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This workshop-based creative writing course starts with the premise that every time we put a word down on a page or break a line at a particular point, we are making a choice of genuine consequence. The process of writing a poem is ultimately a sequence of these seemingly small choices and the particular arrangement of words and lines in our poems is more responsible for how

This workshop-based poetry course starts with the premise that every time we put a word down on a page or break a line at a particular point, we are making a choice of genuine consequence. The process of writing a poem is ultimately a sequence of these seemingly small choices and the particular arrangement of words and lines in our poems is more responsible for how the poems

This workshop-based poetry course starts with the premise that every time we put a word down on a page or break a line at a particular point, we are making a choice of genuine consequence. The process of writing a poem is ultimately a sequence of these seemingly small choices and the particular arrangement of words and lines in our poems is more responsible for how the poems

This workshop-based creative writing course starts with the premise that every time we put a word down on a page or break a line at a particular point, we are making a choice of genuine consequence. The process of writing a poem is ultimately a sequence of these seemingly small choices and the particular arrangement of words and lines in our poems is more responsible for how

We'll read some 40 stories in this class-mostly contemporary, although we will include a few glorious others-and look for what makes them, well, stories. That's part one. Part two is writing: first bits and pieces, scenes and dialogue and narrative explorations, and then a couple of polished stories to discuss in workshops and revise. Intensive engagement in reading, writing,

This is a course for fiction writers on how to write a short story, a genre we’ll define using the formula first proposed by Edgar Allan Poe: a work of fiction that can be read in one sitting. Students can expect to read about forty stories over the semester from a wide range of periods and traditions; write frequent exercises to begin the term; and produce two complete stories

This is a course for fiction writers on how to write a short story, a genre we'll define using the formula first proposed by Edgar Allan Poe: a work of fiction that can be read in one sitting. Students can expect to read about forty stories over the semester from a wide range of periods and traditions; write frequent exercises to begin the term; and produce two complete stories

The traditional short story often follows a traditional form. A story begins when some clear incident incites a causal chain of events. Over the course of these events, action and tension breathe life into the story until it reaches a climactic scene. When the balloon can get no fuller, it pops, deflates, or sails away (this is known as the denouement). In this class, we will

Reading both contemporary short fiction and work from the canon, we will discuss voice, structure, plot, and character to explore the mechanics of breaking a reader's heart. How do you write a compelling and heartbreaking story that isn't simply a manipulative one-note dirge? How do you jump start that alchemical process that transforms tiny black and white symbols on the page

***Time Change*** Rilke and Walter Benjamin stalked Paris; Virginia Woolf and Charles Dickens walked London's streets at night; H.P. Lovecraft scoured the sewers underneath Providence; a whole universe of writers (Edith Wharton, Herman Melville, Joseph Mitchell) saw New York through unromantic eyes. In this course we'll read fiction and non-fiction about the city from across

In the beginning of the 20th century, when metropolitan life was being chronicled by some of the era’s greatest writers, artists, and thinkers for the depths of its miseries and high of its nervous splendors, only 10% of the world’s population lived in urban centers. Today, more than 75% of the world’s citizens live in cities. The city of our new century bears little

Rilke and Walter Benjamin stalked Paris; Virginia Woolf and Charles Dickens walked London’s streets at night; H.P. Lovecraft scoured the sewers underneath Providence; a whole universe of writers (Edith Wharton, Herman Melville, Joseph Mitchell) saw New York through unromantic eyes. In this course we’ll read fiction and non-fiction about the city from across the urban canon,

Some writers are born gradually over a body of early work that allows them to develop a signature style and a series of concerns that will flower over time, while other writers are seemingly born complete--like Athena emerging whole from Zeus's head--with their first novels. We will read a wide selection of remarkable first novels over the term (examples include The

***Time Change*** The lyric essay is a term given to work that is both poetic and discursive and that defies clear categorization. In these hybrid forms, the essayist may begin breaking into lines of verse, or poet may engage in a lengthier argument too rangy for the confines of a syllable count. In this course we will read Whitman's Specimen Days, Dickinson's letters, short

The lyric essay is a term given to work that is both poetic and discursive and that defies clear categorization. In these hybrid forms, the essayist may begin breaking into lines of verse, or poet may engage in a lengthier argument too rangy for the confines of a syllable count. In this course we will read Whitman’s Specimen Days, Dickinson’s letters, short essays by Virginia

John Burroughs wrote that “Until science is mixed with emotion and appeals to the heart and imagination, it is like dead organic matter; and when it is so mixed and so transformed, it is literature.”  Using this directive, students would be asked to document their own observations of the natural world; field notes and almanac will serve as raw material from which to

Students will read various poetry collections that deal with different forms of trauma: homophobia, lynching, war, sexual abuse, colonization, and the overall idea of how to define “violence.” There will be time to discuss prosodic interests of our poets as well as discuss how content and form work together to create a seamless work. We will then turn to our own work and

Good writing is often described as vivid, visceral, sensual, and therefore rooted in the body. But what makes writing feel embodied? What makes personal bodily experiences feel fleshed out on the page? And how can we use our body as a writing resource? This workshop-based creative writing class will examine the narrative techniques and stylistic choices of a variety of body

In her poem “Questions of Travel,” Elizabeth Bishop writes, Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? / Where should we be today? / Is it right to be watching strangers at play / In this strangest of theaters? This is the lament of every traveler, and the restlessness of these lines speaks directly to the literary practice we call ‘travel writing.’ We

In her poem “Questions of Travel,” Elizabeth Bishop writes, Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? / Where should we be today? / Is it right to be watching strangers at play / In this strangest of theaters? This is the lament of every traveler, and the restlessness of these lines speaks directly to the literary practice we call ‘travel writing.’ We will examine the

The archive--and using archival materials as the generative basis for creative output--is having a moment. The visionary scholar-writer Saidiya Hartman has popularized once unknown terms like "critical fabulation" and "documentary poetics" through genre bending works like "Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments"; erasure projects like poet Nicole Sealey's "The Ferguson Report: an

What is Autofiction? The term “autofiction” originated in France in the late 1970s to describe a certain kind of knowing, renegade, and mock-heroic school of autobiographical fiction that fell somewhere between the nihilistic experimentalism of

The term “autofiction” originated in France in the late 1970s to describe a certain kind of knowing, renegade, and mock-heroic school of autobiographical fiction that fell somewhere between William Burroughs and Marcel Proust. It was “writing before or after literature,” meaning its pretensions were so pure as to be somehow super-literary—the ordinary terms (autobiographical