2019-2020

In this thesis workshop in fiction, students will write and revise thesis projects, completing either short stories or chapters of a novel. We will explore how to write, structure, and revise work that is propulsive, character-driven, and lyrical. The creation of compelling characters, unique narrative voices, and frank, polished prose will be our goal. Readings include work by James Baldwin, Edith Wharton, Ha Jin, and Akhil Sharma as well as individualized reading lists.

Day/Time: Thursday, 11 AM-1:50 PM

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: Wednesday, 12:30-3:20 PM
 

This advanced fiction course is for BA and MA students writing a creative thesis or any advanced student working on a major fiction project. It is primarily a workshop, so please come to our first class with your project in progress (a story collection, a novel, or a novella), ready for you to discuss and to submit some part of for critique. As in any writing workshop, we will stress the fundamentals of craft like language, voice, and plot and character development, with an eye also on how to shape your work for the longer form you have chosen. And as a supplement to our workshops, we will have brief student presentations on the writing life: our literary influences, potential avenues towards publication, etc.

Day/Times: Tuesday 2-4:50 PM

In this course we will be reading and writing creative essays that consider voluntary and involuntary migration from a variety of perspectives – historical, personal, geographical, political. We will read works by writers including Valeria Luiselli, Olaudah Equiano, Tommy Orange, Gwendolyn Brooks, Tara Zahra, Italo Calvino, Eve Ewing, José Roach Orduña, and Aleksandar Hemon, which will let us think in terms of narrative, testimony, fragment, investigation, fable, oral history, inhabited voice, memoir. Students will write two essays for workshop, and will be encouraged to grapple with the overlay between present and past, between public and private, between memory and forgetting. As writers, we will work at the technical aspects of managing tense, distance, and scale – close by, far away, a few, many, still, not any more.  

Day/Time: Wednesday, 11:30-2:20

Are memoirs self-indulgent? In this class you’ll learn firsthand the pitfalls of the genre, mainly by writing your own. Although your memoir is about what happened, ultimately it has to be about what what happened means. We’ll help you figure that out by starting with theories proposed by Vivian Gornick in her book, The Situation and the Story, as well as To Show and To Tell, by Phillip Lopate. You’ll apply these theories (or not) in class, two-thirds of which will be workshop, i.e., intensive line edits, essayistic critiques, and long, focused, yet wide-ranging discussions about the student work at hand as well as memory itself, which is the imagination working in reverse. We'll spend the other third of class reading and discussing published exemplars by James Baldwin, Jo Ann Beard, Lucy Grealy, and visiting writers. If you learn one thing in this class, you'll learn that the best memoirs are indeed self-indulgent—but that the self they're indulging is the reader’s, not the writer’s.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 9:30-12:20

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, 2:00-4:50 PM
 

“If you want a compelling story, put your protagonist among the damned” —Charles Baxter
While crisis is to be avoided in life, when it comes to narrative, trouble is your friend. In this advanced workshop, we'll explore the complex ways writers create conflict in their stories, be it internal or external, spiritual or physical, romantic, financial or familial. We'll read masters of the form like Edward P. Jones, George Saunders, Deborah Eisenberg, Sandra Cisneros, and Phil Klay, and discuss how they generate conflict that feels organic, character-driven and inevitable. Weekly writing exercises will encourage you to take creative risks and hone new skills. Each student will workshop two stories, with strong emphasis on focused and productive peer critique and in-class commentary.

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

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: Friday, 9:30-12:20

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 (one to be submitted early in the term) and will be asked to write critiques of all peer work.

Day/Time: Monday, 9:30-12:20

Purple, lean, evocative, muscular, literary, exuberant, lucid, stilted, economical. These are all labels that critics and reviewers have used to characterize prose styles that call attention to themselves in distinct ways. Of course, what constitutes style not only changes over time, but also means different things in different literary traditions. How, then, do translators carry style over from one language and cultural milieu to another? And to what extent does style structure storytelling? We will explore these questions by reading a variety of modern and contemporary stylists who either write in English or translate into English, paying special attention to what stylistic devices are at work and what their implications are for narration, characterization, and world building. Further, we’ll examine the range of choices that each writer and translator makes when constituting and reconstituting style, on a lexical, tonal, and syntactic scale. By pairing readings with generative exercises in stylistics and constrained writing, we will build toward the translation of a short work of contemporary fiction into English. To participate in this workshop, students should be able to comfortably read a literary text in a foreign language. 

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