2018-2019

The short and the long of it. In this course, we'll be focusing on writing about visual arts by using shorter and longer forms, and while thinking about short and long durations of time. The time of encounter with a work of art, the time of its making, kinds of time the artists wanted to invoke, the endurance and ephemerality of the work, and of the experience of the work. We'll work short: wall text, compressed review, lyric fragment, and long: involved and layered sentences and elaborations. We'll work with and against different kinds of syntax, white space, and the unspoken, and read authors including John Yau, Lori Waxman, Zbigniew Herbert, Mark Strand, John Berger, Junichiro Tanizaki, and Dore Ashton, and ekphrastic poetry by Terrance Hayes, Tyehimba Jess, and Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon.

The course hopes to support students both in developing useful practices and experimenting boldly. Every class session will begin with a student-led two-work tour at the Smart Museum, and we will spend one session on close looking at works on paper at the Smart. Students will also visit five collections, exhibitions and/or galleries and keep a looking diary. Students will write a number of exercises in different forms (wall text, review, interview / portrait), and will also write two essays (which may follow one extended line or be a mosaic composite) to be workshopped in class.

This workshop-based nonfiction course is suitable for any student who wants to work on long-form (1500 words and up) journalistic projects. To supplement our workshop submissions, we'll look at a variety of texts touching on (and often combining) reporting on political, cultural, and environmental subjects. We'll consider interviewing techniques and profile writing, as well works concerned with travel (of the non-touristic kind), sports, and the arts. We'll read pieces by the likes of Katherine Boo, Eula Biss, George Orwell, Ryzard Kapuchinski, George Saunders, Geoff Dyer, Ted Conover, Maggie Nelson, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. The emphasis of the course will be on narrative journalism, but other approaches will be considered and welcomed. Ideally, students will come into the course with projects already in mind, but we will also work on developing stories and pitches.

The importance of sound to poetry, lyric poetry especially, is universally acknowledged, yet neither technical analysis of meter nor meticulous maps of vowel and consonant patterns satisfactorily describe how sound-making and listening shape poetic process and even, more controversially, poetic thinking. We will work with sounds luscious and austere, narcotic and precise, in a training of the ear as an organ of poesis.

Multiple short poems gathered into a single yet open-ended structure-this way of working has been remarkably productive for 20th- and 21st-century poets. In this workshop, you will experiment with ways of writing, accruing, counting, dispersing, shuffling, stacking, and otherwise arranging your own "little boxes." We will read and discuss a range of modern and contemporary poetic sequences as models, paying particular attention to matters of craft: How are syllables, words, lines, and stanzas effectively arranged within a short poem? How are short poems effectively arranged in relation to one another? What's the relation of parts to wholes in a poem or a sequence? What roles might repetition, variation, and echo play? We'll also think about ways the sequence can serve as an instrument of attention: How might writing "in pieces" help us notice and name things, events, feelings, and ideas that otherwise remain unnoticed or inarticulate? How might sequential composition open our writing to improvisation, unpredictability, and generative bewilderment? Poets studied may include: Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, George Oppen, Robert Creeley, Rae Armantrout, Fanny Howe, Ed Roberson, Michael O'Brien, Nathaniel Mackey, Joseph Donahue, and others. Over the course of the quarter you will write and revise an extended poetic sequence of your own, and our class meetings will mix writing activities, seminar discussion of our readings, and ongoing workshop discussion of your sequences-in-progress.

As consumers of mass entertainments, we have all been indoctrinated with the traditional Freytag's pyramid model of storytelling, predicated on the linearity of rising action, climax, falling action. In this workshop course, we will read and examine fiction with (seemingly) other shapes, misshapes, or perhaps no shapes. Through an eclectic mix of readings - by writers such as Lucia Berlin, Anton Chekhov, Miranda July - we will investigate alternatives to and departures from the conventional plotlines that dominate our culture, ultimately with an eye towards creating unconventional narratives of our own.

The books and stories we read as teenagers are often some of the most influential in developing our tastes as adult readers and writers of fiction. In this advanced workshop course, we'll discuss the genre of young adult literature through evaluation of your own writing: what are its defining characteristics, and what's the difference between writing for a young adult audience versus writing books and stories about teenagers but designed for adult readers? Students should be working on book-length projects involving teenaged protagonists, no matter the intended audience; please come to the first session with either work to submit or a sense of when you'd be able to sign up for a slot. We'll spend most of our time evaluating student work, learning how to become both generous and rigorous critics, and we'll also talk about the books that influenced us the most as young adult readers and the books we're reading today, from contemporary writers like John Green and Rainbow Rowell to classic authors like S. E. Hinton and Madeleine L'Engle. Students will read at least one or two novels during the quarter as well.

In this advanced fiction workshop, students will work on novel-length projects, completing one to two polished chapters and an outline of a full novel. We will explore how to structure a book that is both propulsive and character-driven, and how to create a compelling, unique narrative voice._ Works by James Baldwin, Edith Wharton, Ha Jin, Vladimir Nabokov, and Akhil Sharma will help us consider the crucial relationship between characters and their contexts.

All writing is revision, and this holds true for the practice of literary translation as well. We will critique each other's longer manuscripts-in-progress of prose, poetry, or drama, and examine various revision techniques-from the line-by-line approach of Lydia Davis, to the "driving-in-the-dark" model of Peter Constantine, and several approaches in between. We will consider questions of different reading audiences while manuscripts for submission for publication, along with the contextualization of the work with a translator's preface or afterword. Our efforts will culminate in not only an advanced-stage manuscript, but also with various strategies in hand to use for future projects. Students who wish to take this workshop should have at least an intermediate proficiency in a foreign language and already be working on a longer translation project.

This class will explore the intermarriage of the poem with the essay or book-length work of nonfiction. We'll explore a range of works that share with the poetic an attention to and innovative use of form, highly imagistic language, and the use of white space or occasional line breaks. At times such works employ elevated diction; at other times vernacular prosity. Some of these works leave off narrative, others care deeply about the telling of a story. In each case, we'll think about the intersection of form and content. Why this form for this story (or non-story)? What has been gained? What seems intentionally lost? Writers studied may include Claudia Rankine, Anne Carson, Patricia Hampl, Eve L. Ewing, Maggie Nelson, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Lia Purpura.

This course aims to investigate, through a range of readings and writing exercises, various units of composition and the ways that they interact with each other in poems. We will study and imitate traditional formal approaches, such as the poetic foot, meter, caesuras, sprung rhythm, rhymed stanzas, and refrains. We also will study and imitate modernist and contemporary "units," such as the word (approached, for example, etymologically or connotatively), the free verse line, the variable foot, vers libre, serial form, the sentence (the "new" sentence, but also modulations of basic syntax), the paragraph, the page, and forms of call and response. This reading intensive course will draw from a selection of mostly modern and contemporary poetry, poetics, and criticism. Students will be expected to submit weekly technical exercises, complete several short critical responses, write a longer essay, and submit a final portfolio of revised material.