Sophie McManus

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, Kelly Link, Carmen Maria Machado, Juan Rulfo, George Saunders, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Leo Tolstoy. 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.

You know it as a reader: that vibrant intimacy between yourself and a book, the connection to people and worlds and eras you have never visited, the certainty that the imaginary can in the deepest sense be true. But how do you as a writer create this vividness? In the first half of the course, we will explore inspiration and invention through generative writing and the close reading of published work. In the second half, we will turn to revision, not as a clerical tidying but as a radical act of discovering and deepening, and towards strategies that make revision feel manageable rather than daunting. Readings will include a mix of stories and novel excerpts by, among others, Isaac Babel, James Baldwin, Willa Cather, Kiran Desai, Elena Ferrante, Amy Hempel, Zora Neale Hurston, Edward P. Jones, Haruki Murakami, Jean Rhys, W. G. Sebald, Leo Tolstoy, Olga Tokarczuk, Joy Williams, and Virginia Woolf. We will read and discuss two student-submitted stories/novel excerpts each week; each student will workshop twice.

How to simultaneously free and capture time, invent and people a world, effect some profound change to that world, and come to an ending as inevitable as it was mysterious to you, even as you wrote it? That’s challenge enough. But while writing a longer work over months or years, you the author are also changing. In this generative workshop, we’ll look at both the craft and the process of writing. We’ll discover and deepen our long-form fictions-in-progress through a consideration of language, narration, character, point of view, dialogue, pacing, detail, plot, place, and time. We’ll examine different approaches to structure, keeping in mind that there is no “right” way into a narrative. Workshop discussion will aim, through thoughtful and empathic close reading, to help the author realize his/her conception of the work. Students will have the opportunity to workshop twice. Mid-semester, we will pair up for further editorial exchange. The published works we read will primarily be writing-on-writing and will include authors such as Elizabeth Bowen, Anton Chekhov, Annie Dillard, Milan Kundera, Peter Mendelsund, Flannery O’Connor, Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace, Joy Williams, James Wood, and George Saunders. We’ll also consider (mostly) optional weekly writing prompts based on students’ projects and interests. In the second half of the semester, we’ll work on practical approaches to organizing and managing a long work and toward honing in on making your particular revision process both pleasurable and illuminating. Works anywhere from recently begun to many years in draft are welcome; but please note that among workshop, conference, and individual exchange, you will share anywhere from 60 to 100 consecutive pages over the course of the semester.