CRWR

T. S. Eliot once said that “good writers borrow, great writers steal.” In this class we will look at modeling as a springboard for original creativity. What makes a piece of writing original? Is it possible to borrow a famous writer’s story structure, theme, or even attempt their voice, yet produce something wholly original? How specifically are writers influenced and then inspired? Readings will pair writers with the influences they’ve talked or written about, such as Yiyun Li and Anton Chekhov; Edward P. Jones and Alice Walker; Sigrid Nunez and Elizabeth Hardwick, and George Saunders and Nikolai Gogol. Writing exercises will experiment with aspects of voice, narrative structure, point of view, tone, and use of dialog. While this is not a workshop course, come prepared to write and share work in class. Students will pursue both creative work and critical papers.

In fiction, it is often said that an effective character must have a clear desire. Kurt Vonnegut famously advised, “Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.” The idea is that desire is an animating, energizing, and focusing force in storytelling. In this course, we’ll attempt to apply the animation, energy, and focus of desire to personal essays, poems, and fiction, and explore how writers depict desire and longing in a wide range of work. We’ll also attempt to catalog different kinds of desire: crushes, obsessions, nostalgia, and farsickness, to name a few. We'll pay special attention to how we can write about strong emotional experiences without resorting to cliches or sentimentality. Potential texts will be Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux, Safekeeping by Abigail Thomas, Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson, Crush by Richard Siken, The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon, and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Instructor TBD

Course Description TBD

In this course, we’ll study the subgenre of immigrant literature, and through the examination of novel excerpts, short stories, poetry, plays, biographies, and memoirs, we’ll discuss the politics and aesthetics of canonized writers such as Amy Tan, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Emma Lazarus, as well as lesser-known writers. From the outset, we’ll discern the characteristics that define immigrants, refugees, exiles, expatriates, and how they, therefore, might show up differently on the page. We’ll consider how authors create engaging characters, by articulating their characters’ evolving sense of identity in the face of conflicting notions of “otherness,” assimilation, and acculturation. To gain a better understanding of how authors shape compelling, and moreover, believable plots, we’ll examine the push and pull factors that situate immigrants differently in the new land, and how their host societies regard them. In short critical papers, we’ll analyze the trends, features, and conventions of the subgenre, and in short exercises, you’ll write a story, poem, essay, or play about immigrants, informed by research, that utilizes the catalogue of questions, techniques, and practices that we identify.

"I love the thingness of things," Sylvia Plath wrote in her journal. By concentrating on poems that are rooted deeply in the material world, this workshop will focus beginning poets on the art of description and the importance of image-making. Poets will to attend to the intensity of the sensorium, rooting their art in the material world as a strategy, albeit a counterintuitive one, to access the emotional and abstract.

This course guides students in exercises that work with both the actual sounds of poetry, like alliteration and rhythm, and the inaudible, “imagined” music of the mind, to write and workshop poems. We read diverse contemporary and classic poets, write several poems, and workshop peer work weekly, culminating in a portfolio of new poems as a final project.

Instructor TBD

Course Description TBD

Instructor TBD

Course Description TBD

Instructor TBD

Course Description TBD

Nature writer Barry Lopez suggests that knowing a place intimately and writing about it — whether that place is an Arctic ice floe or an urban taco stand — creates an important “sense of belonging, a sense of not being isolated in the universe.” In this course, we will read fiction by writers who explore the impact of place on community, culture, and the individual. We will take Lopez’s advice to “become vulnerable to a place,” and to represent that place and its people with rich and complex detail. Writing exercises and the occasional field trip will help to generate material, while responses to assigned readings will give you a bit more direction as you address issues specific to writing about places, as well as other fundamentals of fiction writing.