Writing

It’s one thing to tell a story with the pen. It’s another to transfix your audience with your voice. In this class, we will explore principles of audio narrative. Oral storytellers arguably understand suspense, humor and showmanship in ways only a live performer can. Even if you are a diehard writer of visually-consumed text, you may find, once the class is over, that you have learned techniques that can translate across borders: your written work may benefit. Alternatively, you may discover that audio is the medium for you.

We will consider sound from the ground up – from folkloric oral traditions, to raw, naturally captured sound stories, to seemingly straightforward radio news segments, to highly polished narrative podcasts. While this class involves a fair amount of reading, much of what we will be studying and discussing is audio material. Some is as lo-fi as can be, and some is operatic in scope, benefitting from large production budgets and teams of artists. At the same time that we study these works, each student will also complete small audio production exercises of their own; as a final project, students will be expected to produce a trailer, or “sizzle” for a hypothetical multi-episode show.

This class is meant for beginners to the audio tradition. There are some tech requirements: a recording device (most phones will suffice), workable set of headphones, and computer. You’ll also need to download the free audio editing software Audacity.

Our writing often appears primarily as a product of cognitive faculties, and we easily overlook the profound influence our bodies exert on our thoughts and, consequently, our writing. Our perception of language itself is tied to how we perceive our physical selves. We can understand our bodies materially, as intricate structures of bone, muscle, and cells, or kinesthetically, through movement, force, and tone, intertwined with a spectrum of sensations like pain and pleasure, which intersect with our psychological and emotional landscapes. Through a series of movement exercises, readings, and writing assignments, this seminar delves into the profound impact a deeper understanding of our bodies and their movement can have on our writing, and conversely, how writing can influence our bodily experiences. Using various artistic mediums such as dance, film, literature, and fine arts, we aim to enhance our ability to articulate and write the body's presence and movement through space and time. Students from all concentrations are encouraged to join.

“Take notes regularly,” Lydia Davis advises in Essays One. “Observe your own activity. . .Observe your own feelings (but not at tiresome length). . .Observe the behavior of others, both animal and human. . .Observe the weather, and be specific.”

This cross-genre seminar—fiction and nonfiction, with forays into translation—aims to uncover radical, imaginative, and accessible approaches to generating and refining creative work drawn from the world around us, using the good examples of Davis and writers she is in conversation with. Readings will include Davis’s The End of the Story, Essays One, Essays Two, Collected Stories, Our Strangers, and In the Weeds; her translations of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time; as well as the works of writers such as Franz Kafka, Marguerite Duras, Elizabeth Hardwick, Osama Alomar, Eliot Weinberger, Thomas Bernhard, and Italo Calvino, whose models she cites or follows (or whose works I find complementary to Davis). These readings will be supplemented by the occasional complementary craft essay by writers like Samuel R. Delany, George Saunders, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Ben Mauk. Using these models and guidance, students will be emboldened to apply these techniques to their own work, which will consist of brief weekly writing assignments (many of which will be creative) and generative in-class creative writing prompts. Students will also do short presentations drawn from independent visit to Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library, where Davis’s illuminating notebooks, revised manuscripts, and other papers are housed. Students will also learn to keep a daily writing journal, from which selections will serve as the midterm and final.

We read in order not to be confined to the self nature has assigned us; we read to make prolonged and intimate contact with other inner lives. Day to day we are largely opaque to each other; in literature, by contrast, there are no secrets. What life hides, writing announces. Novels, stories, memoirs, biographies, personal essays, poems and plays exist to reveal what’s really going on in the deep recesses. Our course will focus, across a range of genres and styles, on the endless varieties of inner experience and how outer life disguises, but also intimates, the fortress of secrets within. You will be asked to relate the following readings to other books you’ve read, as well as to what is personal and idiosyncratic to yourself. Your written assignments should reflect the inner changes that reading has wrought -- as well as the core of originality that each of us possesses, just on account of being human.

Prerequisite: Student must have taken beginning workshop in any undergraduate creative writing concentration. Open workshops are for students who are acquainted with and have experience in at least one beginning workshop in creative writing. In Open Fiction Workshops, particular attention will be paid to the components of fiction: voice, perspective, characterization, and form. Students will be expected to finish several short stories, executing a total artistic vision on a piece of writing. The critical focus of the class will include an examination of endings and formal wholeness, sustaining narrative arcs, compelling a reader's interest for the duration of the text, and generating a sense of urgency and drama in the work. A portfolio of fiction will be written and revised with critical input from the instructor and workshop. Outside readings may be used to supplement and inform the exercises and written projects. Please visit https://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate for information about registration procedures.

Prerequisite: Student must have taken beginning workshop in any undergraduate creative writing concentration. Open workshops are for students who are acquainted with and have experience in at least one beginning workshop in creative writing. In Open Fiction Workshops, particular attention will be paid to the components of fiction: voice, perspective, characterization, and form. Students will be expected to finish several short stories, executing a total artistic vision on a piece of writing. The critical focus of the class will include an examination of endings and formal wholeness, sustaining narrative arcs, compelling a reader's interest for the duration of the text, and generating a sense of urgency and drama in the work. A portfolio of fiction will be written and revised with critical input from the instructor and workshop. Outside readings may be used to supplement and inform the exercises and written projects. Please visit https://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate for information about registration procedures.

Prerequisite: Student must have taken beginning workshop in any undergraduate creative writing concentration. Open workshops are for students who are acquainted with and have experience in at least one beginning workshop in creative writing. In Open Fiction Workshops, particular attention will be paid to the components of fiction: voice, perspective, characterization, and form. Students will be expected to finish several short stories, executing a total artistic vision on a piece of writing. The critical focus of the class will include an examination of endings and formal wholeness, sustaining narrative arcs, compelling a reader's interest for the duration of the text, and generating a sense of urgency and drama in the work. A portfolio of fiction will be written and revised with critical input from the instructor and workshop. Outside readings may be used to supplement and inform the exercises and written projects. Please visit https://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate for information about registration procedures.

Prerequisite: Student must have taken beginning workshop in any undergraduate creative writing concentration. Open workshops are for students who are acquainted with and have experience in at least one beginning workshop in creative writing. In Open Fiction Workshops, particular attention will be paid to the components of fiction: voice, perspective, characterization, and form. Students will be expected to finish several short stories, executing a total artistic vision on a piece of writing. The critical focus of the class will include an examination of endings and formal wholeness, sustaining narrative arcs, compelling a reader's interest for the duration of the text, and generating a sense of urgency and drama in the work. A portfolio of fiction will be written and revised with critical input from the instructor and workshop. Outside readings may be used to supplement and inform the exercises and written projects. Please visit https://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate for information about registration procedures.

Seniors who are majors in creative writing are given priority for this course. Enrollment is limited, and is by permission of the professor. The senior workshop offers students the opportunity to work exclusively with classmates who are at the same high level of accomplishment in the major. Students in the senior workshops will produce and revise a new and substantial body of work. In-class critiques and conferences with the professor will be tailored to needs of each student. Please visit https://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate for information about registration procedures.

Creating New Worlds in Writing and in VR is a generative, exploratory fiction seminar where we will read, analyze, and experiment with the process of building new worlds. We will ask, What are the narrative possibilities that unfold within these environments? What are the conventions of sci-fi and fantasy and how can they be used to critique and scrutinize our lives on earth, particularly, experiences of violence, environmental degradation, and racial, sexual, and gender-based oppression? We will use VR technology to help us model our own invented spaces. We will examine how to incorporate traditional literary elements, such as character and dialogue, into these dynamic environments.

What does it mean to be original? How do we differentiate plagiarism from pastiche, appropriation from homage? And how do we build on pre-existing traditions while simultaneously creating work that reflects our own unique experiences of the world?

In a 2007 essay for Harper’s magazine, Jonathan Lethem countered critic Harold Bloom’s theory of “the anxiety of influence” by proposing, instead, an “ecstasy of influence”; Lethem suggested that writers embrace rather than reject the unavoidable imprints of their literary forbearers. Beginning with Lethem’s essay—which, itself, is composed entirely of borrowed (or “sampled”) text—this class will consider the nature of literary influence, and its role in the development of voice.

Each week, students will read from pairings of older stories and novel excerpts with contemporary work that falls within the same artistic lineage. In doing so, we’ll track the movement of stylistic, structural, and thematic approaches to fiction across time, and think about the different ways that stories and novels can converse with one another. We will also consider the influence of other artistic mediums—music, visual art, film and television—on various texts. Students will then write their own original short pieces modeled after the readings. Just as musicians cover songs, we will “cover” texts,  adding our own interpretive imprints.

Plant people are in our midst: they covet plants, grow them, and obsess over them. We call plant people green thumbs. They tend gardens; sniff herbs; make poultices; take cuttings. Plant people risk life and limb in pursuit of plants or become plant-like themselves. They tire of human ways and root in place, preferring the company of trees. As people can become plant-like, plants can also appear people-like, as sentient, sovereign beings who should be addressed with the proper pronouns. These plants have the power to act upon the world of people, and not always benignly. Finally, plant people can be everyday people like you and me, who consume and incorporate plants into our bodies, often without thought or awareness.

In this fiction seminar, we will read all about plant people: stories about plant obsessives, plant witnesses, plant actors, and plant consumers. How do we write stories about plant people? We will discuss craft techniques that relate to writing about plants, from voice to perspective to plot. How do we pull off the disorienting perspectival shift when writing from the vantage of an oak tree? How do we render plants precisely, botanically; what new vocabulary do we need to know? What are some of existing tropes about plants? Most importantly, how do we overcome plant blindness? In addition to short stories and novels, we will also read some nonfiction that will inform our fiction writing. Authors on the syllabus include Ursula Le Guin, Elif Shafak, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Richard Powers, Han Kang, David Diop, Andrea Barrett, and Christina Garza Rivera.

This class will look at formally and intellectually ambitious short books from the last century. The bulk of the coursework will consist of close reading and craft-oriented discussions examining how writers achieve narrative complexity, authority, and emotional impact within severe spatial limits. We will also consider the evolving role of the novel as a technology for capturing the tedium and transcendence of daily life, and ask how books might compete for attention in an increasingly distracted media environment. Are compact literary forms the answer to our ongoing literacy crisis? In an era where dopamine tolerance is at an all-time high and attention spans are at an all-time low, what strategies might a novel use to court the general reader? In other words, can a book be “scroll-stopping”? Should it even try to be?

Each unit will focus on a distinct aspect of craft. Students will produce short pieces of fiction or criticism throughout the semester, experimenting with narrative strategies drawn from the readings. The final project will be either a sustained piece of literary criticism or an excerpt from an original short novel accompanied by a critical introduction. 

The four major craft components of the course are: 

● Compression: How does a writer distill a work of literature to its most essential elements? What gives a text narrative economy? 

● Form & Constraint: This unit looks at experimental works that use formal constraints in place of traditional approaches, sometimes challenging or expanding the established conventions of the novel. 

● Lifewriting: We will look at a number of first person books whose narrator superficially resembles the author, considering how autobiographical experience is transformed into literary material. 

● Voice: This unit will explore how voice and style can court and conscript the interest, sympathy, or even disdain of the reader. We will also discuss the relationship between literary voice and contemporary attention economies. 

A stranger appears at your door and knows everything about you. A figure looms in the dark by your bed every night without explanation. You receive a photo of yourself from an anonymous phone number. You find yourself in a series of connected rooms, a liminal space where there can be any one or anything behind the corner. All of these scenarios elicit the icky, unsettling feeling of the uncanny valley. While we’ve all experienced feeling “a little weird,” to truly understand uncanny horror is to also understand, as Kelly Link says, when describing Nighttime Logic, the way “moments of trauma rearrange, disrupt, and reverse how we make sense of the world.” In other words, as writers, understanding the uneasy nature of horror can help us face the true monsters of reality. In this class, we will examine the feeling of terror before the horror is defined. We will see the ways in which playing with time and withholding information create a sense of dread; how the uneasiness of strangers in fiction is influenced by ancient folklore and the way industrialization and modern anxieties influence “creepypastas” and “the Backrooms.” How do the bureaucracy and constraints of the modern world create a specter of its own? What happens when our illusions of safety break down and what gets let inside? Coursework will include weekly, in-class writing assignments, a reading journal and one completed short story.

Prerequisite: Student must have taken beginning workshop in any undergraduate creative writing concentration. Open workshops are for students who are acquainted with and have experience in at least one beginning workshop in creative writing. In Open Fiction Workshops, particular attention will be paid to the components of fiction: voice, perspective, characterization, and form. Students will be expected to finish several short stories, executing a total artistic vision on a piece of writing. The critical focus of the class will include an examination of endings and formal wholeness, sustaining narrative arcs, compelling a reader's interest for the duration of the text, and generating a sense of urgency and drama in the work. A portfolio of fiction will be written and revised with critical input from the instructor and workshop. Outside readings may be used to supplement and inform the exercises and written projects. Please visit https://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate for information about registration procedures.

Prerequisite: Student must have taken beginning workshop in any undergraduate creative writing concentration. Open workshops are for students who are acquainted with and have experience in at least one beginning workshop in creative writing. In Open Fiction Workshops, particular attention will be paid to the components of fiction: voice, perspective, characterization, and form. Students will be expected to finish several short stories, executing a total artistic vision on a piece of writing. The critical focus of the class will include an examination of endings and formal wholeness, sustaining narrative arcs, compelling a reader's interest for the duration of the text, and generating a sense of urgency and drama in the work. A portfolio of fiction will be written and revised with critical input from the instructor and workshop. Outside readings may be used to supplement and inform the exercises and written projects. Please visit https://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate for information about registration procedures.

This course will examine the lineaments of critical writing. A critic blends the subjective and objective in complex ways. A critic must know the history of an artwork, (its past), while placing it on the contemporary landscape and contemplating its future.  A single piece can report, analyze, argue, describe, reflect and interpret. And, since examining a work of art also means examining oneself, implicitly or explicitly, the task includes a willingness to probe one’s own assumptions and biases. The best critics are engaged in a conversation -- a dialogue a debate --with changing standards of taste, with their audience, with their own convictions and emotions. The best criticism is part of a larger cultural conversation. It spurs readers to ask questions rather than accept answers about art and society.

We will read reviews and essays that address a wide range of forms and genres: performance (from theatre to sports), music, visual art, literature and the uses of language. A number of them also address, implicitly or explicitly, cultural boundaries and divisions: the challenges of new forms; negotiations between popular and high art; between art and politics; the post-modern blurring between artist, critic and fan.

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. 

This course will introduce students to writing about visual art. We will take our models from art history and contemporary art discourse, and students will be prompted to write with and about current art exhibitions and events throughout the city. The modes of art writing we will encounter include: the practice of ekphrasis (poems which describe or derive their inspiration from a work of art); writers such as John Ashbery, Gary Indiana, Eileen Myles, and others who for periods of their life held positions as art critics while composing poetry and works of fiction; writers such as Etel Adnan, Susan Howe, and Renee Gladman who have produced literature and works of art in equal measure. We will also look at artists who have written essays and poetry throughout their careers such as Robert Smithson, Glenn Ligon, Gregg Bordowitz, Moyra Davey, and Hannah Black, and consider both the visual qualities of writing and the ways that visual artists have used writing in their work. Lastly, we will consider what it means to write through a “milieu” of visual artists, such as those associated with the New York School and Moscow Conceptualism. Throughout the course students will produce original works and complete a final writing project that enriches, complicates, and departs from their own interests and preoccupations.

In this seminar, we will target nonfiction that tells stories about lives: profiles, memoirs, and biographies. We will examine how the practice of this kind of nonfiction, and ideas about it, have evolved over the past 150 years. Along the way, we will ask questions about these nonfiction forms: How do reporters, memoirists, biographers, and critics make sense of their subjects? How do they create work as rich as the best novels and short stories? Can criticism explicate the inner life of a human subject? What roles do voice, point-of-view, character, dialogue, and plot—the traditional elements of fiction—play? Along the way, we’ll engage in issues of identity and race, memory and self, real persons and invented characters and we’ll get glimpses of such key publications as The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, and The New York Review of Books. Some writers we will consider: Frederick Douglass, Louisa May Alcott, Walt Whitman, Henry Adams, Joseph Mitchell, Lillian Ross, James Agee, John Hersey, Edmund Wilson, Gore Vidal, Gay Talese, James Baldwin, Vladimir Nabokov, Janet Malcolm, Robert Caro, Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. The course regularly welcomes guest speakers.

Prerequisite: Student must have taken beginning workshop in any undergraduate creative writing concentration. Open workshops are for students who are acquainted with and have experience in at least one beginning workshop in creative writing. In Open Poetry Workshops, students may be instructed in aspects of craft including the poetic persona, the prose poem, the collage, open-field composition, and others. They may also study verse forms such as the villanelle, sonnet, sestina, ballad, acrostic, free verse and also non-European verse forms such as the pantoum. They may read source texts as examples and/or critical texts as theoretical frameworks, and afterward, submit brief critical analyses. They will put their instruction into regular practice by composing original work that will be critiqued by their peers. Students will be encouraged to develop their strengths and to cultivate a distinctive poetic vision and voice but must also demonstrate a willingness to broaden their range and experiment with new forms and notions of the poem. A portfolio of poems will be written and revised with critical input from the instructor and workshop. Please visit https://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate for information about registration procedures.

Prerequisite: Student must have taken beginning workshop in any undergraduate creative writing concentration. Open workshops are for students who are acquainted with and have experience in at least one beginning workshop in creative writing. In Open Poetry Workshops, students may be instructed in aspects of craft including the poetic persona, the prose poem, the collage, open-field composition, and others. They may also study verse forms such as the villanelle, sonnet, sestina, ballad, acrostic, free verse and also non-European verse forms such as the pantoum. They may read source texts as examples and/or critical texts as theoretical frameworks, and afterward, submit brief critical analyses. They will put their instruction into regular practice by composing original work that will be critiqued by their peers. Students will be encouraged to develop their strengths and to cultivate a distinctive poetic vision and voice but must also demonstrate a willingness to broaden their range and experiment with new forms and notions of the poem. A portfolio of poems will be written and revised with critical input from the instructor and workshop. Please visit https://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate for information about registration procedures.

“There are things / We live among ‘and to see them / Is to know ourselves.’”

George Oppen, “Of Being Numerous”

In this class we will read poetry like writers that inhabit an imperiled planet, understanding our poems as being in direct conversation both with the environment as well as writers past and present with similar concerns and techniques. Given the imminent ecological crises we are facing, the poems we read will center themes of place, ecology, interspecies dependence, the role of humans in the destruction of the planet, and the “necropastoral” (to borrow a term from Joyelle McSweeney), among others. We will read works by poets and writers such as (but not limited to) John Ashbery, Harryette Mullen, Asiya Wadud, Wendy Xu, Ross Gay, Simone Kearney, Kim Hyesoon, Marcella Durand, Arthur Rimbaud, Geoffrey G. O’Brien, Muriel Rukeyser, George Oppen, Terrance Hayes, Juliana Spahr, and W.S. Merwin—reading several full collections as well as individual poems and essays by scholars in the field.

Through close readings, in-class exercises, discussions, and creative/critical writings, we will invest in and investigate facets of the dynamic lyric that is aware of its environs (sound, image, line), while also exploring traditional poetic forms like the Haibun, ode, prose poem, and elegy. Additionally, we will seek inspiration in outside mediums such as film, visual art, and music, as well as, of course, the natural world. As a class, we will explore the highly individual nature of writing processes and talk about building writing practices that are generative as well as sustainable.

Post-structuralist. Post-modern. Post-colonial. Post-human? (Going to post that on my socials!). As technology becomes increasing more interwoven into our labor, our recreation, and our culture, how does it affect our words and our art? In this class we will explore poets and writers of experimental prose who write about, fret about, dream about, and utilize 20th and 21st technology into their work. We will start with anxieties of emerging middle class home appliances in the 1920s to home computing and this called the internet during Y2K to the debate over AI today.

Students will write both analytically and creatively, meet with the professor at least once during the semester, engage in collaborative work, and take turns leading class discussion. The semester will culminate in research leading to an analytical, interdisciplinary, or creative project. Nota Bene: Students will not be allowed to use AI in their writing; however, we will be discussion AI in class.

Readings will include Jon Bois, Shayla Lawz, Franny Choi, Jillian Weise, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, and Margaret Rhee.

CROSS-GENRE SEMINAR

CROSS-GENRE SEMINAR

CROSS-GENRE SEMINAR

CROSS-GENRE SEMINAR

CROSS-GENRE SEMINAR

CROSS-GENRE SEMINAR

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TRANSLATION SEMINAR

TRANSLATION SEMINAR

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NONFICTION LECTURE

POETRY LECTURE

Research Arts for MFA Writing Program - Students Must Have Completed 60 Points to Register

Interenship for MFA Writing Research Arts Students