Technical Seminars

Writing fiction is in large part a matter of convincing world-building, no matter what genre you write in. And convincing world-building is about creating a seamless reality within the elements of that world: from character dynamics, to setting, to social systems, and even the story or novel's conceptual conceit. And whether it be within a genre of realism, historical fiction, or science fiction, building a convincing world takes a good deal of research. So while we look closely at the tools and methods of successful world-building, we will also dig into the process of research. From how and where to mine the right details, to not just how to do research, but how research can make a fertile ground for harvesting ideas and even story. Students will read various works long and short fiction with an eye to its world-building, as well as critical and craft texts. They will write short weekly reading responses and some creative exercises as well. Each student will also be expected to make a brief presentation and turn in a final paper for the class.

This seminar looks primarily at fiction that blurs the line between imagination and experience. We'll look at highly memoiristic "autofiction" by the likes of Rachel Cusk, Renata Adler, and Hitomi Kanehara. Authors who have addressed the same subjects in both works of fiction and nonfiction, including Kathryn Harrison and James Baldwin, will also be of interest to us. As will nonfiction novels and/or highly novelistic journalism by George Orwell, Ryzard Kapuchinski, and Katherine Boo. Finally, we'll look at some radio and film works that deliberately and/or "ecstatically" smudge the truth, by Orson Welles, Banksy, and Werner Herzog. The focus of this course is very much on responding critically to each text and the larger question of genre. But there will also be opportunities for creative exercises. As such this course is particularly meant for Creative Writing majors in fiction but will appeal to any student interested in contemporary literature.

There are choices we're making at the sentence level that conjure specific tonal environments in our Non-Fiction. These tonal choices are mostly idiosyncratic to each writer, part of our syntactic DNA. This won't be a class in changing anyone's inherent tonal choices. It will be a class where we'll practice how to listen to our writing so that we can recognize the choices we've made and how best to accentuate them in revision. We'll look at some of the great sentence makers: Woolf, Baldwin, Didion, Sontag, Als, Sebald (still a knock-out even in translation), DFW, Rushdie, and others. We will be looking very closely at sentence level construction. We'll read some poets because they make it all look so easy sometimes. We'll analyze the interaction between the tone and content of each essay, watching how that interaction can be causal, inseparable, playful, discordant, impossible, etc.

This past year, the Nobel Prize Committee controversially awarded the Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition." But what does "new poetic expressions" mean? In this course, we will look at works which fall inside and outside of the poetic tradition (including artworks, films, songs, and so on) in order to ask: What are we saying when we say "poetic"? What values are we ascribing to this practice and how do we delineate its formal and/or "expressive" powers? Students will be asked to keep a reading notebook as well as to write essays on the subject.

As readers, we can all sense when a narrator doesn't seem "convincing" as a character. Would anyone say such a thing? we wonder. What makes a first-person voice seem "real" to readers? How does this voice naturally move - whether in moments of boredom, of distress, of passion? Ultimately, what we're asking as writers is, How can interiority truly be achieved? In this reading course, we will examine the first-person voice in contemporary fiction by authors such as Garth Greenwell, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Banana Yoshimoto - always with a craft-specific eye on how we can fine-tune our own narrators' voices.

This course is an introduction to the linked practices of reading and writing poetry. We will begin with major stylistic experiments of the last century-finding common ground in familiar idioms. We will discuss significant topics, movements ,and styles of the period while identifying formal strategies. As we practice these strategies in our writing, we will move backward in time, to less familiar terrain-expanding our sense of context while increasing our technical repertoire and defamiliarizing ourselves with our assumptions about what poetry is, what it should do, and how it should do it. Weekly reading and writing assignments will challenge students to expand their technical repertoire. And the historical breadth of the course will give students an opportunity to explore the expansive field of poetry as a historically dynamic phenomenon. But the true educational experience will come in uniting these activities, when the student begins to read as a writer and write as a reader. This creative relation to the world of symbols will open them to the world as such and the world as such to their writerly minds. Ultimately, this is a course in inventive perception.

This reading and writing seminar will acquaint students with one of the essential tools of fiction writers: characterization. We will read primary texts by authors including Baldwin, Flaubert, Munro, and Wharton, as well as critical work by Danticat, Forester, and Vargas Llosa, toward exploring how some of literature's most famous characters are rendered. How do writers of fiction create contexts in which characters must struggle, and how does each character's conflicts reveal his or her nature? Students will complete both creative and analytical writing exercises, reading responses, and a paper that focuses on characterization in a work of fiction.

In this class we'll analyze the architecture of nonfiction. We'll start by studying the primary elements of composition: the sentence, paragraph, and section. (Or chapter, in the case of a book.) We'll begin with Verlyn Klinkenborg's treatise, Several Short Sentences about Writing; also, because the sentence has so much in common with the line and thus poetry, lyric essays, which verge on verse. Sentences accrete into paragraphs, each with its own internal structure, one that leads to the next paragraph and eventually to the overall structure, one composed of every previous element, like a set of Russian nesting dolls. We'll take apart those structures. If it's a chain of events we'll study their order, and ask why they're often better out of chronologic order. If the piece is a train of thought we'll look at the way each paragraph forms a boxcar, so to speak, in that train, one pulled along by a central, sometimes unspoken, question or conflict. In some cases-Didion's White Album-we'll analyze the absence of any meaningful structure. Other readings include Katherine Boo, David Grann, Natalia Ginzburg, and theoretical texts such as John McPhee's Draft Number Four.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 9:30-12:20 

This technical seminar explores different theoretical and practical approaches to imagery and description in poetry. To begin with, we'll try to distinguish between the two terms, to the extent necessary and possible. Then we will examine and practice writing radically different approaches to image making and description (e.g. synesthetic, collaged, surrealist, eco-poetic, abstract, juxtapositional, haiku, etc.). Along the way, we'll consider theories about the rhetorical functions of imagery and description in the poetic text. Although this course focuses on poetry, it is certainly relevant to prose writers interested in the role of descriptive detail in literary writing, and for comparison we will examine famous examples of description in works of fiction. Students should plan to submit a weekly exercise, write a critical essay, and give a class presentation. 

Day/Time: Friday, 10:30-1:20
 

In this technical seminar, we will set about exploding the traditional "rules" of fiction craft in order to broaden our grasp of intention and technique. Each week, using Charles Baxter's Burning Down the House as our textbook, we will focus on a nontraditional approach to a craft element (e.g., anti-epiphanic endings, counterpointed characters, rhyming action, etc.). We will analyze the fictional element in an assigned short story and write a short craft analysis, meditating on both the risk and payoff of these literary digressions. Then we'll experiment with the technique in a short writing exercise. Although this is not a formal workshop, we will share and receive feedback in brief "10 Minute Workshops." The end of the semester will culminate in a portfolio of exercises and techniques.       

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