2021-2022

What do writers and artists do with surplus, with extras, leftovers, and other excesses of production? Is there a creative use to put them to? When viewed in the context of ecology and economy, what are the ethical dimensions of working with surplus? Are there also ethics and aesthetics of the “useless”? With these guiding questions, this course will explore creative approaches to waste, and develop revision practices that draw on the reuse of material surplus. We will consider forms of excess, and we’ll examine diverse types of waste and things that “waste”, including literal trash, ruins, the body, time, the dream, and everyday texts (such as emails, text messages, rough drafts, conversations, and ephemeral media). Readings and media may include work by Georges Perec, Harryette Mullen, Nikki Wallschlaeger, T. S. Eliot, Kurt Schwitters, and Agnes Varda. Students should plan to complete various prompts, lead discussion on readings, and complete a final project.

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

In this workshop we will tackle the problem of writing poetry in the present moment at a range of scales, thinking critically about our world's obsession with the "contemporary." At the grandest scale, we will ask what it means to write into the contemporary moment, one in which we seem to feel time fading with every status update and tweet, and one that demands embodied engagement—reading works that have been written recently, in dialogue with living authors. At the most intimate scale, we will consider how poetry can cultivate critical awareness of the present moment amidst forces that pull us with dopamine-induced promises and regrets into the future and past. How does poetry, with its odd ability to punctuate, syncopate, fragment, and suspend time, intervene in daily life and in the historical record? Authors for consideration will include Issa, Basho, Gertrude Stein, F.T. Marinetti, David Harvey, Cecilia Vicuna, Bernadette Mayer, Etel Adnan, Leslie Scalapino, Lyn Hejinian, Julie Patton, CA Conrad, Julian T. Brolaski, and Bhanu Kapil. Students will have the chance to experiment with different forms of attunement to the present, and will produce a daybook in tandem with a final "book" project that may take a range of forms.

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

This class workshops original student fiction in the context of challenging recent work from outside English. Each week we will read a different author in translation and seek to define those technical qualities that make their fiction at once strange and instructive: elliptical prose in Fleur Jaeggy, improvisational procedure in César Aira, or freely transplanted fairy tales in German-Japanese writer Yoko Tawada. We'll touch on different models of world literature—as markets, as centers and peripheries, as national traditions—and discuss questions of translation. While reading these authors and pondering the nature of cross-linguistic influence, you will write and workshop two original stories or novel chapters. Once during the quarter students will be asked to either translate a short passage from recent fiction in a language of their choice or to write a direct imitation of one of the authors we've read. No foreign language proficiency is required for this course.

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

Certain lives catch and keep our attention – they seem magnetic, illustrative, confusing, broken off, revelatory. Sometimes we suspect that through studying a life we will be able to understand a scientific discovery, an artistic creation, a political issue or an historical period; sometimes we are drawn by the drama of the life the subject lived, or by the person’s introspection or testimony. This is a course for students interested in writing lives – and might be of particular interest to a variety of students: creative writers from nonfiction, fiction, and playwriting with an interest in profiles, group portraits, documentary work, or historical meditation; graduate and undergraduate students of history, art, politics, medicine, or law who imagine one day writing a biography, or who are interested in oral history, portraits, medical narrative writing, testimony, case histories, or writing for general / magazine audiences. We’ll work to learn methods and techniques of interviewing, quotation, portrayal and documentation from historians and journalists, and also from playwrights, psychoanalysts, documentary photographers and archivists. Students will write weekly exercises in a variety of forms, and will complete one longer essay to be workshopped in class and revised.

Day/Time: Wednesdays, 9:30am-12:20pm

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 explore traditional and contemporary takes on a variety of forms and modes, such as sonnets, odes, aphorisms, serial poems, and poetic collage. Readings may include a mixt of poems and prose by Will Alexander, Joyelle McSweeney, Mark Leidner, Robert Hass, Aimé Césaire, Wallace Stevens, Dean Young, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Thylias Moss. Students should expect to write exercises, submit new poems, contribute feedback on peer work, write short response papers, and submit a final portfolio.

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

This workshop-based course proceeds from the premise that disorder and disruption are fruitful aesthetics that might be applied to numerous elements of fiction to unlock new possibilities in our work. Students will seek to identify typical narrative conventions and lyrical patterns and then write away from them—or write over them, toward subversion, surprise, and perhaps even a productive anarchy. In the first half of the course, students will search for hidden structures in work by Mary Gaitskill, Dennis Johnson, Taeko Kono, A.M. Homes, Lydia Davis, and Diane Williams, examining the methods these writers use to lead readers to unexpected, original, and transgressive places. Students will complete several short creative exercises in which they practice disruption and disorder in plot, pace, dialogue, and syntax. In the second half of the course, students will workshop one story or excerpt and write thoughtful, constructive critiques of peer work. Revision is also a crucial component of this class, as it is an opportunity to radically warp and deviate from our prior visions. Throughout the quarter, we will attempt to interrupt and shake up our own inclinations as artists.

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

Sigmund Freud defines "the uncanny" ("unheimlich") as something that unnerves us because it is both familiar and alien at the same time, the result of hidden anxieties and desires coming to the surface. In this advanced fiction workshop, we will explore how fiction writers use the uncanny to create suspense, lend their characters psychological depth, thrill and terrify their readers, and lay bare the darkest and most difficult human impulses. We will read and discuss fiction by writers like Shirley Jackson, Jamaica Kincaid, Octavia Butler, Kelly Link, Ben Okri, Haruki Murakami, and Victor Lavalle, drawing craft lessons from these writers to guide our own attempts at writing the uncanny. 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 and "mini-workshops" throughout the quarter, every student will complete a full-length "uncanny" short story for workshop and compose critique letters for each of their peers. Students will be required to significantly revise their full-length short story by the end of the quarter.

Day/Time: Thursdays, 9:30am-12:20pm

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. 

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

What natural and artificial boundaries do we impose on ourselves as writers? Are those boundaries clarifying or limiting? How might we push beyond them to more effectively tell the stories we need to tell? This workshop-based course will focus on these questions and ask you to expand the formal and also emotional, thematic, and aesthetic possibilities in your fiction. To that end, we’ll read the work of writers who offer distinct visions of the world through innovative storytelling approaches, and we'll examine how their risk-taking might be as personal as it is literary—an encouragement for you not necessarily to be “experimental” writers, but to explore more meaningful, honest, and expansive ways of telling your own stories. For the course, you will do writing exercises and weekly reading responses, as well as workshop one full-length story that attempts an approach in form or content that you have not tried before in your fiction.

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

To revise a piece of writing isn’t merely to polish it. Revision is transformation and yields an alternate reality. A new view, a re-vision. This course will examine the radical potential of revision, drawing case studies from a range of writers such as Marguerite Duras, Jorge Luis Borges, Elizabeth Bishop, Dionne Brand, Li-Young Lee, Janet Malcolm, Lydia Davis, Terrance Hayes, Yiyun Li, francine j. harris, Bhanu Kapil, Shane McCrae, and Chase Berggrun. We’ll start by tracking compositional process, looking at brilliant and disastrous drafts to compare the aesthetic and political consequences of different choices on the page. We’ll then study poems, essays, and stories that refute themselves and self-revise as they unfold, dramatizing mixed feelings and changing minds. We’ll end by considering erasure poetry as a form of critical revision. Our conversations will inspire weekly writing exercises and invite you to experiment with various creative revision strategies. Students will be asked to lead one presentation and to share their writing for group discussion.

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