Writing

This course will aim to provide an introduction to college and to poetry, as seen through the cultural lenses of what has been called the “East” and what has been called the “West.” Because this course will meet at night, we will also have a chance to discuss the flawed binary of what has been called "Light" and what has been called "Dark" and how that might influence writers. While keeping faith with the sacred jazz ethic of improvisation, we are likely to spend class time getting to know each other as readers and writers and working collaboratively; discussing questions like what is a poem, what is taste, what is the “East,” what is the “West,” what is "Light" and "Dark," and how have these constructs influenced writers and readers; and doing writing exercises as practicum, including keeping a nightbook. Students will participate in readings at the middle and end of each semester; they will work with a partner, write weekly response letters and introduce their work; and make two zuihitsus, a Japanese form combining what has been called “poetry” and what has been called “prose.” We will read two versions of The Narrow Road to the Interior: Basho’s from the 17th century and Kimiko Hahn’s from 2006, as well as excerpts from The Pillow Book, through which Sei Shonagon invented the zuihitsu a thousand years ago. The only informal prerequisites are a passion for reading that equals your passion for writing, the courage to give up spectatorhood for active participation, and a willingness to undertake whatever might be necessary to read, write, and think better on the last day of class than the first. In weekly conferences, we will discuss college and review student drafts—mostly of poems, along with some critical writing about shared texts—particularly Edward Said’s Orientalism and Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly. 

"Radial, bilateral, transverse: symmetries that change over a life; radical asymmetries. Sea shells unfurl by Fibonacci. Horn, bark, petal: hydrocarbon chains arrange in every conceivable strut, winch, and pylon, ranging over the visible spectrum and beyond into ultraviolet and infrared. Horseshoe crab, butterfly, barnacle, and millipede all belong to the same phylum. Earthworms with seven hearts, ruminants with multiple stomachs, scallops with a line of eyes rimming their shell like party lanterns, animals with two brains, many brains, none." — Richard Powers, The Gold Bug Variations

This course will be part workshop and part an exploration of reading and writing in established, evolving, and invented forms. Featuring essays on form by contemporary poets, we will use An Exaltation of Forms, edited by Annie Finch and Katherine Varnes, alongside books by a wide array of poets and visual artists to facilitate and further these discussions. Students will direct language through the sieves and sleeves of the haiku, sonnet, prose poem, ghazal, haibun, and more. Expect to move fluidly between iambic pentameter, erasures, comic poems, and the lipogram (in which students will not be allowed to use a particular letter of the alphabet in their poem). Students should expect to complicate their notion of what “a poem in form” is. We will utilize in-class writing exercises and prompts. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly. 

Many students enter college as avid readers and writers, but their understanding of what fiction is—its range and possibilities—will greatly expand during their undergraduate years. This writing workshop is designed to invite and fast-track that experience by exposing students to fiction’s aesthetic diversity and the myriad ways it can enchant, enlighten, and unsettle us—without privileging any single approach. To that end, we will read everything from the psychological realism of A. M. Homes and Jhumpa Lahiri, to the eerie expressionism of Franz Kafka and Haruki Murakami, to the funhouse narratives of Donald Barthelme and Angela Carter, to the genre-bending work of Brian Evenson and Kelly Link. We will not only explore the logic behind stories, but also analyze their construction: the way point-of-view decisions steer us through a work of fiction, the way meaningful patterns drive us deeper, and the way sentence-level choices engineer a story’s lasting effect. But the course—a “user’s guide,” after all—is as much about writing as it is about reading. Students will bring what they are learning to their own work, initially by responding to weekly writing prompts and later by sharing several longer pieces with their classmates during focused peer-critique sessions. Students will be encouraged to play on the page, as we build a community determined to seek out the borders of fiction. The class will culminate in a final portfolio, giving students the opportunity to collect, arrange, and reflect upon the diverse work that they have created over the course of the year. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences may be weekly or biweekly.

This fiction workshop will seek to draw inspiration from the way that American writers have grappled with the experience of race and racial inequality. How do race and racism act not only as social forces but also as imaginative ones? How do they become narrative resources for writers? How do writers engage with these historical and imaginative legacies? What lessons might aspiring writers draw from their efforts? In other words, how might we fruitfully think about what Claudia Rankine, Beth Loffreda, and Max King Cap have called—in their anthology of the same name—“the racial imaginary”? Over the course of this creative-writing workshop, students will be asked to explore the American racial imaginary by examining writing in a variety of genres and disciplines—from short stories to personal essays and poetry, as well as academic criticism and historical scholarship—in the interest of producing and workshopping their own original fiction. For final conference projects, students will be expected to produce a portfolio of fiction. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly.

Read everything that is good for the good of your soul. Then, learn to read as a writer, to search out that hidden machinery, which it is the business of art to conceal and the business of the apprentice to comprehend. Research, to the degree that it is illuminating, how the author’s life informs the text. Read work that is less than good, work in progress, to see that machinery more clearly. Learn to read your own work as if it were that of another. Try to figure out what interests you at the deepest level, but do not expose the secret parts of yourself to unkind scrutiny. What are you drawn to? What do you avoid? Admit your own mediocrity and believe in the optimism of revision. — Margot Livesey, The Hidden Machinery

This course will be an exploration in both writing and reading fiction. We will learn to read as writers, looking at how the thing is made and how, through writing, meaning is shaped in fiction. In fall, full attention will be given to the short story. We will develop our craft through weekly exercises and experiments in form, character, narrative, stance, authority, point of view, dialogue, scene, situation, style, tropes, and syntax. Additionally, memory as a tool will be considered—both the writer’s memory as it is reimagined and reinvented in a work of fiction, family memory, historical memory, as well as the use of memory inside a work of fiction such as character memory, place memory, or historical memory. Students will develop stories from first draft through at least one revision. Students will complete a draft of a story every two weeks. Conference work will involve additional reading and redrafting and revising of work. Biweekly in fall, students will alternate between individual conferences with the instructor and group conferences. Biweekly in spring, students will meet with the instructor for individual conferences.

Black study has been at the center of considerations surrounding kinship, gender, violence, literacy and language, revolution, property, technology, and alternative forms of thinking about the world for hundreds of years. What might we, as writers—regardless of our differing identities—learn from this tradition about how to articulate the relationships between “I” and “we,” form and freedom, aesthetics and social transformation? Many of our most influential contemporary writers draw from this tradition, from Toni Morrison to Octavia Butler, Audre Lorde to Ta-Nehisi Coates, and others. In this nonfiction writing course, we will learn to think beyond the given by studying the various innovations by Black writers with genres including, but not exclusive to, memoir, journalism, manifesto, hybrid forms, rap music, animation, and new media like digital games. Our focus will be especially strong on the 21st century, as we direct longstanding questions and writing techniques toward the many crises of our own moment. We will write across genres of nonfiction as we work to define them for ourselves, paying careful attention to rhetorical strategies and historical context in our attempts to represent reality. In fall until mid-semester, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; thereafter through spring, individual conferences will be biweekly.

Toni Morrison once wrote, “If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.” She referred to the interior life of her ancestors as being a large charge that she faced as an author; the characters she created—in part from pictures, in part from the act of imagination—yielded “a kind of truth.” We are experiencing a new age of Black artists and activists, charging the world to heed their truths; as writers, we will delve into the fullness of their experiences. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah brings magical realism to the doorstep of our daily lives; Edward P. Jones establishes setting as character, garnering comparisons to James Joyce; Ta-Nehisi Coates posits large questions about writing and Black identity, while Jocelyn Nicole Johnson uses satire to address themes of class and culture; Danielle Evans, Amina Gautier, and Jamel Brinkley write in a charged realist tradition that is right in everybody’s backyard. Readings will include essays on craft and technique, as well as short stories and memoir. This workshop will also have, at its heart, the discussion of student manuscripts and the development of constructive criticism. Talking about race, talking about craft, and talking about our own fiction should occur in an environment where everyone feels valued and supported. The road may be bumpy at times—but how else to get to that truth that Toni Morrison so prized?

Many authors will say that the best way to embark on the apprenticeship of fiction writing is to write relentlessly and read extensively. This, especially the latter, is as close to self-evident truth as there is in this business. Even when a story seems magically virtuosic, its inner cranks can be taken apart and analyzed. In this practice, we will discover what is working and replicate those techniques uniquely in our own work. In this course, we will take an in-depth look at our own writing and the work of the “greats." When we do look at pieces by Jhumpa Lahiri, Tobias Wolff, Lorrie Moore, Edward P. Jones, and others, we will not be worshippers but, rather, critical agnostics who need to thoroughly break down their craft in order to believe. As for the writing, in addition to weekly prompts, students will be counted on to produce one full-length short story to be revisited throughout the course. This is meant to introduce students to the painstaking literary art of revision. During workshop and individual conferences, students will receive advice on how to improve their piece, which will guide them in producing a final, more realized version at the end of the semester. Ultimately, this course will be about what we write and what inspires us to write, what coaxes the words onto paper. So, get ready for breakthroughs and agony but, hopefully, more of the former.

This is a course with writing at its center and other arts—mainly, but not exclusively, visual—around it. We will read several types of narratives—children’s books, folk tales, fairy tales, and graphic novels—trying our own written hand at many of these styles. Readings will include everything from ancient Egyptian love poems to contemporary Latin American literature. For conference work, students might create graphic novels, animations, quilts, a scientifically accurate fantasy involving bugs, rock operas, items of clothing with text attached, nonfiction narratives, and dystopian fictions with pictures, as examples of past imaginations. This course will be especially suited to students with an interest in another artistic form or a body of knowledge that they would like to make accessible to nonspecialists. 

In "Love After Love" Derek Walcott wrote: "The grand clock of my life was broken." More than other arts, literature is bound up with time and time with storytelling. In this workshop, we will ask: What path through time should my story take; what does this mean for my characters and the worlds I am making; and. on a technical level, how the heck do I get there? Starting with Joan Silber's The Art of Time in Fiction, we will experiment with what Silber calls "classic," "slow," and "long" times. We will also consider flash fiction and compression, causality, chronology, and circularity. In the latter part of the semester, we will write outside of time's boundaries—into dream and memory, lands of the dead, time travel, other worlds, and nonhuman perspectives. Short readings, provided as a packet at the beginning of the course, will include stories and excerpts from Nicholson Baker, Jorge Luis Borges, Octavia Butler, Ted Chiang, Annie Ernaux, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kelly Link, Juan Rulfo, George Saunders, Leslie Marmon Silko, Leo Tolstoy, and Jean Toomer. Outside of class, students will write each week in a different time style. Wild swings, subversions, and “messy” experimentation are most welcome. This class will be generous and flexible, with plenty of room for students to follow what most interests them in their own writing. Students will expand one (or more!) pieces of work in the second half of the semester.

After reading a story by an older writer, the young James Joyce wrote, “Is this as near as [he] can get to life, I wonder?" One could say that Joyce was describing an aspiration held by many fiction writers: the aspiration to bring one’s unique way of apprehending life to the page rather than relying on formula and convention. Something similar to this striving lay behind Chekhov’s revolt against traditional plot, Woolf’s search for new ways to render the subtleties of consciousness, Stein’s playful forays into poetic abstraction, and Kafka's experiments with dreamlike narratives. In this course, we will read short stories, old and new, investigating how different writers have tried to take their readers "near to life." Writers likely to be read include Isaac Babel, Anton Chekhov, Percival Everett, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mary Gaitskill, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, Carmen Maria Machado, Katherine Mansfield, Lorrie Moore, ZZ Packer, Grace Paley, George Saunders, and Virginia Woolf. Though formally a small lecture, this will be a discussion-based course in which every student will be expected to participate in our conversations about the readings. In weekly group conferences, students will share their own writing in a spirit of mutual appreciation and support.

A novelist once began a lecture by asking how many people in the audience wanted to be writers. When almost everyone raised a hand, he said, “So why the hell aren’t you home writing?” The novelist was asking the right question. The only way to improve as a writer is to write a lot. You might have all the talent in the world. You might have had a thousand fascinating experiences. But talent and experience will not get you very far unless you have the ability to sit down, day after day, and write. Accordingly, the main goal of this course will be to encourage students to develop or sustain the habit of steady writing. Students will share a very short story with the class every week in response to provided prompts, and will produce an additional story for conference every two weeks. We will also be learning from writers who have come before us, reading a mix of both classic and contemporary writers, including Isaac Babel, Anton Chekhov, Danielle Evans, Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Mansfield, Lorrie Moore, ZZ Packer, and Grace Paley.

In this generative creative-writing course, we will study the way child narrators and child protagonists are made real on the page through a close reading of authors such as Jesmyn Ward, Jeanette Winterson, Joy Williams, Ha Jin, Mariana Enríquez, Sandra Cisneros, Truman Capote, and others. Through experimentation and play, we will write short fiction pieces featuring different child narrators and protagonists. Intended output will consist of a portfolio of exercises, including at least one completed story. This course is suitable for students curious about creative writing and fiction but who do not know where to begin, as well as for committed creative writers looking for a lab to try something new and outside the box of a traditional workshop. 

Great stories are built with good sentences. In this workshop, students will create short stories or continue works-in-progress that will be read and discussed by their peers. Class sessions will focus on constructive criticism of the writer’s work, and students will be encouraged to ask the questions with which all writers grapple: What makes a good story? Have I fully developed my characters? And does my language convey the ideas that I want? The writer's craft will be discussed: how people tell stories to each other, how to find a plot, and how to make a sentence come to life. This workshop should be seen as a place where students can share their thoughts and ideas in order to then return to their pages and create a completed imaginary work. There will also be some short stories and essays on the art of writing that will set the tone and provide literary fodder for the class.

In fall, writing will begin with our bodies in present time and space. Our minds are nestled in our bodies, and our imaginations are nestled in our nervous systems. We will consider present bodies as mediums, sources, oracles, and anchors. From autofiction to high fantasy, stories are born this way; speculation, itself, is an imaginative projection. We will explore ways to release our writing from cerebral control while mindfully steering it: breaking habitual linguistic patterns, collaborating with other writers, and working outside our usual forms. We will explore how elements preconceived as deficits are actually sources of power as writers. In spring, we will have a solid process and practice foundation. Thus, the course will segue into our examination of the most common craft terms and the generally accepted contemporary rules for writing fiction. We will look at how some writers explode those rules, then use what was learned to break the rules themselves. We will generate new writing through experiments both during and outside of class. Experiential exercises may include immediate sensory awareness work, dream logs, and studies of inexplicably vivid memories. We will also do some highly structured experiments around craft concepts such as point of view, atmosphere, plot, and figurative language, among others. We will also collaborate in pairs and small groups. Authors studied may include Franz Kafka, Anton Chekhov, Karin Tidbeck, Uchida Hyakken, Carmen Maria Machado, Paul La Farge, Octavia Butler, Raymond Carver, Robert Lopez, Maurice Kilwein Guevara, James Hannaham, Denis Johnson, Renee Gladman, Elizabeth Crane, Shelley Jackson, and Ryō Hanmura. Texts by writers and teachers such as Pema Chödrön, Garielle Lutz, Peter Levine, Richard Schwartz, D. Foy, and Jericho Brown will also support our work.

What does it mean to be a writer today? How do we find our subject matter, our voices, our forms? The writer Paula Whyman observed, “Art in its many forms can give voice to our concerns, hopes, fears, anxieties—and joys. Art can provide solace. It can spur engagement. It can increase understanding. It can help us feel less alone.” Through reading and writing assignments, we will begin the journey toward understanding who we can be as fiction writers. We will explore technical questions such as: What is craft? What makes a story a story? How does one go from word to sentence to paragraph to scene? Does a transformation always need to take place within a story? Can structure shape content? The workshop will be divided between generative sessions, workshopping student stories, and discussing published literature, which will include work from authors such as George Saunders, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Jennifer Egan, and Amina Gautier. We will also read essays by a range of authors who combine questions of craft with larger cultural issues. From the start, we will work on developing constructive criticism. When developed in a supportive atmosphere, critiques should help better grasp the workings of our stories and reveal what they can be in the world.

Who does not love Frog and Toad? Have you ever wanted to write something like it—or perhaps like Charlotte’s Web or A Snowy Day? Why do our favorites from childhood work so well and so universally? We will begin by reading books we know and books we missed, discussing what makes them so beloved. We will look at read-to books, early readers, instructional books for children, rude books, chapter books, and books about friendship—with the potential of also examining young adult literature and what successful children’s history and biography might look like. We will discuss the place of the visual, the careful and conscious use of language, and notions of appropriateness for various age levels. Invariably, the course will discuss childhood—students' own and as part of an ever-changing set of social theories. We will try writing picture books, early readers, friendship stories, and nursery rhymes such as Mother Goose poems. Class sessions will be both lecture and conversational, and group conferences will involve reviewing our writing. Conference work will involve making a children’s book of any kind, on any level.

The goal of this course will be to start a creative revolution. By diving deep into the audio-fiction landscape, we will explore and put forth the ways in which student voices can be used to create the next generations of creative audio fiction and podcasting. Our goal will be to change the current landscape of podcasting and audio fiction while challenging it and breaking systemic barriers. In this course, students will learn to write and produce groundbreaking contemporary audio dramas and learn how to publish them. We will listen to works from venerable podcasts, such as Welcome to Night Vale, The Magnus Archives, Alice Isn't Dead, and many others. We will also listen to audio fiction from collectives, such as Mermaid Palace, and provocative companies, such as Dipsea, that explicitly address identity and sexuality to challenge the status quo. Also, we will create our own critical discourse for contemporary audio drama—analyzing writings and essays from the fields of screenwriting, sound art, contemporary music, and literature—to help understand and analyze the works that we are creating. Creators from Welcome to Night Vale, The Magnus Archives, and other production houses will join our discussions to talk about their stories and creative processes. Throughout the semester, students will make works and create their own podcasts. At the end of the semester, students will broadcast their works and also have the ability to learn how to pitch their ideas to networks.

How does fiction shape our understanding of what it means to grow up? In this course, we will read and respond to a range of 20th- and 21st-century short stories and novellas that reinvigorate the classic literary genre of the bildungsroman, which traditionally depicts a young person’s moral or spiritual education. As we read, we will examine how these works use voice and narrative structure to convey growth, asking questions such as: What is knowledge? And how is the (growing, changing) self constituted by its particular social world? We will also respond to in-class creative prompts to develop our own fictional coming-of-age tales. Readings will potentially include works by Jamaica Kincaid, Justin Torres, Sayaka Murata, Graham Greene, Carson McCullers, Jeanette Winterson, and Toni Morrison, among others. Students will workshop an evolving short story or novella excerpt over the course of the semester and also read and respond to their peers’ work.

The novella, at its best, combines the urgency of the short story with the cumulative power of the novel. The novella is a form that may be of particular interest to young writers who are thinking about how to transition from the writing of stories to the writing of longer narratives. In this course, we will read novellas (or long stories, or short novels—there is no precise definition of the form) by writers including Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, D. H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, Gabriel García Márquez, Carson McCullers, Jean Rhys, Sandra Cisneros, and Philip Roth. We will endeavor to read as writers, thinking closely about how these works can inform our own fiction. Though formally a small lecture, this will be a discussion-based course in which every student will be expected to participate in our conversations about the readings. In weekly group conferences, students will share their own writing in a spirit of mutual appreciation and support.

Stories are immensely complex mechanisms. When talking about how they work, we often confine our discussion to their most straightforward elements: the relationship between conflict and suspense, for example, or between verisimilitude and believability. But stories also derive a substantial proportion of their meaning and force from elements not so easily pinned down: from the potency of their images, from their surprising and suggestive juxtapositions, or from other qualities more easily apprehended by the unconscious than by the conscious mind. During the first half of the semester, students will read and discuss dreamlike narratives with the goal of understanding how the patently impossible can be made to feel as if it is actually happening, what sort of truths are rendered through unreality, and how authors can open themselves to the promptings of the unconscious and become alert to the complex interactions of images and narrative gestures. As part of the process, students will write two- to three-page imitations of the works discussed in class. The second half of the semester will be devoted to workshopping students’ own stories.  

In her introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2024, editor Lauren Groff wrote: "Nearly every prose writer I adore got their start in small scrappy journals; only when readers support said journals can the next wave of brilliant prose writers work their way into the world." In this generative workshop, we will read from three collections of The Best American Short Stories (1996, edited by John Edgar Wideman; 2021, edited by Jesmyn Ward; and 2024, edited by Lauren Groff). We will bring to the table questions about craft, editorial selection, and the process of canon formation. The Best American series contains material from established and emerging authors and should also inspire questions about the ways editorial tastes vary one year to the next. What trends do we recognize? What do the authors have to say about their process? How important are literary journals to begin with? And how can these anthologized stories inspire our own work? Students will be given time to generate material during class; when we begin to share stories, typed critiques will be required. Our workshop should be a place of support, safety, and encouragement; to that end, we will also work on the art of constructive criticism, which is key to becoming a strong writer.

What might it mean for a writer to be useful to a state? How have states used writers, witting and unwitting, in projects aimed at influence and hegemony? How might a state make use of language as a weapon? What might it mean for a writer to attempt to avoid being useful to a state? How might a state inflect and influence the intimacy between a writer and what we may write? In this course, we will discuss an array of choices that writers have made in relation to state power, focusing particularly on the United States from just after World War II until the present. Students will be asked to read excerpts from six texts: Joel Whitney’s Finks: How the C.I.A. Tricked the World’s Best Writers; Frances Stonor Saunders’ The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters; Eric Bennett’s Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During the Cold War; Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism; and two long poems, Peter Dale Scott’s "Coming to Jakarta" and Dionne Brand's "Inventory." Group conferences will function as writing workshops to offer students feedback on their letters in progress in addition to various writing exercises. The lens of this course will be that of a writer—using deep study and playful practice to figure out the dilemmas and best practices of the present. 

We are living in an era in which narrative audio series have thrived, with shows like This American Life, Radiolab, and other narrative audio series having dominated the podcasting space for decades. This phenomena happens all while journalism feels as though it is on a precipice, as more and more people get their information from a growing collection of media sources. This course will teach students the fundamentals of how narrative journalism and audio storytelling continues to thrive, while we explore where the field of journalism is going and how the entertainment industry continues to intrude. Students will learn practicalities of investigating stories, writing for the ear, audio editing and mixing, along with how to create a pitch deck and publish their works. We will also reflect on the theoretical and ethical considerations for narrative journalism. We will ask questions, such as: How does imposing narrative structures affect nonfiction storytelling? How do narrative shows deal with ethical missteps? What does it mean to have “a voice”? Does it matter who gets to tell the story? (The answer on the last question is “yes.” We will discuss why.) Producers, editors, and freelancers for This American Life, Audible, Radiolab, and others will visit the class to provide insight into their shows and answer student questions. At the end of the course, students will broadcast their works and have the opportunity to pitch their ideas to seasoned industry players.

This course is for students who want to break free from the conventions of the traditional essay and memoir and discover a broader range of narrative and stylistic possibilities available to nonfiction writers. During the first half of the semester, students will read and discuss examples of formally innovative nonfiction that will serve as the inspiration for brief assignments. Completed assignments will also be read aloud and discussed each week. During the second half of the semester, students will workshop longer pieces, which they will have written in consultation with the instructor as a part of their conference work. Required texts will include: The Next American Essay, edited by John D’Agata, and Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra; all other readings will be accessible in a photocopied handout. 

This course will be divided into three units, each of which will involve reading published essays and writing our own. In the first unit, People You Know, students will write personal narratives involving people in their lives. Students will also read, as models, published examples of such works; for example, Phillip Lopate’s portrait of his family in the essay “Willy.” In the second unit, Place, we will read and write essays about authors’ relationships to particular places—less travelogues than investigations of the dynamic between the person and the place; examples of published essays studied in this unit will include “Stranger in the Village,” by James Baldwin, and Annie Dillard’s essay, “Aces and Eights.” For the third unit, The Personal in the Critical/Journalistic, studied works will combine personal reflection with consideration of an outside subject, such as a favorite movie or an event like 9/11—the interaction of the personal and the outside subject yields a third element, an insight that would not be possible without the first two elements; for example, Jonathan Lethem’s personal essay about the movie The Searchers.

In this course, we will explore the intersection of sports and literary writing and journalism. We will read a mixture of books and essays by writers such as Mitchell S. Jackson, John McPhee, Nick Hornby and a sports poetry anthology edited by Natalie Diaz. There will be weekly critical responses. Writing assignments will include: an interview/portrait of an athlete, a first-person sports essay, a sports short story, and a sports poem. For conference work, each student will write an in-depth story about a local sports issue on the high-school or collegiate level. This in-depth story will require research. Students will be expected to interview the main characters in their piece and write multiple drafts, finding the story within the story and exploring it from multiple angles.

As central to the historical development of the modern essay as its concern with personal experience is the essay's usefulness in politics and the representation of political experience. The essay can be polemical, informative, argumentative, lyrical, intimate, condemnatory. It can narrate and describe, or it can persuade or cajole, or it can satirize. As an open, improvisational form, the essay is particularly suited to giving depth to individual experience by placing that experience in social and political contexts and among allegiances and identities—and also suited to imparting drama to collective experience by locating the individual within his, her, or their social conditions and conflicts. We will follow this give and take in our readings, which will be across the reasonable political spectrum. Some examples: Samuel Taylor Coleridge on William Pitt the Younger, George Orwell on his education, H. L. Mencken on The Presidency, James Baldwin in Switzerland, Joan Didion on the counter-culture, Adrienne Rich and Anne Carson on patriarchy, Mike Davis on class and the politics of firefighting in contemporary Los Angeles, and a series of recent editorials and op-eds about our ever-present political crises. These various pieces will be used as models for our own writing, which will range from the small to the medium to the large and will be presented to the class for critique of both their rhetorical realizations and their plausibility or implausibility.

Long-form investigative journalism has opened many doors, perhaps most literally in America’s penal system where journalists have regularly revealed—and freed—the wrongfully convicted. This course will set out to expose the innocence (or confirm the guilt) of a man or woman convicted of a controversial murder or other serious felony. Working collectively and using all of the tools and traditions of investigative journalism, the class will attempt to pull out all known and unknown threads of the story to reveal the truth. Was our subject wrongfully accused? Or are his or her claims of innocence an attempt to game the system? The class will interview police, prosecutors, and witnesses, as well as friends and family of the victim and of the accused. The case file will be examined in depth. A long-form investigative piece will be produced, complete with multimedia accompaniment. 

This course is for students interested in writing essays set on the borderland where the personal essay and the essay of cultural opinion meet. Each week, in addition to talking about student work, we will discuss three or four published essays, some of which will focus closely on the writer's life, some of which will mediate on social or cultural questions. For conference work, students will complete a short work of creative nonfiction every two weeks. Writers likely to be read include James Baldwin, G. K. Chesterton, Joan Didion, Gerald Early, Vivian Gornick, Phillip Lopate, George Orwell, Zadie Smith, and Susan Sontag. Given the range of writers and opinions we will read, it is safe to say that students will encounter many ideas they will consider objectionable over the course of the semester. One of the premises of the course is that exposure to unwelcome ideas, far from being harmful, serves to broaden and clarify one's thinking. 

This course will use the family, broadly defined, as the prism through which we analyze and write memoir. Open to writers and non-writers alike, students will learn the craft and tools to write their own 15-page memoir narrative.

We write personal essays to learn about ourselves, face our demons, understand what entangles us, expose the lies we have allowed ourselves to believe, recognize what we are running away from, find insight, and tell the truth. This workshop is designed for students interested in doing that work and learning to craft what they have written so that their readers can share in that learning. We will learn to read as writers, write as readers, and, where relevant, draw connections between writing and other creative fields such as music and film.

This course will be divided into three units, each of which will involve reading published essays and writing our own. The first unit, Demons, will focus on writers’ personal challenges, from mental illness (as in Susanna Kaysen’s memoir, Girl, Interrupted) to migraines (the subject of Joan Didion’s essay, “In Bed”). The second unit focuses on braided essays; students will read essays whose authors juxtapose seemingly disparate topics in forming coherent works. Melissa Febos’ essay, “All of Me,” for example, reveals how writing, singing, tattoos, and heroin addiction all relate to the need to deal with pain. For the final unit, Critical Survey, we will read and write critical takes on works or figures in particular fields; for example, B. R. Myers’ A Reader’s Manifesto, his take on the novelists of the day, and James Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work, about the movies of his youth. 

Any writer who tries to capture the likeness of another—whether in biography, history, journalism, or art criticism—must face certain questions. What makes a good profile? What is the power dynamic between subject and writer? How does a subject’s place in the world determine the parameters of what may be written about him/her/them? To what extent is any portrait also a self-portrait? And how can the complexities of a personality be captured in several thousand—or even several hundred—words? In this course, we will tackle the various challenges of profile writing, such as choosing a good subject, interviewing, plotting, obtaining and telescoping biographical information, and defining the role of place in the portrait. Students will be expected to share their own work, identify what they admire or despise in other writers’ characterizations, and learn to closely read many recognized practitioners of the genre. We will also turn to shorter forms of writing—personal sketches, brief reported pieces, physical descriptions—to further illuminate what we mean when we talk about “identity” and “character.” The goal of this course is less to teach the art of profile writing than to become better readers and writers generally.

This course will examine and produce a range of work—from the journalistic to the critical, from the practical to the mystical, from the factual to the fictional—in the vast landscape of arts writing. We will write short pieces along the lines of liner notes, catalogue copy for gallery shows, and short reviews. We will approach long reviews, critical essays, and deep and subjective interior meditations on our experience of artists and their work by reading broadly across time. Topics may include, but are not limited to: Samuel Johnson on Richard Savage; William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge on themselves; Friedrich Nietzsche on Richard Wagner; Theodor W. Adorno via Thomas Mann on Beethoven’s Opus 111; V. S. Naipaul on Gustave Flaubert; Amiri Baraka on Billie Holiday; Virginia Woolf on Thomas Hardy; Glenn Gould on Barbra Streisand; Mark Strand on Edward Hopper; Rosalind Krauss on photography; Susan Sontag on Leni Riefenstahl; Jean-Luc Godard on Nicholas Ray; Pauline Kael on Sam Peckinpah; the art criticism of Donald Judd; and contemporary phenomena such as fan fiction, crossovers, and alternate universes made up of familiar literary characters. Students should feel confident in their familiarity with one or two art forms, broadly understood, and should expect, along with the reading, to write several small and two larger (7-12 pages) pieces to be presented to the entire class. Conference work will comprise research projects on those artists or works of art, or both, that students, in consultation with the instructor, decide on as their special province.

This course will focus on the craft of writing poetry. Students will engage in an intensive pursuit of finding the finest form that their poems can embrace, driven by the usual concerns and techniques that occupy the writing of poems—imagination, voice, revision, content, etc. The course will also delve into fundamental questions regarding the history and conceptualization of form and the poetic line. We will draw distinctions between line and sentence, speech and writing, shape and body, rendering and enactment, occasion and discovery, description and perception, disembodiment and incarnation, rhetoric and music. These distinctions are meant to serve as touchstones for our conversations. Prepare to work hard, wonder curiously, and wander a bit. And prepare to bring joy and a sense of humor to our conversations.

Poetry is as old as human life on Earth. We sang to our babies. We sang to cast spells, to bless, to seduce, to celebrate, to mourn, to survive, to instruct, and to imagine. This course will be open to anyone who wants to read and write poetry. Beginners and experienced writers alike are welcome. (We are all beginners.) We will read contemporary poems and poems written many years ago. We will practice observing the outer and the inner worlds. We will practice the poetic arts: creating images, making metaphors, and employing rhyme and assonance. We will practice organic forms. We will work with rhythm and syllabics. We will experiment with ecopoetry, ekphrastic poetry, and persona poems. Students will meet weekly with each other on "poetry dates" and meet with the instructor biweekly for individual conferences. Students will revise their poems written weekly so that, by the end of the semester, they will have a deeper sense of the art and a revised collection of their work. Students will be asked for curiosity, care, and commitment. We will have a wonderful time.

This course will look at contemporary American poetry (1980 to the present) through the lens of the Pitt Poetry Series, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Students will read a book each week. We will write a critical response to each book and also have weekly writing prompts. Authors to be read will include: Etheridge Knight, Sharon Olds, and Larry Levis from the 1980s and 1990s and Paisley Rekdal and Malena Morling from the 2000s. Roughly half of each class will be spent discussing published work, and the other half will be spent discussing student work. The semester will culminate with each student turning in a portfolio of at least seven poems—three drafts for each poem. Students will also write a paper comparing a more recent Pitt poet with a writer from the syllabus.

This course will focus primarily, and humanistically, on participants’ own work. Roughly a third of discussion time will be devoted to examining seminal contemporary poems, with attention to poets of color and marginalized voices. We will examine poetics, prosody, and issues of form, pace, voicing, and tone in contemporary poetry and radically experimental texts. The course will also focus on the revision process: How do artists push themselves toward new worlds? How do poets achieve spontaneity without sacrificing rigor? How do texts reconcile clarity and unpredictability? How do poets develop their own exploration tools—and how do we go beyond intent? Emphasis will be on craft and individual style, not judgment. Students should expect to read widely, to approach texts in new ways, and to create many wild drafts and a finished portfolio of six to an infinite amount of poems. Students will produce a final paper, as well as creative writing. This course is intended for students with deep interest in poetry.

The Iowa Writers' Workshop was founded by Wilbur Schramm in 1936. Schramm went on to a many-faceted career, which included cowriting a postwar manual for the army called The Nature of Psychological Warfare. He saw the writing workshop as a way to train “the kind of young persons who can become the kind of writers we need” in a future framed by the dominance of the United States. This course will look for the traces of this project of domination and will ask what might happen for writers when the domination is seen from the point of view of the dominated and the “free” from the point of view of the prison. Why are censorship and incarceration such central facts of what it means to be a poet elsewhere? Why has that not been true in the United States? How does Archibald MacLeish’s “a poem should not mean but be” or T. S. Eliot’s “like a patient etherized upon a table” sound beside Adam Wazyk’s “how many times must one wake you up before you recognize your epoch?” or Suzanne Césaire’s use of surrealism as a tool to recover stolen power “purified of colonial stupidities”? What is real freedom? What are its ways? How is the poetry that comes from it? Our class text will be an anthology and workbook handed out on our first day, The Most Beautiful Sea: Poems & Pathways Toward Poems, including the work of Nas, Elizabeth Bishop, Refaat Alareer, Nâzım Hikmet, Marie Howe, Joshua Bennett, Lucille Clifton, Nipsey Hussle, Mahmoud Darwish, Dionne Brand, and the greatest of all poets: Anonymous. Students will be asked to complete in-class writing exercises, write letters with a partner, bring drafts to conference, and make a chapbook. In the words of Turkish poet Nâzım Hikmet, we will look together for “the most beautiful sea” that “hasn’t been crossed yet," also known as “the most beautiful words I wanted to tell you / I haven’t said yet.”

“Lacks one, lacks both,” Whitman says. “Just throw in the kitchen sink, why don’t ya,” my mother used to say. This is a poetry-writing wonder romp through a series of polar tensions that pervade modern and contemporary poetry. Through exercises, readings, and your own work, we will explore a variety of dichotomies/tensions that might enable us to engage our poems with a greater sense of presence and emotional possession. Occasion and directionality, intensity and intimacy, figure and ground, speech and writing, line and syntax, structure and body, eye and I...there are plenty of concepts and mechanics, concerns of craft and art, to throw into this course. Are they false dichotomies? Sure, but falsity has its own use; and the central use of falsity is to move us toward truth, to inhabit, to nest there. Primarily, we will be investigating and claiming the best ways that serve our poems—our sense of belonging with poetry—that either narrow our concern or expand our vision, or both.

In this workshop, we will practice paying attention to our curiosities and questions, to our inner lives, and to the world around us. We will read poems by a variety of writers who start with the familiar and make it strange. In short, we will track how daily living gets transformed into art. Along the way, we will imitate, try out prompts, experiment with form, and revise toward the unexpected charge in language. Come ready to write new poems, respond generously to the work of your peers, and contribute to our class community. Students will meet with the instructor biweekly in an individual conference to discuss their writing; and by the end of the semester, students will put together a personal portfolio of their work. Writers from whom we will learn include Wo Chan, Tiana Clark, Megan Fernandes, Daniel Poppick, Margaret Ross, Danez Smith, Ocean Vuong, Jenny Xie, and many others. Beginners and experienced poets alike are welcome.

Where does inspiration come from? Why do we always write about the same thing? Do the muses really exist? What do we do with the best line we have ever written that just does not fit that poem? This course will allow us to delve into our obsessions: what we write and why. Quiller-Couch and Faulkner begged us to let go of our “darlings,” yet in this course we are going to lean in. When we lean into our beloved lines, we can discover even more about ourselves and our work. What about the muses? We will be calling on them for our own inspiration and becoming our own muses to create poems that bring us closer to our unique poetic voice. Poets such as Jack Gilbert, Natalie Diaz, Patrick Rosal, Aracelis Girmay, and more will be read; and each week’s reading assignments will be used to dispel writers block and build creativity. Students will write poem drafts in the style of, or inspired by, poets, muses, and, of course, our own obsessions. A packet of poems and an essay on poetry will be assigned weekly, along with a writing prompt to be used for the creation of new work. The course will culminate in individual portfolios of 6–8 works of revised poetry. Revision will stem from in-class workshop and one-on-one conferences. This course will be all about leaning into what we cannot shake: our fixations and our passions. Come with your most open and tender selves, and let’s create our most cherished work.

There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarity. —Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is one of the most important thinkers and writers of the 20th century. His many writings and innovative concepts, which continue to be discussed and debated today, are of pressing relevance for the contemporary moment, marked as it is by themes of technological and aesthetic transformations, political violence, and histories of exile and displacement. The purpose of this intensive seminar will be to delve into the textures of Benjamin’s life—from his childhood years in Berlin to his final days in France and Spain—while considering the diverse and intricate formations of Benjamin’s thought and writing. For this inquiry, we will be drawing from a number of biographical, historiographic, political, literary, and anthropological lines of analysis to gain an incisive sense of his groundbreaking writings on film and photography, literature and translation, concepts of history, and the politics of culture. Along the way, we will connect Benjamin’s thought to other significant writers and philosophers, including Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Siegfried Kracauer, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Derrida. We will focus on a number of key texts authored by Benjamin, including Berlin Childhood around 1900, The Arcades Project, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” “The Task of the Translator,” “The Storyteller,” and “On the Concept of History.” In engaging with these and other challenging texts and giving thought to Benjamin’s life and death more generally, students will develop a richly informed understanding of the life and thought of this singularly compelling person while coming to terms with the haunted histories of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Step behind the camera and discover the world of cinematic storytelling. This immersive course is designed for aspiring filmmakers ready to bring their creative visions to life. From crafting powerful scripts to directing with confidence, students will gain essential skills in screenwriting, visual storytelling, and working with actors. Through hands-on exercises, scene breakdowns, and collaborative filmmaking projects, students will learn to shape compelling narratives and discover their own creative voice. No prior experience is required—just the courage to tell your story on the big screen. Because of the workshop nature of this course, we will meet once a week for three hours. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly. 

This course will aim to improve and perfect the students’ speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills, as well as their knowledge of Italy’s contemporary culture and literature. In order to acquire the necessary knowledge of Italian grammar, idiomatic expressions, and vocabulary, a review of all grammar will be carried out throughout the year. As an introduction to modern Italian culture and literature, students will be introduced to a selection of short stories, poems, and passages from novels, as well as specific newspaper articles, music, and films in the original language. Some of the literary works studied will include selections from Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, Natalia Ginzburg, Gianni Rodari, Marcello D’Orta, Clara Sereni, Dino Buzzati, Stefano Benni, Antonio Tabucchi, Alberto Moravia, Achille Campanile, and Elena Ferrante. In order to address the students’ writing skills, written compositions will be required as an integral part of the course. Biweekly conference topics might include the study of a particular author, literary text, film, or any other aspect of Italian society and culture that might be of interest to the student. In small groups, conversation classes will be held twice a week with the language assistant; students will have the opportunity to reinforce what they have learned in class and hone their ability to communicate in Italian. When appropriate, students will be directed to specific internship opportunities in the New York City area, centered on Italian language and culture. 

This lecture will focus on the interpretation and appreciation of the most influential lyric poetry written in English in the tumultuous decades between the French Revolution and the Reform Act of 1832. Over the course of two generations, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats invented a new kind of autobiographical poem that largely internalized the myths they had inherited from literary and religious traditions. The poet’s inward, subjective experience became the inescapable subject of the poem—a legacy that continues to this day. We will explore ways in which the English Romantic poets responded to the political impasse of their historical moment and created poems out of their arguments with themselves, as well as their arguments with one another. The preeminent goal will be to understand each poet’s unique contributions to the language.

Contemporary poems have many unique virtues; in them, we recognize our moment in time refracted in its own cultural and linguistic idiom. Contemporary poems exist at the near edge of literary tradition, where the past ends, and our poetic inheritance becomes a source of invention, a live wire. For a working poet, contemporary poetry offers the most readily available bridge to the resources of the art. All great works of poetry have, of course, the capacity to inspire fresh imaginings. But the shock of the new is often obscured or dulled by canonization—as if poems, too, could be cordoned off in a museum or placed behind glass by their official greatness. But the reputation of the contemporary is always up for grabs. Contemporary poems await our judgment and interpretation. They also pose a significant challenge to our critical faculties. We are, almost by definition, less equipped to evaluate the new, which seeks to establish the standard by which it will be judged. In this seminar, we will read a sequence of the instructor's "elective affinities" from contemporary poets Elizabeth Bishop, May Swenson, Amy Clampitt, James Merrill, A. R. Ammons, John Ashbery, Geoffrey Hill, Mark Strand, Jay Wright, Seamus Heaney, Louise Glück, and Anne Carson. In conference, students will be encouraged to focus on, or discover, their own elective affinities among contemporary poets and select favorite poems to contribute to our final set of readings for class discussion. 

This introductory course will offer a comprehensive foundation in spoken and written language, focusing on pronunciation, speaking, listening comprehension, reading, and writing. Intended for students with no prior knowledge of Spanish, the course will integrate classroom learning with language-lab exercises to reinforce and supplement material. Through a variety of activities, students will develop the skills necessary to engage in basic conversations, comprehend short texts, and express simple ideas in writing. By the end of the course, students will be able to understand basic spoken phrases, introduce themselves and talk about family and friends, express their needs in everyday situations, and write short personal essays. Additionally, the course will explore the rich diversity of Hispanic cultures through music, films, and poetry, strengthening students' cultural knowledge and appreciation. Through the study of women poets like Angelamaría Dávila, Alejandra Pizarnik, and Cristina Peri Rossi, as well as urban and punk music movements, students will explore themes of resistance, identity, and cultural change. Group conferences will provide an opportunity to expand upon what we have learned in the classroom and provide a space to address any additional questions or concerns regarding the materials presented thus far. While there are no individual conferences with the instructor, weekly individual meetings with a Spanish language assistant, in addition to class sessions, will be required.

This intensive drawing course challenges young artists to develop a disciplined, sustainable, and experimental practice that expands how they think, see, and make art. Each week, students will create 50 to 100 small works on paper, based on open-ended prompts designed to disrupt habits and deepen the relationship between subject and process. Students will work quickly and flexibly, experimenting with mediums and approaches to explore multiple solutions to each prompt. Alongside these daily drawings, students will develop a single, ambitious, labor-intensive piece throughout the semester—evolving slowly and reflecting time’s passage in contrast to our in-class exploratory drawings. This dynamic exchange fosters varied creative rhythms, bridging idea generation and final execution. The course will push students to redefine the medium of drawing and, in turn, transform their art-making practice. In fall and spring, students will meet biweekly with the instructor for individual conferences, alongside corequisite First-Year Studies Project (ARTS 1000), which will meet weekly as a group.

This intensive drawing course challenges young artists to develop a disciplined, sustainable, and experimental practice that expands how they think, see, and make art. Each week, students will create 50 to 100 small works on paper, based on open-ended prompts designed to disrupt habits and deepen the relationship between subject and process. We will work quickly and flexibly, experimenting with mediums and approaches to explore multiple solutions to each prompt. Alongside these daily drawings, students will develop a single, ambitious, labor-intensive piece throughout the semester—evolving slowly and reflecting time’s passage in contrast to our in-class exploratory drawings. This dynamic exchange fosters varied creative rhythms, bridging idea generation and final execution. The course will push students to redefine the medium of drawing and, in turn, transform their art-making practice.

This course is designed for seniors committed to deepening their artmaking practice over an extended period. Students will maintain individual studio spaces and are expected to work independently, creatively, and critically—challenging both themselves and their peers to explore new ways of thinking and making. The course will include prompts that encourage interdisciplinary approaches to art and culminates in a solo gallery exhibition during the spring, accompanied by a printed book documenting the show. Students will engage in regular critiques with visiting artists and faculty; discuss readings and a range of artists; visit galleries and studios; and participate in the Visual Arts Lecture Series, a program of lectures given by prominent contemporary artists and held at Sarah Lawrence College. Beyond studio work, students will develop skills in presenting their work—including writing artist statements and exhibition proposals, interviewing artists, and documenting their art. A series of professional-practice workshops will further prepare students for life beyond college.

This course will experiment and explore contemporary performance art. Through surveying a range of important artworks and movements, we will review the histories, concepts, and practices of performance art. Born from anti-art, performance art challenges the boundaries of artistic expression through implementing, as material, the concepts of space, time, and the body. Examples of artists reviewed will include John Cage, Joan Jonas, Adrian Piper, Bruce Nauman, Martha Rosler, Simone Forti, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Pope.L, Laurie Anderson, Joseph Beuys, Janine Antoni, Suzanne Lacy, Aki Sasamoto, and Anna Halprin, to name a few. We will review dialogues and movements introducing performance art, such as art interventions, sculpture, installation art, institutional critique, protest art, social media, video art, happenings, Dada, comedy, sound art, graphic notation, scores, collaboration, and dance/movement. Students will be able to relate the form and function of performance art through research, workshopping ideas, experimentation, and improvisation—thereby developing the ability to confidently implement any method of the performance art genre.

In this generative creative-writing course, we will study the way child narrators and child protagonists are made real on the page through a close reading of authors such as Jesmyn Ward, Jeanette Winterson, Joy Williams, Ha Jin, Mariana Enríquez, Sandra Cisneros, Truman Capote, and others. Through experimentation and play, we will write short fiction pieces featuring different child narrators and protagonists. Intended output will consist of a portfolio of exercises, including at least one completed story. This course is suitable for students curious about creative writing and fiction but who do not know where to begin, as well as for committed creative writers looking for a lab to try something new and outside the box of a traditional workshop. 

Long-form investigative journalism has opened many doors, perhaps most literally in America’s penal system where journalists have regularly revealed—and freed—the wrongfully convicted. This course will set out to expose the innocence (or confirm the guilt) of a man or woman convicted of a controversial murder or other serious felony. Working collectively and using all of the tools and traditions of investigative journalism, the class will attempt to pull out all known and unknown threads of the story to reveal the truth. Was our subject wrongfully accused? Or are his or her claims of innocence an attempt to game the system? The class will interview police, prosecutors, and witnesses, as well as friends and family of the victim and of the accused. The case file will be examined in depth. A long-form investigative piece will be produced, complete with multimedia accompaniment.