2020-2021

In the radically different environment we anticipate for this fall, this course will work creatively to build individual writing projects and collaborative ones. Students will keep observation notebooks and we’ll develop an ongoing class publication online with reports from all the locations students are residing in (this might be a room, a neighborhood, a landscape, a city, or other kinds of places). The course will consider creative research methods in constrained times, with special attention to walking and other local kinds of investigation. We'll discuss observation, interviewing, historical research, keeping a notebook, supportive editorial relationships, and working from photography, video, and the internet. Some thematic clusters and possible reading: walking, local, and photographic investigation (Rebecca Solnit, Francisco Cantú, Teju Cole, Hervé Guibert); reckoning with history, ideas of reparations (Claudia Rankine, Layli Long Soldier, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Tommy Orange, Nikole Hannah-Jones) migration, testimony, interview, and borders (Valeria Luiselli, Liu Xiaobo, Edwidge Danticat), climate crisis and slow emergency (Winona LaDuke, Elizabeth Rush), notebook practices (H.D. Thoreau, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Walter Benjamin). Students will write in an ongoing way for our shared publication, produce essays to be workshopped in class, and develop writing, researching, and editorial skills.

Day/Time: Wednesday, 10:20 AM-12:20 PM

This class is required for nonfiction majors, minors, and MAPH concentrators, but it's open to anyone working on a project of 20-30 pages. The class itself is almost entirely workshop, meaning that you and your classmates will provide the vast majority of material we discuss in class. You’ll spend as much time editing other people’s writing as you will working on your own. I emphasize editing because writing is essentially rewriting, and editing the work of others is the best way to acquire the objectivity and skill you need to edit your own. By teaching others you’ll teach yourself, preparing you for the real life of the writer outside the academy. That’s why your first assignment will be to create your own syllabus: a self-directed program of outside reading, with smart, succinct reasons for each choice. Ultimately, all writers are self-taught, and this class is a big step in that direction.

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

This course is an advanced seminar intended primarily for students writing a Creative BA or MA thesis, as well as Creative Writing Minors completing the portfolio. Because it is a thesis seminar, the course will focus on various ways of organizing larger poetic “projects.” We will consider the poetic sequence, the chapbook, and the poetry collection as ways of extending the practice of poetry beyond the individual lyric text. We will also problematize the notion of broad poetic “projects,” considering the consequences of imposing a predetermined conceptual framework on the elusive, spontaneous, and subversive act of lyric writing. Because this class is designed as a poetry workshop, your fellow students’ work will be the primary text over the course of the quarter.

Day/Time: Fridays, 1:50-5:00 

This course is an advanced seminar intended primarily for students writing a Creative BA or MA thesis, as well as Creative Writing Minors completing the portfolio. Because it is a thesis seminar, the course will focus on various ways of organizing larger poetic “projects.” We will consider the poetic sequence, the chapbook, and the poetry collection as ways of extending the practice of poetry beyond the individual lyric text. We will also problematize the notion of broad poetic “projects,” considering the consequences of imposing a predetermined conceptual framework on the elusive, spontaneous, and subversive act of lyric writing. Because this class is designed as a poetry workshop, your fellow students’ work will be the primary text over the course of the quarter.

Day/Time: Wednesdays, 1:50-5:00

In this course, we will not only explore how stories function individually, but also how they can come together in a collection to form a coherent and unified story or experience. Please come prepared to read and discuss published story collections, focusing in particular on the formal and thematic ties of discrete narratives. With this in mind, we will also workshop two to three of your own short stories. By the end of the course, you will have written the first three stories of your collection and developed a plan for how to proceed with the project.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 9:40-12:40

This thesis workshop is for Creative Writing majors, minors, and MAPH students and other advanced students working on a substantial fiction project. All students will begin with a manuscript they are developing, whether a story collection, a novel, or an unknown entity. The focus of this thesis workshop will be on deepening the narrative. We’ll ask ourselves this question: How does the story transcend itself? In other words, is this narrative about more than the specific situation depicted? We’ll discuss and develop methods of surfacing the ideas and conceits that may already be embedded within the piece, but not yet within grasp. To that end, we will consider re-sequencing certain scenes, proportioning out the narrative differently, and developing certain characters more fully. Readings will consist primarily of contemporary fiction. We will also consider the writing processes of other authors. Students will be expected to present on their own personal, non-literary influences.

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

Few things are as effective in capturing the attention of a reader than well crafted scenes. The creation of the illusion of movement, time and the sensory experience is by no means an easy task, however, and it must take into consideration pacing, punctuation, spatial references and white space among a vicissitude of other elements. In addition, there is the added difficulty of the nonfiction scene, the role of research, the limitations of first-person accounts and the distortion of memory. This course is intended to address these questions through a series of readings, lectures and writing prompts designed to dissect the matter at hand and equip the writer with the necessary tools to build a well-paced and effective scene.

Day/Time: Thursday, 2:40-5:40

This fiction workshop is for Creative Writing majors, minors, and MAPH students and other advanced students working on a substantial fiction project. It will be primarily a workshop class and all students are expected to enter this course with a story collection, a novel, or a novella already in progress, ready to be submitted and critiqued. The class will stress narrative arc and different kinds of conflict, though we will also discuss such fundamentals as POV and narrative distance, voice, character development, structure, setting, and dialogue as needed, in order to best shape a given work toward the writer’s own vision of that work. Keep in mind that writers don’t work in a vacuum—we should have a strong sense of how our own work fits in with the work of other writers. Each student will also be expected to make several short presentations. 

Day/Time: Wednesdays, 10:20-12:20

From the fragmented to the recurrent, from the recurrent to the intricate, from the precise to the vernacular, from the vernacular to the artificial; we'll discuss the why, the how, and the effects of a few of the possible forms and devices of poetry.

Day/Time: Wednesday, 12:40–2:40 PM

This advanced fiction workshop is for Creative Writing majors, minors, and MAPH students and other advanced students working on a substantial fiction project or portfolio. As it is primarily a workshop, please arrive with your project in progress (a story collection, a novel, or a novella), ready for critique. In the workshop, we will stress craft fundamentals such as character, setting, voice, style, plot, and structure, considering the longer form. Reading and listening to author interviews, we will also consider what it means to be an artist and how artists come to cultivate an aesthetic sensibility.

Day/Time: Thursdays, 9:40-12:40