Writing

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. The beginning workshop in fiction is designed for students with little or no experience writing literary texts in fiction. Students are introduced to a range of technical and imaginative concerns through exercises and discussions, and they eventually produce their own writing for the critical analysis of the class. The focus of the course is on the rudiments of voice, character, setting, point of view, plot, and lyrical use of language. Students will begin to develop the critical skills that will allow them to read like writers and understand, on a technical level, how accomplished creative writing is produced. Outside readings of a wide range of fiction supplement and inform the exercises and longer written projects.

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. The beginning workshop in fiction is designed for students with little or no experience writing literary texts in fiction. Students are introduced to a range of technical and imaginative concerns through exercises and discussions, and they eventually produce their own writing for the critical analysis of the class. The focus of the course is on the rudiments of voice, character, setting, point of view, plot, and lyrical use of language. Students will begin to develop the critical skills that will allow them to read like writers and understand, on a technical level, how accomplished creative writing is produced. Outside readings of a wide range of fiction supplement and inform the exercises and longer written projects.

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. The beginning workshop in fiction is designed for students with little or no experience writing literary texts in fiction. Students are introduced to a range of technical and imaginative concerns through exercises and discussions, and they eventually produce their own writing for the critical analysis of the class. The focus of the course is on the rudiments of voice, character, setting, point of view, plot, and lyrical use of language. Students will begin to develop the critical skills that will allow them to read like writers and understand, on a technical level, how accomplished creative writing is produced. Outside readings of a wide range of fiction supplement and inform the exercises and longer written projects.

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. The beginning workshop in fiction is designed for students with little or no experience writing literary texts in fiction. Students are introduced to a range of technical and imaginative concerns through exercises and discussions, and they eventually produce their own writing for the critical analysis of the class. The focus of the course is on the rudiments of voice, character, setting, point of view, plot, and lyrical use of language. Students will begin to develop the critical skills that will allow them to read like writers and understand, on a technical level, how accomplished creative writing is produced. Outside readings of a wide range of fiction supplement and inform the exercises and longer written projects.

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. The beginning workshop in fiction is designed for students with little or no experience writing literary texts in fiction. Students are introduced to a range of technical and imaginative concerns through exercises and discussions, and they eventually produce their own writing for the critical analysis of the class. The focus of the course is on the rudiments of voice, character, setting, point of view, plot, and lyrical use of language. Students will begin to develop the critical skills that will allow them to read like writers and understand, on a technical level, how accomplished creative writing is produced. Outside readings of a wide range of fiction supplement and inform the exercises and longer written projects.

The modern short story has gone through many transformations, and the innovations of its practitioners have often pointed the way for prose fiction as a whole. The short story has been seized upon and refreshed by diverse cultures and aesthetic affiliations, so that perhaps the only stable definition of the form remains the famous one advanced by Poe, one of its early masters, as a work of fiction that can be read in one sitting. Still, common elements of the form have emerged over the last century and this course will study them, including Point of View, Plot, Character, Setting and Theme. John Hawkes once famously called these last four elements the "enemies of the novel," and many short story writers have seen them as hindrances as well. Hawkes later recanted, though some writers would still agree with his earlier assessment, and this course will examine the successful strategies of great writers across the spectrum of short story practice, from traditional approaches to more radical solutions, keeping in mind how one period's revolution -Hemingway, for example - becomes a later era's mainstream or "commonsense" storytelling mode. By reading the work of major writers from a writer's perspective, we will examine the myriad techniques employed for what is finally a common goal: to make readers feel. Short writing exercises will help us explore the exhilarating subtleties of these elements and how the effects created by their manipulation or even outright absence power our most compelling fictions.

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. The seminar provides exposure to the varieties of nonfiction with readings in its principal genres: reportage, criticism and commentary, biography and history, and memoir and the personal essay. A highly plastic medium, nonfiction allows authors to portray real events and experiences through narrative, analysis, polemic or any combination thereof. Free to invent everything but the facts, great practitioners of nonfiction are faithful to reality while writing with a voice and a vision distinctively their own. To show how nonfiction is conceived and constructed, class discussions will emphasize the relationship of content to form and style, techniques for creating plot and character under the factual constraints imposed by nonfiction, the defining characteristics of each authors voice, the authors subjectivity and presence, the role of imagination and emotion, the uses of humor, and the importance of speculation and attitude. Written assignments will be opportunities to experiment in several nonfiction genres and styles.

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. One advantage of writing poetry within a rich and crowded literary tradition is that there are many poetic tools available out there, stranded where their last practitioners dropped them, some of them perhaps clichéd and overused, yet others all but forgotten or ignored. In this class, students will isolate, describe, analyze, and put to use these many tools, while attempting to refurbish and contemporize them for the new century. Students can expect to imitate and/or subvert various poetic styles, voices, and forms, to invent their own poetic forms and rules, to think in terms of not only specific poetic forms and metrics, but of overall poetic architecture (lineation and diction, repetition and surprise, irony and sincerity, rhyme and soundscape), and finally, to leave those traditions behind and learn to strike out in their own direction, to write -- as poet Frank OHara said -- on their own nerve.

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. 

“For those, in dark, who find their own way by the light of others’ eyes.” —Lucie Brock-Broido

The avenues of poetic tradition open to today’s poets are more numerous, more invigorating, and perhaps even more baffling than ever before. The routes we chose for our writing lead to destinations of our own making, and we take them at our own risk—necessarily so, as the pursuit of poetry asks each of us to light a pilgrim’s candle and follow it into the moors and lowlands, through wastes and prairies, crossing waters as we go. Go after the marshlights, the will-o-wisps who call to you in a voice you’ve longed for your whole life. These routes have been forged by those who came before you, but for that reason, none of them can hope to keep you on it entirely. You must take your steps away, brick by brick, heading confidently into the hinterland of your own distinct achievement.

For the purpose of this class, we will walk these roads together, examining the works of classic and contemporary exemplars of the craft. By companioning poets from a large spread of time, we will be able to more diversely immerse ourselves in what a poetic “tradition” truly means. We will read works by Edmund Spencer, Dante, and Goethe, the Romantics—especially Keats—Dickinson, who is mother to us all, Modernists, and the great sweep of contemporary poetry that is too vast to individuate.

While it is the imperative of this class to equip you with the knowledge necessary to advance in the field of poetry, this task shall be done in a Columbian manner. Consider this class an initiation, of sorts, into the vocabulary which distinguishes the writers who work under our flag, each of us bound by this language that must be passed on, and therefore changed, to you who inherit it. As I have learned the words, I have changed them, and I give them now to you so that you may pave your own way into your own ways, inspired with the first breath that brought you here, which may excite and—hopefully—frighten you. You must be troubled. This is essential

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.

Required discussion section for WRIT UN2400 Around the Fire: Introduction to Audio Storytelling

Required discussion section for WRIT UN2400 Around the Fire: Introduction to Audio Storytelling

The human desire to connect to the past is a forever phenomenon. Today, technological advancements have accelerated an unprecedented proliferation of the “past” through easily circulated and reproduced digital content—namely, through photographic images. These photographic testimonies of the past are often fragmented, distorted, and evoke a feeling of nostalgia—a Greek compound that combines nóstos or "homecoming" with álgos, meaning "pain" or "ache." The revival of nostalgia coincides with times of dramatic social and economic uncertainties, disruptions, and cultural shifts. Nostalgia for an idealized past is sometimes employed as a marketing ploy (late painter Bob Ross for Adobe) or political strategy (e.g.," Make America Great Again," "Europe for Europeans," etc.). Aside from its practical and sinister uses, nostalgia can also have positive implications. It can improve self-esteem, benefit learning and memory consolidation, and increase social cohesion and connectedness.

Good or bad, nostalgia is unavoidable and consequential. Its impact can be traced across the spheres of culture, politics, and economy. With that in mind, this course will approach photographs as historical documents that call for urgent and critical re-reading and re-contextualizing through the practice of writing. The course readings, discussions, and writing assignments will address questions such as: What role does photography play in shaping histories and identities? How are historical narratives skewed through photography? How is memory of an event challenged by the photography of the same?

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."

—Carl Sagan

"Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming."

—David Bowie

"I grew up reading science fiction."

—Jeff Bezos

Science fiction is the literature of the human species encountering change. It is the literature of the Other, of philosophy and ideas, of innovation and experimentation. This seminar will examine how poets and writers from around the world have imagined alternate realities and futures, linguistic inventions, and new poetic expressions inspired by science. We will discuss what these imaginings might tell us about the cultural and political presents in which they were conceived, as well as what the extreme conditions offered by science fiction might teach us about writing into the unknown. Topics will include astroecology and apocalyptic ecopoetics, extraterrestrial aphrodites, monstrous bodyscapes, space exploration and colonization, future creoles and the evolution of language, bio-poetics and crystalline formations, immortal texts, and global futurisms—from the European Futurists of the early 20th century to Afrofuturism, as well as recent figurations such as Gulf Futurism and Arabfuturism.

Course reading will include work by Aase Berg, Etel Adnan, Chen Qiufan, Johannes Heldén, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Velimir Khlebnikov, Hao Jingfang, Eve L. Ewing, Sun Ra, Ursula K. Le Guin, Italo Calvino, Anaïs Duplan, Ursula Andkjær Olsen, Dempow Torishima, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Octavia E. Butler, Tracy K. Smith, Cathy Park Hong, and others.

Human beings have always been drawn to water. We rely on it to survive, but we also set sail on it, extract its resources, swim in it, and walk down to its edges to contemplate its beauty. Water has long been a potent source of meaning and imagination for writers, but in the last thirty years water has taken on new associations. As the oceans rise, as rivers dry up, as migrants boats capsize at sea, and as we reappraise histories of empire and colonization, writers are more than ever before turning their attention to water and learning to tell new stories about it.

This class will investigate the relationship between one of the most important elements of the natural world – water – and the stories that human beings choose to tell about it. We will read and think about swimming, migration, rising oceans, extraction, sea creatures, and ghosts. Students will produce both critical and creative work, and while this is a fiction class, we will take our lessons from writers working across many different formats. By considering novels, essays, poetry, and short stories that embody and describe the human relationship to water, students will learn to consider the ways in which we, as writers, can address ourselves to the natural world as it changes around us, and how water in all its forms can be both a source of fear and a source of consolation.

This class aims to look seriously at how we write literature about the environment, landscape, plants, animals, and the weather in an age of worsening climate change. What genres, forms, and structures can we use to creatively respond to and depict the conditions of the anthropocene? How can we use time to capture the simultaneous tedium and terror of the emergency? Can we write about the individual as well as the collective? Is it possible to write about climate change not as something that is coming, but as a phenomenon that’s already a part of our lives? In answering these questions, students will determine how best to address these issues in their own creative work. While this is a fiction class, we will take our lessons from writers working across many different formats. We will read novels and short stories, but also poetry, creative non-fiction, journalism, and theory. Through writing exercises, field journals, critical essays, and their own creative pieces, students will work through, and with, the despair and radical imaginative changes wrought on all our lives by the anthropocene.

Levity’s worth taking seriously. This seminar examines satire in several forms, including polemics from the late Roman Empire, stand-up from the late British Empire, and novels from the healthy and indestructible American Empire. We’ll explore satirical reactions to historic disasters, and how to apply those techniques during the next one. We’ll see satire flourish on bathroom walls and street signs (my specialty, admittedly). We’ll learn why every subculture has their own version of The Onion. Finally, we’ll apply lessons from the above to develop our own writing with creative responses, in-class exercises, and a final project. Anyone can be a satirist. Dealing with reality is the hard part.

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.

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 from the 1960s—the decade that saw an avalanche of new forms, new awareness, new freedoms, and new conflicts, as well as the beginnings of social movements and cultural preoccupations that continue to frame our lives, as writers and as citizens, in the 21st century: civil rights, feminism, environmentalism, LGBTQ rights, pop culture, and the rise of mass media. We will look back more than a half century to examine the development of modern criticism, memoir, reporting, and profile-writing, and the ways they entwine. Along the way, we will ask questions about these classic nonfiction forms: How do reporters, essayists, and critics make sense of the new? How do they create work as rich as the best novels and short stories? Can criticism rise to the level of art? What roles do voice, point-of-view, character, dialogue, and plot—the traditional elements of fiction—play? As we go, we will witness the unfolding of arguably the most transitional decade in American history—with such events as the Kennedy assassination, the Watts Riots, the Human Be In, and the Vietnam War, along with the rise of Pop art, rock ‘n’ roll, and a new era of moviemaking—as it was documented in real time by writers at The New Yorker, New Journalists at Esquire, and critics at Partisan Review and Harper’s, among other publications. Some writers we will consider: James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, Rachel Carson, Dwight Macdonald, Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Pauline Kael, Nik Cohn, Joseph Mitchell, Lillian Ross, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, John Updike, Michael Herr, Martha Gellhorn, John McPhee, and Betty Friedan. We will be joined by guest speakers.

In this seminar we will consider modern nonfiction as “the literature of fact” as we trace the course of the genre’s development from the mid-19th century to the present day. Along the way, we’ll see how magazines emerged, beginning in the 1860s, as the prime venue for American nonfiction, with excursions into—and glimpses of—publications that have shaped our shared cultural history, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, The Partisan Review, Esquire, Harper’s, New York, and Gourmet. Our readings will include reportage, criticism, memoir, and profile-writing and we will ask questions about these various nonfiction forms: Can criticism be the equal of art? How do nonfiction writers establish “authority”? How do they investigate the past and make sense of the new? How do they create work as rich and challenging as the best literary novels and short stories? What roles do voice, point-of-view, character, dialogue, and plot—the traditional elements of fiction—play? Some of the writers we will consider: Louisa May Alcott, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Mitchell, Lillian Ross, James Agee, Edmund Wilson, Martha Gellhorn, John Hersey, Joan Didion, Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, James Baldwin, Janet Malcolm, Robert Caro, Ian Frazier, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Zadie Smith, and David Foster Wallace.

The course will welcome guest speakers.

“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.

Annie Dillard was only in her twenties when she began writing what would become the nature writing classic Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. Over several seasons, she took her notebook to the creek and paid close attention to the muskrats, water bugs, and birds, focusing on the miraculous minutiae of the material world, and compiled what Thoreau might have called “a meteorological journal of the mind.” With a child’s capacity for awe, Dillard captured what she found to be holy and singular about nature, and reveled in the “scandal of particularity” that so bedeviled theologians. “Why, we might as well ask, not a plane tree, instead of a bo?” Dillard wonders. “I never saw a tree that was no tree in particular.” Since its publication, Pilgrim has inspired generations of writers who return to it for its commitment to specificity and its joyous prose. What does the moon look like? Like “a smudge of chalk,” or “softly frayed, like the heel of a sock.” What do you call the shedding of leaves in fall? “A striptease.” What does cold air do? “Bites [one’s] nose like pepper.” (And so on.)

In this cross-genre seminar, we will read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and use the book as a guiding text to hone our own faculties of attention, observational writing skills, and descriptive ability. We will work and rework our descriptions so that no tree is just a tree, and no sunset is just a sunset. The output of this course will not be stories, essays, or poems, but rather, lists of descriptions of oranges, the texture of bark, weather, and a repertoire of new vocabulary words for describing colors and materials. Weekly exercises will prompt us to become nature writers in the city: we will stalk pigeons, inventory trash and weeds, study maps of buried streams, and examine a drop of puddle water through a microscope. We will dissect Dillard’s prose to see how she puts her words together to achieve various effects. We will compile lists of active verbs and make our sentences somersault and sing. Though taking inspiration from Pilgrim and based in the natural world, the exercises in this class are meant to carry over into other kinds of writing; paying close attention is an asset no matter what the subject matter. Field trips will include a walk in Riverside Park, a visit to the Greenpoint Sewage Plant, and an optional day-trip to the Beinecke Library to see the Annie Dillard papers.

Required discussion section for WRIT UN3400 Paying Attention With Annie Dillard

Mystery once referred primarily to religious ideas: divine revelations, unknown rites, or the secret counsel of God. In the 20th century, the word began to be used in reference to more prosaic things, like whodunits. But what is coming to be known in a story? Why and what is a reader tempted to try to know, and what, today, can she possibly think is going to be revealed? When do the ‘tricks’ of withholding information annoy, and when do they compel? What are clues? What are solutions? In what ways can and do stories not straightforwardly written as mysteries use the tropes of mystery? And to what mechanisms of meaning-making do these tropes point?

In this course we will read with the intention of noticing how writers have borrowed, avoided, warped, translated, or disguised the structures of mystery. In this way, we will think about what techniques of mystery we might integrate into our own work. There will also be four five to seven page creative writing assignments, based around: the Clue, the Crime, the Search and the Detective.

In addition to the creative writing assignments, each student will be responsible for one presentation on a reading. The guidelines for presentations are appended after the sample syllabus below.

Required discussion section for WRIT UN3402 Mysteries

The science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, in her sly, radical manifesto of sorts “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” proposes an idea of the “bottle as hero”: instead of conflict serving as our central organizing theory for narrative, she suggests that “the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag.” In other words: a container. These containers needn’t only apply to novels, I contend, but many types of literary narratives, whether they are classified as fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or some hybrid of forms.

With this in mind, the generative cross-genre craft seminar Bottle as Hero aims to uncover beautiful and practical approaches to gathering small narratives into a larger, cohesive whole. Readings will include Svetlana Alexievich’s devastating novels in voices, Percival Everett’s incendiary novel-within-a-novel Erasure, Ted Chiang’s mesmerizing historical fantasy, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s braided essays of restoration, Nâzım Hikmet’s epic in verse Human Landscapes from My Country, Renee Gladman’s cross-disciplinary approaches to writing and drawing, Yevgenia Belorusets’s dispatches from Ukraine, Edward Gauvin’s identity-memoir-in-contributors’ bios, Saidiya Hartman’s speculative histories, Gary Indiana’s gleefully acerbic roman à clef Do Everything in the Dark, Alejandro Zambra’s standardized test-inspired literature, W. G. Sebald’s saturnine essay-fiction, and Lisa Hsiao Chen’s meld of biography and autobiography, as well as fiction and nonfiction by Clarice Lispector, Vauhini Vara, Eileen Myles, Olga Tokarczuk, and Julie Hecht, among other texts. 

In addition, we will also read essays on craft and storytelling by Le Guin, Gladman, Zambra, Lydia Davis, Walter Benjamin, Garielle Lutz, Ben Mauk, and more. What we learn in this course we will apply to our own work, which will consist of regular creative writing responses drawn from the readings and a creative final project. Students will also learn to keep a daily journal of writing.

Required discussion section for WRIT UN3404 Stories Within Stories

The science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, in her sly, radical manifesto of sorts “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” proposes an idea of the “bottle as hero”: instead of conflict serving as our central organizing theory for narrative, she suggests that “the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag.” In other words: a container. These containers needn’t only apply to novels, I contend, but many types of literary narratives, whether they are classified as fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or some hybrid of forms.

With this in mind, the generative cross-genre craft seminar Stories within Stories aims to uncover beautiful and practical approaches to gathering small narratives into a larger, cohesive whole. Readings will include Svetlana Alexievich’s devastating novels in voices, Percival Everett’s incendiary novel-within-a-novel Erasure, Ted Chiang’s mesmerizing historical fantasy, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s braided essays of restoration, Nâzım Hikmet’s epic in verse Human Landscapes from My Country, Renee Gladman’s cross-disciplinary approaches to writing and drawing, Yevgenia Belorusets’s dispatches from Ukraine, Edward Gauvin’s identity-memoir-in-contributors’ bios, Saidiya Hartman’s speculative histories, Gary Indiana’s gleefully acerbic roman à clef Do Everything in the Dark, Alejandro Zambra’s standardized test-inspired literature, W. G. Sebald’s saturnine essay-fiction, and Lisa Hsiao Chen’s meld of biography and autobiography, as well as fiction and nonfiction by Clarice Lispector, Vauhini Vara, Eileen Myles, Olga Tokarczuk, and Julie Hecht, among other texts. 

In addition, we will also read essays on craft and storytelling by Le Guin, Gladman, Zambra, Lydia Davis, Walter Benjamin, Garielle Lutz, Ben Mauk, and more. What we learn in this course we will apply to our own work, which will consist of regular creative writing responses drawn from the readings and a creative final project. Students will also learn to keep a daily journal of writing.

The act of writing is often mythologized, romanticized, or dismissed as peripheral to the text itself.  This course will address the process as a primary lens for looking at art, focusing on literature that explicitly investigates the experience of its creation.  Readings will include writings by visual artists who produce documents of performances, surrealists who use “automatic” methods to reveal the unconscious, poets who seek to capture states of enlightenment or intoxication, and novelists who employ extreme conditions to achieve unexpected results.  For the class, students will experiment with their environment, lifestyle, and methods to increase their awareness of how everything they do can affect what appears on the page.

CROSS-GENRE SEMINAR

CROSS-GENRE SEMINAR

CROSS-GENRE SEMINAR

CROSS-GENRE SEMINAR

CROSS-GENRE SEMINAR

CROSS-GENRE SEMINAR

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

TRANSLATION SEMINAR

TRANSLATION SEMINAR

.

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