Master of Fine Arts in Writing: Courses

An alternative to the traditional workshop. Though the primary reading will be novels (just begun, nearly finished, somewhere in between) being written by members of the class, the course will focus more on process- that of writing a novel, but also that of reading one as it's being written. In some ways the class is meant to interfere with the usual modes of (institutional) critique, not to dismiss them outright (or replace one mode of critique with another), but rather to foreground an awareness of them. How, for example, does writing a novel in an academic institution differ from writing one outside it? What are some of the implicit assumptions about writing- and reading-a novel in this context? Given that, in this setting, writing a novel is at least a partially public process, how can a writer make the best use of that process, and how can the process be broken down in such a way as to allow any number of difference in sensibility, intention, ideology, etc.

Misheard Respoken: The In Betweens This generative workshop will highlight the gaps and spaces that exist within the process of artistic and literary production. The workshop will trace and invent links between language, image, and materiality. Investigating both the critical and poetic approaches to literal and material translations, each student will develop their own expressive methodologies in a series of collaborative and independent experimental projects. The class discussion will be informed by visiting artists and writers sharing their approaches to the possibilities of translation.

Graduate Poetry Workshop: Word Work & Hybridity In this poetry workshop we will focus on poetry's conventions: word choice, line break, concision, use of white space, syntax, and the sonic elements of language. We will simultaneously consider hybrid texts: works that move between poetry and prose, work that experiments with fonts, handwriting, and other visuals such as photographs and stitching. Our focus will be on the page as primary frame, though we may also consider text for the wall, the screen, or handmade book. Writers of any genre are welcome in this workshop, as well as other graduate students who want to get the most out of text in their work. We will discuss each others poems and texts, and we will do in-class exercises to generate new work and revise. Readings of contemporary poets will include Kamau Brathwaite, Susan Howe, M. NourbeSe Philip, Douglas Kearney, Cecilia Vicu?a, Leslie Scalapino, Bhanu Kapil, Paolo Javier, Jen Hofer, and Jen Bervin. We will also consider the textual gestures of artists such as Jenny Holzer, Glen Ligon, Louise Bourgeois, and Brendan Fernandes.

By seriously examining and editing stories written by others (i.e. measuring and helping advance the success of stories according to their authors? intentions), writers not only develop a greater capacity to strengthen their own work, but a clearer understanding of their own literary values. In this workshop students write a number of stories for critique, and closely read and critique those of their classmates. Focusing primarily on style and structure, we each make it our goal to help others improve their writing through line-editing and in-class discussion, in accordance with the authors? perceived intentions. Additionally, we read stories by a variety of published authors, and reverse-engineer them to determine the ways in which they function. In-class generative exercises may occasionally be assigned.

This class will explore one particular Situationist concept: the derive, 'a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences. 'Classes will vary between actual derives (conducted outdoors) and in-classroom meetings wherein we discuss the derive and the particular results of our derives. The core of the reading will be basic Situationist literature: Society of the Spectacle, and Revolution of Everyday Life. Those who enroll should be prepared for a good deal of walking.

?Given its genre mingling, the lyric essay often accretes by fragments, taking shape mosaically??its import visible only when one stands back and sees it whole.? ?Editors, Seneca Review The lyric essay has been defined by its similarity to poetry, in its attention to the musicality of language, associative leaps, intuitive connections, and compression. Many writers have referred to the lyric essay as a mosaic, montage, or collage. It?s a genre-bending form, straddling and blurring literary boundaries. For example, Brenda Miller states: ?the lyric essay has a tendency toward fragmentation that invites the reader into those gaps, that emphasizes what is unknown rather than the already articulated known. By infusing prose with tools normally relegated to the poetic sensibility, the lyric essayist creates anew, each time, a form that is interactive, alive, full of new spaces in which meaning can germinate.? In this course, we will further examine what has been deemed the lyric essay by creating and sharing our own. Readings will come from Anne Carson, Albert Goldbarth, Lia Purpura, Lawrence Sutrin, Brenda Miller, Deborah Tall, and others.

This course examines writing formulated and structured according to systems of thought and expression, derived from various disciplines and technologies including dentistry, alphabets, calendars, medicine, and the poetics of literary history. Students will produce and present their own writing through in-class exercises and creative responses to one another's work and to readings. Class readings will include the work of Richard Powers, Gertrude Stein, Jennifer Moxley, Julie Carr, and Paul Hoover.

All strong fiction is made of strong sentences, strong strings of words that make us want to linger even as they push us toward the next strong string. This class will focus on how to make stronger sentences. We will read strong sentences by all kinds of authors and discover exactly what makes them strong. We'll do in-class exercises to master our intentions. We will read student sentences and take them apart. We will force student sentences to box and do yoga and sleep and sing opera. We will smash them up and twist them to find their strengths. If they have no strengths, we will put them to death, and feed their cold bones to other, better sentences in need of more calcium. We will find all the fun and have it.

'Then away out in the woods I heard that kind of a sound that a ghost makes when it wants to tell about something that's on its mind and can't make itself understood, and so can't rest easy in its grave, and has to go about that way every night grieving.' Starting from the premise that Mark Twain?s novel is one of the essential influences on the modern story, we will read and discuss J.D Salinger, CATCHER IN THE RYE, Joyce Carol Oates, FOXFIRE: THE CONFESSIONS OF A GIRL GANG, Anthony Burgess, THE CLOCKWORK ORANGE, Russell Banks, RULE OF THE BONE, Marilyn Robinson, HOUSEKEEPING, Suzan-Lori Parks, TOPDOG /UNDERDOG, and Rian Johnson's 2005 neo-noir film BRICK.

We are accustomed to thinking of fiction as emanating, first, as ?voice,? i.e. as a formalization of oral language, almost instinctive, and easily available. In truth, for the writer to rely primarily on first impulse is also to discover how exceptionally limited ?instinct? is to the construction of a longer work; the novel. While narrative voice is critical, the novel must often rely on multiple techniques of structure, point of view and pacing, to sustain the reader?s (and writer?s) curiosity, challenging his/her interest. In fact, the novel?s architecture, like a rite of courtship, coyly unfolds and withholds plot, illuminates then complicates character, and radically subverts time and space. For anyone considering writing a novel, this course explores the diverse techniques of narrative structure employed by contemporary English language novelists (i.e: American, Australian, British & Canadian). Writers we?ll read are: Uzodinma Iweala (Beasts of No Nation), James Welch (Winter in the Blood), Kazuo Ishiguro (Remains of the Day), Julian Barnes (Flaubert?s Parrot), Claudia Rankine (Don?t let me Be Lonely), Elizabeth Strout (Olive Kitteridge) & Meg Cabot (Boy Meets Girl). Accompanying mimetic writing exercises will focus on options for structuring short or long fictions. These will inform your writing the opening of your novel, presented in two alternating structures.

We will be reading the whole of the Brothers Grimm and thereafter varying it in variations of our own invention. That is ? the members of the class, independently, will take tales and turn them. This work may be done in fiction or in verse, as one chooses -- even in art of one sort or another. The method of criticism will be the same as used in my LYING CLASS: Asking. This method will be taught along with the work of varying.

Surrealism is not only one of the most important art movements of the 20th century, but it continues to provide a wealth of methods for creative practice, and a rich point from which to view the role of art and its relationship to social and political life. In this seminar, we will focus on two sites dear to the Surrealists: the wunderkammer, or wonder cabinet, and the flea market. Alternating with surrealist exercises (some created as a group), we will read or view key surrealists and their decedents in many genres: Andre Breton, Rikki Ducornet, Angela Carter, Cornell's boxes, and the animations of the Brothers Quay, as well as Dadaist Kurt Schwitter's Mertzbau and accounts of early Surrealist gallery shows.

In this course we explore alternative models of research and publishing as a creative project. We review the seminal and ongoing projects of small publishers, with an emphasis on how the activity ofpublishing informs and influences one's practice. Working independently or collectively, students theorize, curate, organize, produce and distribute a publication, utilizing their own work and that of others as content. Though printed forms are emphasized, students from all disciplines are welcome to contribute their interests in electronic and other forms of production.

This interdisciplinary workshop initially engages elements of narrative in isolation to generate single lines of text, looking for how narrative asserts itself through implication, considering how much untold can be communicated by discrete concentrated or compressed units of the told. Shortly we?ll take our own paths, making text-based work or combining aspects of narrative with another medium, with many opportunities to share works in progress through manuscript exchange, screenings, performances, and studio visits.

The detail, the distinct voice and character of a play, can be found in its dialogue. This playwriting course is generative, using exercises developed out of gossip, overheard conversation, dream ournals, family story, song and photograph to make new work. The student is encouraged to work from a variety of sources while writing in class, rewriting quickly, and performing scenes newly minted that will surprise us all. We will make a number of new scenes and one act plays in the course of a semester and will develop at least one of them from each student for a final performance. The story, plot and dialogue work can have a direct application to all prose forms. Students of other disciplines are encouraged to take this class. PARTIAL READING LIST: Samuel Beckett, Caryl Churchill, David Mamet, Dylan Thomas, Harold Pinter, Anton Chekhov, Dorothy Parker; local playwrights Mickle Maher and Jenny Magnus; the fiction of Lorrie Moore, Donald Barthelme, Franz Kafka, Lars Gustafson; the performance artist Karen Finley; and the radio work of Ira Glass and friends.

Found object, objet trouve, ready-made: removed from one context and placed within another--aesthetic, critical, creative, or explicitly anti-expressive. In this class we recycle, rearrange, reiterate, recombine, replay; seek and stumble upon; cut, orchestrate, shape; read and re-read. We workshop your experiments and investigations of found language with the eyes of scientists, testing process and the validity of your hypothesis. We consider history and pop, books, signage, lists, collage, spectacle. Readings may include projects by writers, artists, and composers such as Blaise Cendrars, Kathy Acker, Bern Porter, and Hart Seely, with particular attention to their sources.

This is a class for students to work on a single, extended writing (or writing-related) project of any sort, involving any media- this can include traditional literary forms (linked short prose works, poem sequences)- as well as cross-disciplinary forms (e.g. graphic novel, performance, music or sound piece) and non- traditional formats and venues- (public space writing project, zines, comics). Your project can be made up of many disparate parts, but those parts should be part of a single whole. Your project does not have to focus primarily on writing, but writing should be an integral part of the project's conception. This is not a traditional workshop that focuses on presentation and group critique of work, but rather a forum for articulating and discussing ideas and process as you work through a project-so while the class will include presentation and discussion of your work, we will approach it from a process- oriented perspective that focuses on open-ended questioning and exploring rather than intervention and critique. You can be at any stage in your project (beginning, middle, end), but if you haven't begun it, you should have articulated a clear enough sense of it both to begin work by the first class and remain committed to it through the last. Graduate students from all disciplines, working in all media, are welcome.

This course explores the notion that a work, regardless of genre, has its own needs. The writer's role, then, is to get out of the way and let it emerge. As Patricia Hampl notes, it's a matter of paying attention to 'what it wants, not what I want. The difference has to do with the relation ? any writer--?has to unconscious or half-known intentions and impulses in composition.' With this in mind, writers will have an opportunity to investigate not only the genesis of their work but also the choices made along the way to completion. In addition to reading and responding to each other's work, students will give individual presentations on their artistic process in relation to a piece generated in this class. Although the focus will be primarily on student makings, we will examine some readings of flash fiction and nonfiction, prose poems, short stories, essays--and view selected art work.

In this course, you will learn how to translate personal experience and research into literary writing. We?ll look at published pieces and workshop your own nonfiction stories (memoir, travel writing, personal essay, whatever you're drawn to). On an ethical level, we will delve into the considerations that come into play when writing from 'real' life. On a formal level, we will probe the artistic necessity of selecting an architecture for the writing that advances the most compelling truth-telling. Reading list will range from Benjamin Franklin to Eula Biss, Mark Twain to Susan Orleans.

Or finding your voice, which is something more complex than style. In music, the ability to hear yourself--know when you're singing in tune, let's say--entails the ability and stamina to critique yourself. In this workshop/seminar, you will be asked to critique your own work as well as your classmates' and to lead a discussion of a writer you choose from the many whose work has inspired and influenced you. Inspiration is one of those touchy-feely words we aren?t supposed to touch, so instead let?s say we will endeavor to bring forth your mojo. What poems/art cast a spell on you, haunt you, what art do you aspire to work/live up to? Attention paid to aesthetics and poetic sensibility.

Break away from interior life and venture out into the broader world. The frequent and fascinating collisions of humans and nature serve as a spur to generating new work in this class. As a group, we?ll take three field trips to urban natural areas, and individually, students will be planning and executing their own excursions. Creating a field notebook with writings, drawing and other media is required; students will use the notebooks as the basis for producing a final project. Readings include stories and selections from Rick Bass, Joy Williams, Michael Pollan, Charles Baxter, and Carol Kaesuk-Yoon.

This workshop is for students either beginning a novel, or continuing work on one. The goals will be to help participants make significant progress with their own work, and to develop skills in critiquing the work of others in a way that will help them move forward. We will also address issues specific to the novel, or as they apply to the longer form - matters such as pacing, choice of narrator and narrative stance, setting and holding tone, writing what you can then building on what you have. Students should arrive at the workshop with at least a promising idea and a readiness to make tracks.

First Year MFAW priority. What happens to a text when it?s transformed? Does it matter? What must be considered, both in revising already existing texts and in encountering them? When is a transformation primarily a translation? Beginning with the written text, we'll look at ways different artists have seen and 'revised' them. Sometimes such revisions are done as 'homage' (e.g. some film adaptations of novels); sometimes they're done as an effort to 'reclaim' a particular story (e.g. slave/captivity narratives); sometimes to subvert or to show another perspective (e.g. feminist retellings of fairy tales; Angela Carter's retellings of a number of stories, including Lizzie Borden); and sometimes with no apparent agenda other than a desire to 'tell the story' (e.g. any number of versions of Salome: the biblical story, Wilde's play, Beardsley's drawings, etc.). We'll consider questions of aesthetics, cultural/political agenda, artistic 'intentionality,' etc. The class will include exercises in such revision, and each student will choose a text of any sort to 'revise' in any medium.

We will read a number of short story collections and explore, amongst other things, the ways that sequencing, setting, voice, and theme affect the dynamic of each collection as a whole. Students will give creative presentations and turn in fiction. Potential texts: NATASHA by Bezmozgis, DROWN by Junot Diaz, AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL STORIES by Babel, PETERSBURG TALES by Gogol, THE LITTLE DISTURBANCES OF MAN by Paley, CIVILWARLAND IN BAD DECLINE by Saunders, TWENTY GRAND by Rebecca Curtis, THE COAST OF CHICAGO by Dybek, BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN by DF Wallace, BAD BEHAVIOR by Gaitskill, THE ANGEL ESMERALDA by Don DeLillo, SAMUEL JOHNSON IS INDIGNANT by Lydia Davis, THE KNIFE THROWER by Millhauser, ALTMANN'S TONGUE by Brian Evenson, THE VOICE IMITATOR by Bernhard, WILLFUL CREATURES by Aimee Bender.

We will be reading aloud powerful poems, memorizing poems, considering the biographies, lives and deaths of poets, and finding what it means for poetry to involve the body and the tongue. Readings may range through all of human history.

In this course, students will propose and then begin to execute the composition of a long poem. Proposals will focus not only on quality of inspiration in subject and idea, but also on formal concerns (in what manner to write a long poem), and issues of feasibility. Our reading material will be several long poems written in English, each demonstrating formal and subjective concerns, including: Wordsworth's two-part 'Prelude' (1799) (self and historical events as subject; blank verse); Whitman's 'Song of Myself' (1855) (self as subject; free verse; serial form); Hopkins' 'The Wreck of the Deutschland' (1875) (catastrophe as subject; rhymed verse; serial form); Mina Loy's 'Songs to Joannes' (1917) (love/passion as subject; free verse; serial form); Robinson Jeffers' 'The Roan Stallion' (1925) (violence/natural world as subject; blank-free verse; narrative form); H.D.'s, 'Trilogy' (1944) (war/catastrophe/esotericism as subject; free verse; serial form); Aime Cesaire's 'Notebook of a Return to a Native Land' (1947) (post-colonialism/ surrealism as subject; free verse/prose-poem; notebook form); Basil Bunting's 'Briggflatts' (1965) (self/sex as subject; free/rhymed verse; seasonal form); Ronald Johnson's Radios (1977) (Milton/cosmos as subject; poem-by-excision as form); and Anne Carson's 'Glass Essay' (1995) (literature/break-up as subject; free verse; narrative form). The goal of the course is to have students on their way to completing their own long poems by the end of sixteen weeks.

In our intensely visual culture, one of the last great advantages written narratives hold over television and film is their ability to represent their characters' inner lives. This course will focus on the representation of consciousness, with an emphasis on texts that transform this project into an organizational principle of their narratives. In other words, consciousness isn't just the 'what' of these texts, but the 'how' of them as well. We will examine a wide-range of works written by both contemporary and not-so-contemporary writers. Though fiction will be our central concern, we will also analyze memoirs devoted to mental illness along with works of non-fiction that address the inner life of their real-world subjects. This course will balance readings with writing exercises and will be run primarily through class discussions.

Many of the so-called authoritative lists of the great innovative prose writers are, more often than not, made up mostly of men, but in fact women have been at the forefront of literary innovation for quite some time. Women are responsible for much of the most provocative, energetic, stirring, hilarious, and intelligent experimental fiction of the 20th and 21st centuries. We will read a number of texts by authors which may include Gertrude Stein, Nathalie Sarraute, Yoko Ono, Lydia Davis, Julie Doucet, Renee Gladman, and more, and consider whether we see a pattern in how they address questions about tradition, identity, memory, time, sex, politics, narrative, and much more. Students will do one presentation each, and, inspired by the reading, we will do numerous prose exercises, which will turn into full pieces for workshop.

The purpose of this class is to reexamine basic assumptions about what we do when we write poetry. What is language? What is literature? What separates poetry from prose, and distinguishes its use of language? In determining the meaning of a poem, how much depends on the writer?s intention; how much on the reader?s interpretation; how much on the traditions and historical traditions that surround the text? What is poetry supposed to do? How is it supposed to change the world, if at all? Every week, we will discuss a key seminal text of poetic theory in conjunction with one or two poems. Students will have the choice of a short response paper, or a poem in the parameters of the form or genre being discussed that week. The final project is a personal statement of poetics, which students may find useful in assembling their MFA manuscripts.

First Year MFAW priority. This course examines established literary form and convention not as models to aspire to but as examples of how writers before us represented experience and literary expression. In addition to establishing a shared vocabulary of historical forms, we?ll gain practice in close reading of texts that formally honor, extend or transgress these definitions. Students may be asked to present course material and lead discussions or to invent writing prompts that allow class members to channel their own material through these architectures.