2024-2025

Memoir is the most pilloried genre in literature, not without reason. Many memoirs *are* self-indulgent, and they’re inevitably fictionalized to some degree. Memory is an unreliable narrator. It’s our imagination working in reverse, and as such, it invents things. It fictionalizes, and yet we have no choice but to rely on it. The best way to learn about its pitfalls is firsthand, by writing your own.

An inquiry into the ways we write about the internet, this workshop will survey works spanning across narrative nonfiction genres, from writing by William Gibson and Naomi Klein to the rise of the YouTube video essay as a sub-genre. Students will write and workshop essays that arise from hyper-contemporary corners of the internet, defining, as they go, a new kind of ekphrasis for the digital age.

Thinking about practices is a way of focusing a conversation between creative writers, art historians, curators, and working visual artists, all of whom are encouraged to join this workshop. We ourselves will be practicing and studying a wide variety of approaches to visual art. We’ll read critics like John Yau and Lori Waxman, memoirists like Aisha Sabbatini Sloan, inventive historians like Zbigniew Herbert, and poets like Gwendolyn Brooks and Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, as well as curatorial and museum writings, catalogue essays, artists' statements, and other experimental and practical forms.
The course hopes to support students both in developing useful practices and experimenting boldly. Classes will be shaped around current exhibitions and installations. Sessions will generally begin with student-led observation at the Smart Museum, and we will spend one session on close looking in the study room at the Smart. Students will also visit five collections, exhibitions and/or galleries and, importantly, keep a looking notebook. Students will write a number of exercises in different forms (immersive meditation, researched portrait, mosaic fragment), and will also write and revise a longer essay (on any subject and in any mode) to be workshopped in class.

Instructor TBD

Course Description TBD

Writing about work, jobs, and vocational experiences may seem contradictory— or even antithetical—to our goals in fiction. After all, if we aim to inspire, to invigorate, to otherwise wield a narrative “axe for the frozen sea within us” (as Kafka wrote), why write about the very day-to-day tasks so often charged with numbing and blurring our sensation of life? In this workshop, we will explore and answer this question with our own work-focused fictions, developing strategies for defamiliarizing the mundane, and using routines to build dramatic tension. Utilizing a combination of creative workshops and exercises—and drawing upon models from the job-focused fiction of Eugene Martin, Dorothy Allison, Lucia Berlin, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Edwidge Danticat, and other writers—we will also deepen and develop our characters through precise depictions of their work environments.

In this advanced workshop, we will explore the range of strategies and techniques that fiction writers employ to make readers suspend their disbelief. We will consider how imagined worlds are made to feel real and how invented characters can seem so human. We will contemplate how themes, motifs, and symbols are deployed in such a way that a story can feel curated without seeming inorganic. We will consider how hints are dropped with subtlety, how the 'rules' for what is possible in a story are developed, and how writers can sometimes defy their own established expectations in ways that delight rather than frustrate. From character consistency to twist endings, we'll investigate how published authors lend a sense of realism and plausibility to even the most far-fetched concepts. Through regular workshops, we will also interrogate all students' fiction through this lens, discussing the ways in which your narratives-in-progress create their own inner logic. Students will submit two stories to workshop and will be asked to write critiques of all peer work.

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.

From ancient Sumerian temple hymns to 7th-century Japanese death poems to avant-garde ekphrasis in the 21st century, the history of poetry is as rich in genres as it is in forms. Why does it feel so good to write a curse? What is an ode and how is it different from an aubade? In this technical seminar we will study the origins, transcultural functions, and evolving conventions of some of the oldest-living genres of lyric poetry – the ode, the elegy, the love poem, the curse, to name a few. We will read living writers such as Alice Oswald, Danez Smith, Kim Hyesoon, and Natalie Diaz alongside historical forerunners including Aesop, Sei Shonagon, John Keats. Federico Garcia Lorca, Sylvia Plath, and Paul Celan. Students will write weekly experiments of their own in response to our readings, and for a final project they will edit a mini-anthology of a genre of their choice, including a short critical introduction.

Whenever we write stories, we are in conversation with other writers, living or dead. Sometimes that conversation is quiet and intimate—a matter of subtle influence, much as we take on unconsciously the diction and cadences of admired mentors and beloved friends. Other times, the conversation is boisterous, a meeting of minds, a deepening of our collective discourse. Still other times, the conversation gets heated. We feel the need to set the record straight, give voice to a neglected or misrepresented character, vindicate a monster or indict a hero. In this technical seminar, we will read writers responding to other writers—Victor Lavalle & H.P. Lovecraft, Haruki Murakami & Franz Kafka, Doris Lessing & Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Joyce Carol Oates & James Joyce, among others—and examine how these writers retell, modernize, and comment upon influential stories, making the stories their own while incorporating familiar elements. The emphasis of this course will be on critical writing, but students will also have opportunities to write creative responses to the readings and experiment with the craft techniques we discuss.

What we call style is more than literary flourish. Control of a story begins with a writer’s characteristic approach to the line. Style dictates and shapes immersive and impactful worlds of our creation. It’s also indicative of a work’s larger themes, philosophies, and aesthetic sensibility. In this class, we’ll examine fiction by wordsmiths such as James Baldwin, Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison, and Marguerite Duras in order to contemplate the influence that elements such as diction, syntax, rhythm, and punctuation have on a writer’s style.