2020-2021

What is plot beyond the events that take place in a story? What is its function beyond engaging us in what happens to the story’s characters? If plot is dramatic movement in a narrative, in what ways can it move within and outside the traditional arc of rising action, climax, and denouement? And how can it become a vehicle for what we want to express about our characters, the world of our story or the world at large, our emotional or intellectual concerns, our very aesthetics as an artist? In this technical seminar, we’ll tackle such questions by examining 1) the broader, evolving cultural perspectives on plot and what that tells us about how and why we narrativize our lives, and 2) the practical mechanics of plot and its interaction with all the other crucial elements of a dramatic narrative. And alongside writing exercises where we’ll apply these lessons to our own fiction, our conversations will ideally help each of us clarify the kinds of stories we want and need to tell. 

Day/Time: Tuesday, 2:40-5:40

“Time is an illusion,” Einstein famously declared, articulating a truth about relativity that writers have understood at least since Homer compressed a decade of travels into 24 books of dactylic hexameter. In this creative writing seminar, we will consider a variety of approaches to the handling of time in the creation of literary illusions. We will concentrate on poetry and works of prose in which a fixed time frame—from a few moments to a few hours—gives urgent shape to the details of our writing as they unfold. How do certain works heighten our experience of time’s passage, giving us the illusion of speeding it, or stopping it? What is lyric time? What is real time? How do digression and plot relate to time? Reading the work of writers such as Jorie Graham, Alice Oswald, James Agee, James Baldwin, Virginia Woolf, and Gwendolyn Brooks, we will study how the art of description moves through syntax, and the art of syntax moves through time. Students will write critical responses, creative exercises, and a final paper on a topic to be approved by the instructor.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 1:00-4:00 pm

How do you write silence? What is subtext? What is the structure of a joke? Dialogue is one of the most important elements of fiction because of its dynamism. It can, among other effects, reveal character, advance plot, and escalate tension.  In this seminar, we will read work that inspires, informs, and expands our understanding of the definition and usages of dialogue. We will read exemplars of fiction, nonfiction, drama, poetry, as well as watch film—all with the objective of discovering the aspects that make the dialogue (or written speech) in each text effective. The class will include work by Grace Paley, Ernest Hemingway, August Wilson, Toni Cade Bambara, Junot Diaz, Joan Didion, Tyehimba Jess, and Sally Rooney). We will discuss stylistic elements of the work, its ideas, and attempt to situate it in its cultural context. Class sessions will consist of informal writing, discussion, and lecture. Coursework includes two short creative assignments (with a critical component), questions for discussion, and informal writing.

Day/Time: Monday, 1:50-3:50

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.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 9:40-12:40

Some of the most compelling pieces of writing across all genre deal with, and often feature, deeply problematic central adversarial characters without which the poem, story, or essay would have no forward motion, and no cause to exist. From Capote’s In Cold Blood to Milton’s Paradise Lost, from Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita to Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and Sabato’s The Tunnel, literature returns again and again to the question of evil and the concept of opposition. This course is designed to explore this question alongside authors who have devoted their lives to understanding the role of evil in literature, its necessity, its appeal, its frivolity and its betrayal. The course will be divided into three section, each section devoted to a specific genre during which two to three texts will be explored, discussed and analyzed in class, and at the end of which one brief analysis paper will be due. One creative piece, in any of the three major genres, exploring the said topic will be due at the end of the course.

Day/Time: Thursday, 1:00-4:00

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, Conversations with Ogotemmeli, the figure of Harry Potter, the poetry of W.B. Yeats and others, as well as additional things too secret to reveal at present, including the nature of esotericism.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 1:00-4:00

Nature writer Barry Lopez suggests that knowing a place intimately and writing about it — whether that place is an Arctic ice floe or an urban taco stand — creates an important “sense of belonging, a sense of not being isolated in the universe.” In this course, we will read fiction by writers who explore the impact of place on community, culture, and the individual. We will take Lopez’s advice to “become vulnerable to a place,” and to represent that place and its people with rich and complex detail. Writing exercises and the occasional field trip will help to generate material, while responses to assigned readings will give you a bit more direction as you address issues specific to writing about places, as well as other fundamentals of fiction writing. You will also be required to produce a full-length story for workshop, letters of critique for each of your peers, and a substantial revision of your short story. Readings may include work by Marilynne Robinson, Jhumpa Lahiri, Breece Pancake, Edward P. Jones and others.

Day/Time: Thursday, 9:40-12:40

“The novel is exhaustive by nature,” Steven Millhauser once wrote. “The short story by contrast is inherently selective. By excluding almost everything, it can give perfect shape to what remains.” Through readings of published stories and workshops of students’ own fiction, this course will explore the parameters of the short story, its scope and ambitions, its limitations as well. We’ll read established masters like Edgar Allen Poe, Raymond Carver, and Joy Williams as well as many newer literary voices, breaking down their stories, not simply as examples of meaningful fiction, but as roadmaps toward a greater awareness of what makes a short story operate. Over the course of the quarter, students will submit full-length stories for consideration in workshop, as well as other experimental efforts in short-short and micro fiction. Discussion will revolve around basic elements of story craft—point of view, pacing, language, etc.—in an effort to define the ways in which a narrative can be conveyed with economy, precision, and ultimately, power.

Day/Time: Monday, 10:20-12:20

Where’s your home? Why is that home? The great Toni Morrison writes, “Home is memory and companions and/or friends who share the same memory.“ In this advanced fiction workshop, we will write and read work that explores aspects of home: landscape, people, language, history, customs, memories, etc. The first few weeks we will read and discuss exemplary short stories and novel excerpts from writers including Edward P. Jones, Flannery O’Connor, Junot Diaz, and Jesmyn Ward. In later weeks, each workshop member will write and submit one full-length story or stand-alone chapter for workshop and either a second story or stand-alone chapter or significant revision of the first story. While each submission will receive holistic feedback, we will also pay particular attention to the aspects of home explored in each submission. Furthermore, will also work to deepen the skills necessary to revise your work and to critique the work of others. The course will include writing exercises to assist in exploring a range of strategies, impulses, and ideas.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 2:40-5:40

Many if not most writers draw on their own lives. Transforming the raw stuff of experience, personal and/or family history, and intimate expertise is not, of course, as straightforward as it might seem. Does writing autobiographically necessarily equal "confession"? Or are there other ways of writing the self? Where exactly is the line between personal essay/memoir and autobiographical fiction? What pact do we form with the reader when the material is explicitly close to our own lives? What pact do we have with ourselves and the real people we write about? Readings will include works by Sylvia Plath, Leslie Feinberg, Kathryn Harrison, Akhil Sharma, Michael Cunningham, Ralph Ellison, and St. Augustine. Critical responses and creative exercises alike will help you understand the nuances, challenges, and pleasures of writing autobiographically.

Day/Time: Wednesday, 12:40–2:40 PM