2021-2022

Given the recent shift to remote learning and its challenging effects on mental health, this course is designed to get us out of our heads and back into our bodies, minimizing the time we spend looking at the screen through activities and prompts that stimulate physical awareness, support wellness, and enhance creativity. An active writing life demands a refined ability to stay present and receptive to ideas that not only inspire possibility but animate our hands into action. If we view the relationship between sensory experience, memory, and imagination as a triangle of interdependence, then by exercising the gifts of perception writers can gain access to a wealth of "raw material" that sparks discovery of unconscious themes and associations while forging a path for reader accessibility and immersion within the world of a story. Many issues of craft— setting, scene, imagery, characterization— boil down to a writer's intuitive understanding of how corporeality informs emotion and spirituality. From scavenger hunts to yoga, photography, cooking, and dancing, students will exercise the integration of the nervous system and the business of creation, developing original drafts that can be felt in the spine and enriched with a robust workshop experience. Given the multidimensional nature of our practice, students will have the option to pursue multimedia and cross-genre projects. Students with disabilities are strongly encouraged to join in this exploration of the senses.

Day/Time: Wednesdays, 1:30-4:20pm

Creative nonfiction is an often difficult to define genre. Frequently caught up in ontological and political controversies, and perpetually torn between allegiances to journalism, science, philosophy and art. This course will serve as a brief introduction into the genre by focusing on its history, primary influences and some of the major subgenres which compose it today. From the lyrical, narrative and hybrid, to science writing, reportage, the memoire and even illustrated journalism straight from warzones. This will be accomplished through reading, lectures, discussions and guided writing prompts.

Day/Time: Mondays, 10:30am-1:20pm

This workshop is an introduction to writing and revising poems, and the related art of giving helpful feedback to other writers. One of the course’s goals is to help you reflect on your writing as a process. Most weeks you will write drafts that focus on the poetic concepts we are studying. You’ll receive feedback on your drafts from your classmates during workshop and will respond both critically and creatively to theirs. At the end of the quarter, you’ll revise your drafts and collect them in a portfolio, accompanied by a critical introduction. At the same time, this course will also introduce you to poetry from a variety of time periods, languages, and approaches to content and structure. You’ll learn to apply critical tools and terminology by drafting poems that experiment with elements such as form, voice, rhythm, imagery, translation, and creative response. We’ll discuss not only how poems are written, but also why they are written and what relationship they have to the contexts in which they are written and read.

Day/Time: Fridays, 10:30am-1:20pm

This course explores basic approaches to writing poems through careful reading and discussion of modern and contemporary poets. We’ll practice poetic elements, such as rhythm, diction, syntax, and metaphor, at the same time that we explore the movements of mind and the moods that lyricism makes available. The class will practice literary community building by discussing peers’ poems in workshops, by responding to poems and essays by contemporary and modern poets and critics, and by attending literary events on campus. For the first few sessions, our discussions will focus primarily on readings. As we move forward, we will spend the majority of time workshopping student work.

Day/Time: Monday, 12:30pm-3:20pm

This course explores basic approaches to writing poems through careful reading and discussion of modern and contemporary poets. We’ll practice poetic elements, such as rhythm, diction, syntax, and metaphor, at the same time that we explore the movements of mind and the moods that lyricism makes available. The class will practice literary community building by discussing peers’ poems in workshops, by responding to poems and essays by contemporary and modern poets and critics, and by attending literary events on campus. For the first few sessions, our discussions will focus primarily on readings. As we move forward, we will spend the majority of time workshopping student work.

Day/Time: Wednesday, 12:30-3:20pm

This course aims to deepen your understanding of the craft of short fiction through intensive study of contemporary writers and through workshops of both your own work and that of your classmates. Together we will examine stories by Mary Gaitskill, Kevin Brockmeier, Charles Yu, and others, reading as writers, searching not for theme but for a sense of how the stories were created, what craft choices the authors made, and what their structures can teach us as we create our own narratives. In addition to these readings, you will complete several short writing exercises and one longer story, which you will workshop and substantially revise. You will also engage with the work of your peers, delivering thoughtful, encouraging, constructive critiques.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 11:00am-1:50pm

Writers at all levels learn through the careful reading of works they admire. We will spend more than a third of our time in this class reading stories worth learning from, both classic and contemporary, by writers like James Baldwin, Sherman Alexie, Deborah Eisenberg, Adam Haslett, and Jhumpa Lahiri. Discussion will be lively--passionate opinions and enthusiasm are welcome--but most of our focus will be on the choices that writers make, the nuts and bolts of craft, including: point of view, tone, direct and summary dialog, setting, and use of time. In-class exercises will further hone your understanding of specific techniques, fire your creativity and get you writing. In writing workshop, each of you will each have the opportunity to present your work to the group. Critique will be respectful and productive, with emphasis on clarity and precision. By the end of the course, you will have generated significant raw material and completed at least one story, which will be revised and handed in as a final portfolio.

Day/Time: Thursday, 2:00-4:50pm

Writers at all levels learn through the careful reading of works they admire. We will spend more than a third of our time in this class reading stories worth learning from, both classic and contemporary, by writers like James Baldwin, Sherman Alexie, Deborah Eisenberg, Adam Haslett, and Jhumpa Lahiri. Discussion will be lively--passionate opinions and enthusiasm are welcome--but most of our focus will be on the choices that writers make, the nuts and bolts of craft, including: point of view, tone, direct and summary dialog, setting, and use of time. In-class exercises will further hone your understanding of specific techniques, fire your creativity and get you writing. In writing workshop, each of you will each have the opportunity to present your work to the group. Critique will be respectful and productive, with emphasis on clarity and precision. By the end of the course, you will have generated significant raw material and completed at least one story, which will be revised and handed in as a final portfolio.

Day/Time: Monday, 1:30-4:20pm

Writers at all levels learn through the careful reading of works they admire. We will spend more than a third of our time in this class reading stories worth learning from, both classic and contemporary, by writers like James Baldwin, Sherman Alexie, Deborah Eisenberg, Adam Haslett, and Jhumpa Lahiri. Discussion will be lively--passionate opinions and enthusiasm are welcome--but most of our focus will be on the choices that writers make, the nuts and bolts of craft, including: point of view, tone, direct and summary dialog, setting, and use of time. In-class exercises will further hone your understanding of specific techniques, fire your creativity and get you writing. In writing workshop, each of you will each have the opportunity to present your work to the group. Critique will be respectful and productive, with emphasis on clarity and precision. By the end of the course, you will have generated significant raw material and completed at least one story, which will be revised and handed in as a final portfolio.

Day/Time: Mondays, 1:30-4:20pm

“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 as well as many newer literary voices, breaking down their stories, not simply as examples of meaningful fiction, but as road maps 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, 9:30-12:20pm