamaica Kincaid, Haruki Murakami, Kazuo Ishiguro, Charles Portis, Alice Munro, Raven Leilani, Russell Banks, Evan S. Connell and others, drawing craft lessons from these writers to guide our own attempts at writing in first person. Much of our class time will be dedicated to evaluating student work and honing our skills of composition and critique. In addition to shorter writing exercises throughout the quarter, every student will complete a full-length first-person short story for workshop and compose critique letters for each of their peers. Students will be required to significantly revise their full-length story by the end of the quarter.

The art of nonfiction is sometimes described as the art of leaving things out, and nowhere is this more pronounced and problematic than in capturing character. The way you characterize people, places, and things ultimately says as much about you, the author, as it does about what you’re characterizing, and the goal of this class is to teach you to do so economically yet accurately, or at least fairly. Not reductively. We’ll start with the surface: with the eccentricities, tics, and quirks that make someone who they are, or appear to be. How to capture these oddities without sliding into caricature? Writers often default to physical description, but we’ll devote as much or more effort to the verbal, i.e., to exercises in dialogue, whose true power is not to convey information but character. We’ll also practice writing in body language, which is equally revealing of mien, demeanor, and underlying motivation. Beneath it all lies what we call ‘true character’: the values, morals, and ideals evident in deeds, facts, and what we might call properties, the essential characteristics of a culture, city, or place. Our weekly reading and writing assignments and exercises will culminate in a creative portfolio and a final essay, as well as the skills you’ll need to take workshops.