CRWR

This advanced fiction course is for BA and MA students writing a creative thesis or any advanced student working on a major fiction project. It is primarily a workshop, so please come to our first class with your project in progress (a story collection, a novel, or a novella), ready for you to discuss and to submit some part of for critique. As in any writing workshop, we will stress the fundamentals of craft like language, voice, and plot and character development, with an eye also on how to shape your work for the longer form you have chosen. And as a supplement to our workshops, we will have brief student presentations on the writing life: our literary influences, potential avenues towards publication, etc.

Wallace Stevens suggests that "The essential thing in form is to be free in whatever form is used." How does form provide a kind of freedom for a poet? How does it manifest itself in a poem? Does it mean we have to follow prescribed rules, or is there a more intuitive approach? This course will give students a chance to try out a range of traditional and experimental forms, both as an attempt to improve as writers and in order to interrogate form and its other, what Bataille called the formless, or "unformed" (l'informe). We'll exam in depth rhythm, meter, and the line, as well as forms such as the ballad, the villanelle, the sonnet, the pantoum, and the sestina. We'll also engage with non-traditional forms such as rhizomatic structure, serial poems, list poems, somatic exercises, and walk poems. Readings will likely include an anthology such as the Norton, Carper and Attridge's Meter and Meaning, work by contemporary poets such as A. R. Ammons, John Ashbery, Alice Notley, and Lyn Hejinian, and theoretical texts by by the likes of Bataille, Adorno, Glissant, and Deleuze. Students will be expected to submit exercises each week for workshop, write an essay, serve as discussion leaders, and complete a final portfolio of original poems.

To write in any genre is a gesture that puts one in a relationship with predecessors and precursors. While this relationship if often constructed as a dialogue, it can also be a conflict, full of clatter, disagreement and intentional offensiveness. In this sense, the writer's mark crosses out the predecessors' work, and functions as an act of desecration. Writing becomes an intertextual act of rebellion that calls into question the conventional, the canonical, and the sacred. Readings may include avant garde manifestos, erasure poetry, and poetry and fiction by Shakespeare, William Blake, Joyce Mansour, Sylvia Plath, Bernadette Mayer, Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, Federico Garcia Lorca, Haruki Murakami and Georges Bataille. Students will be expected to write creative works in response to prompts, and write an academic essay. The prompts will form the basis of a final portfolio, which will be accompanied by an original essay.

A monolith manifests in orbit around Jupiter, emitting a signal. A beacon? A man spontaneously discovers the ability to teleport. An evolutionary accident? The origin of human life proves to be malicious. Divine fate? Space travel is enabled by the ingestion of enormous quantities of a geriatric spice a messianic figure auspiciously learns to manipulate. A drug trip?! Among popular genres, science fiction is the riskiest conceptually and among the trickiest to master. The difference between an amazing idea and a rotten story is often slim. What makes good sci-fi work? And how best to write it? Let's put on our gravity boots and solar visors and see what we can discover. In this course, you'll read some novels (by Frank Herbert, Alfred Bester, and Ursula K. LeGuin), poetry (by Andrew Joron), a graphic novel (by Chris Ware), and screenplays (by Damon Lindelof, and Stanley Kubrick & Arthur C. Clarke). And all the while, you'll try your hand at bending each other's minds with your own science fiction.

A personal essay can employ a chain of events, but it's essentially a train of thought. Like thought, it's protean, able to take any shape and yet remain an essay. In this workshop you'll write two drafts of your own essai, or attempt, at the form, while line editing and critiquing your classmates' attempts. You'll also do close readings, starting with "Why I Write," by George Orwell, and "Why I Write," by Joan Didion. Then James Baldwin's "Autobiographical Notes." Once we've had a taste of the present we'll go back four thousand years to the essay's beginnings in Babylon, following its evolution in Greece and Rome-Heraclitus, Plutarch, Seneca-then Europe: Montaigne, Max Beerbohm, Walter Benjamin, and Natalia Ginzburg, returning to contemporary English-language writers, including Adrienne Rich and Margaret Atwood, ending with Didion's "Goodbye to All That," paired with Eula Biss's contemporary cover version, also titled "Goodbye to All That."

This workshop-based course is suitable for any student wishing to refine and expand their understanding of how fiction gets made, and will be of particular interest to those exploring new stylistic possibilities or working in both the disciplines of prose writing and music. We'll look at the Modernists' experiments with refrain, repetition, and pure verbal music, their attempts "to find out what's behind things," as Woolf put it. We'll consider literary improvisation as Ellison meant the term: the gathering of seemingly disparate materials to synthesize something wildly new. We'll explore how musicians are often allowed (or forced) to cross cultural boundaries through texts like Baldwin's "This Evening, This Morning, So Soon" and interviews with Wendy Carlos and Fred Hersch. We'll also look at the burgeoning field of rhythmology, and use it as a bridge to examine how music also borrows from fiction, through storytelling in song and a guest lecture from a Pulitzer-Prize-nominated composer._

This advanced fiction workshop will examine the ways we write about love in fiction: romantic love, familial love, unconventional love, etc._ Our basis will be the notion that love is ultimately self-knowledge, which lies at the core of all great fiction, and like self-knowledge it involves an endless and inexhaustible act of seeking._ We will read and discuss stories centered on the topic of love, this act of seeking, and we will do writing exercises that help us write compellingly, convincingly, and unsentimentally about deeply sentimental things._ Every student will also complete and workshop a full-length story that explores the idea of love on some level._ They will additionally write a significant revision of this story, which they will either present for a second workshop or turn in at the end of the quarter._ Please expect a rigorous but constructive workshop environment where being a critic and an editor is as essential as being a writer.

Do you believe in wizards? Are you a wizard? Then pack up your talismans, fetishes, and gamelans into the mysterious little satchel you carry at your side and get ready for some incantatory magic. We will investigate the figure of the wizard as an archetype, a literary symbol, a vehicle for fantasy, and as a commanding reality, while considering such things as A Wizard of Earthsea, the figure of Merlin, The Teachings of Don Juan, The Teachings of Ogotemmeli, Harry Potter, Aleister Crowley, the poetry of W. B. Yeats, Nathaniel Mackey, Jay Wright, and Ronald Johnson, as well as some other things too secret to reveal at present, including the nature of esotericism.

A personal essay can employ a chain of events, but it's essentially a train of thought. Like thought, it's protean, able to take any shape and yet remain an essay. In this workshop you'll write two drafts of your own essai, or attempt, at the form, while line editing and critiquing your classmates' attempts. You'll also do close readings, starting with "Why I Write," by George Orwell, and "Why I Write," by Joan Didion. Then James Baldwin's "Autobiographical Notes." Once we've had a taste of the present we'll go back four thousand years to the essay's beginnings in Babylon, following its evolution in Greece and Rome-Heraclitus, Plutarch, Seneca-then Europe: Montaigne, Max Beerbohm, Walter Benjamin, and Natalia Ginzburg, returning to contemporary English-language writers, including Adrienne Rich and Margaret Atwood, ending with Didion's "Goodbye to All That," paired with Eula Biss's contemporary cover version, also titled "Goodbye to All That."