David Ryan

The aim of this workshop is to help students write a long-form work—novel, memoir, or some hybrid project—from beginning toward an end. The workshop’s parallel goal is to give you, through theory and discussion, a grounded understanding of what drives a text and thereby drives a reader to read it.

The course will stretch across two semesters and discuss novels, memoirs, and hybrid forms, using traditional conventions of plot and character as a launching point for more unconventional approaches. It will be an ambitious class, as outside readings and discussions will supplement the discussion of student work. In particular, I think of a story as a kind of circuit—a system with a current that runs through it to achieve certain effects along the way, directing that energy toward some final expression of catharsis. It’s important to understand just what is inherently interesting to a stranger entering into that circuit cold—and how the guided charge and shape of its energy is a reader's engagement. I believe that first grasping traditional ideas of plot, unity, and catharsis is the best way of then branching off into other methods of building narrative interest. Som we’ll begin with Aristotle’s Poetics and contemporary adaptations of the theory of plot but soon move into other modes of thinking: how narrative plots are driven by metaphor, image chains, recursion and consecution, rhizomatic models and their variants, animistic and divinatory poetics, psychological and neurological concepts, models of desire, cinematic form, musical form, and so on. We will probably discuss a couple of films and some film theory. We’ll also discuss music theory as narrative—voice-leading, counterpoint, fugue variations, binary methods, improvisation over chord changes, etc.—as a way of generating a text. The ideas will be supported throughout with creative interpretations so that you can see how they work in practice and beyond the theory. Because it’s a yearlong effort, we’ll have latitude for stretching beyond the conventional boundaries of “workshop”: Half of each session will be devoted to outside readings, ideas, and some theory; the other half, to a more conventional peer workshop. Probably one student piece per session will be discussed in the workshop. But this also means that the ambitions of the class may be more than some can reasonably manage right now. The reading list will be demanding, probably leaning toward forms that illustrate more experimental ideas (though not entirely). It will absolutely include dark, complicated, and emotionally difficult readings. Several may be triggering to some people. Peers will be free to write what they want, as well. I’d like to ensure an open discussion, free of remonstration, in the interest of experience and learning. Please consider this before committing to the class. I’m aiming for a gestalt here and hope that the discussions and ideas will continue to unpack long after the class is over. I’ll be learning alongside you. I may try to write something, too. I’d love to think that, in the end, we created something original, enduring, and compelling.

This course will approach the craft of creative nonfiction and fiction from the perspective of film theory. We'll learn how our prose can benefit from understanding cinematic focal length, lighting, depth of field, the montage principle, and framing. We'll discuss the ways cinema and prose manipulate time and space, structure types of plot, generate empathy and mediate psychic distance.

To do this, we'll read film and narrative theory, as well as theory that blurs distinctions between psychology, philosophy, and linguistics. We'll watch movies that illustrate the cinematic principles. And we’ll read prose that illustrates the film techniques we're learning.

This class is inspired by an essay by Giorgio Agamben on profanation, which he describes as a crossing over the threshold between the human and the divine to create a third thing. That third thing is both, and neither, of those two states. How do we, as writers, work with that liminal space between two states to create a separate transcendent place that the reader occupies? It’s that sense of liminality, and what it produces, that I’d like to navigate over the semester. We’ll look at Agamben’s thought alongside other perspectives on the spaces between human and animal nature, consciousness and the unconscious, the gestalt of metaphor, cinematic montage, and whatever else comes up. We’ll read novels and short stories and discuss certain films that show how these ideas have been used to create art that itself transcends the simpler terms of its breakdown. My hope is that, by the end of the semester, you’ll understand how to make art that defies any reduction back to its original parts. You’ll better understand a kind of practice of the sublime.

This class will discuss what makes contemporary narrative move, as well as what gives it its haunted power. We’ll begin with some fundamental ideas on plot and form, then progress to less traditional thoughts on narrative’s internal circuitry. Each story that we tell is a kind of consciousness with its own repressed activity living in the space around the words. This narrative unconscious—the madness within the syntax and word choice of its symbolic order—is critical to a reader’s engagement. It’s the heat in a story, the daemonic life within the text. But what is this heat? Why do certain stories have it while others don’t? How do we produce it in our own writing? We’ll start with Aristotle’s Poetics—his ideas on tragic vs. epic plots, unity, and magnitude. How do they relate to contemporary structure and dynamics? I’ll show you how we can adapt them to suit more open and fragmented forms. Then we’ll move into theories of the narrative unconscious: the sublime, Duende, the uncanny, abjection. How is creative writing a kind of madness of language? What does John Dewey mean when he says that art is a “living creature”? How—through plot and the distortions of ambiguity, ellipsis, fragmentation, and metaphor—do we navigate that line between internal logic and lucid creative confusion? Readings will move from somewhat conventional formal structures to more open forms—Paula Fox, Denis Johnson, Marilynne Robinson, Michael Ondaatje, and Fleur Jaeggy. Theory will draw from Aristotle, Dewey, Bergson, Chatman, Barthes, Freud, Bly, Lorca, Lacan, and Kristeva. Weekly writing exercises will produce self-contained flash pieces, using plot in compressed, unconventional ways to support and counter the week’s theory and creative readings.

This workshop will take a hybrid approach to the traditional roundtable discussion of student work. Though we’ll discuss student work, we’ll also spend class time talking about theories on structure, form, psychology, and philosophy. We’ll read and analyze published work—stories and novels and memoir—that illustrates how the theory can leave the academic and conceptual realm and be useful to developing your own creativity. Because, as important as it is to be writing as much as possible right now, it’s as important to bend and broaden your understanding of the ways people perceive and dream and hope and remember and forget. These are the drivers of narrative as much as they are of living. So we’ll read and discuss philosophical and psychological texts; we’ll look into dreams and memory, metaphor, formal symmetry, dialectical method, the uncanny, desire, and whatever else seems suited to the class.

This workshop will focus on novels, novellas, and book-length memoirs. We'll use a traditional roundtable discussion to talk about student work-in-progress. The class size will probably influence how we approach the workshop and how we use conferences, but the emphasis will be on your work’s development. If time permits, I'd also like to discuss ideas that will help you work on longer narratives that move beyond the workshop discussion and, hopefully, beyond ideas that you’ve already learned—concepts as applicable to creative nonfiction as they are to fiction. Mostly, we’ll focus on interest: What makes a book riveting? Why are some narratives flat and dull or fall apart after the first third—even when they’ve followed all the common “rules” to the letter? The discussion of why the experience of reading fascinates us—drawing from psychological, philosophical, and linguistic ideas—might be more valuable than reiterated truisms on character, plot, and structure. So, I’m hoping that we can talk about the conventions that are useful but then move into some less-discussed concepts. We might begin with David Ball’s book on reading plays, Backwards and Forwards, then branch off into ideas rooted in catharsis, reversal and recognition, the uncanny, the gestalt of metaphor, sublimation, mirror neurons and narrative empathy, the interaction of space and time as depth and energy, the teleological impulse, transindividuation, how the death and life drives work together to create a “page turner”…and so on. We’ll look at work by established writers, using interesting approaches so that nothing we discuss will exist in an abstract, conceptual vacuum—because the better you understand the atomic principles that constitute the larger abstractions, the more likely you’ll be able to turn those conventions inside out. You’ll retain what makes basic rules of plot and character and structure powerful while adapting their cathartic force to suit your ideas rather than resorting to the stock templates. I’m hoping that the semester will show you how you can express your ideas in a way that feels natural for you but also sets you apart.

The aim of this workshop is to help students write a long-form work—novel, memoir, or some hybrid project—from beginning toward an end. A parallel goal is to give you, through theory and discussion, a grounded understanding of what drives a text and, thereby, drives a reader to read it. The course will stretch across two semesters and discuss novels, memoirs, hybrid forms, etc., using traditional conventions of plot and character as a launching point for more unconventional approaches. It will be an ambitious class, as outside readings and discussion will supplement the discussion of student work. Longer work demands a commitment from the reader. It’s important to understand just what is inherently interesting to a stranger coming at your story—cold. I believe that first grasping traditional ideas of plot, unity, and catharsis is the best way of then branching off into other methods of building narrative interest. So, we’ll begin with Aristotle's Poetics but soon move into other modes of thinking: how narrative plots are driven by metaphor, image chains, recursion and consecution, rhizomatic models and their variants, animistic and divinatory poetics, psychological and neurological concepts, models of desire, cinematic form, musical form, and so on. We will probably discuss a couple of films and some film theory. We’ll also discuss music theory as narrative—voice-leading, counterpoint, fugue variations, binary methods, improvisation over chord changes, etc.—as a way of generating a text. The ideas will be supported throughout with creative interpretations so that you can see how they work in practice and beyond the theory. Because it's a yearlong effort, we’ll have latitude for stretching beyond the conventional boundaries of “workshop.” So, half of each session will be devoted to outside readings, ideas, and some theory; the other half, to a more conventional peer workshop. Probably one student piece per session will be discussed in the workshop. But this also means that the ambitions of the class may be more than some can reasonably manage right now. The reading list will be demanding, probably (though not entirely) leaning toward forms that illustrate more experimental ideas. The list will absolutely include dark, complicated, and emotionally difficult readings. Several may be triggering to some people. Peers will be free to write what they want, as well. I’d like to ensure an open discussion, free of remonstration, in the interest of experience and learning. Please consider this before committing to the class. I’m aiming for a gestalt here and hope the discussions and ideas will continue to unpack long after the class is over. I’ll be learning alongside you. I may try to write something, too. I’d love to think that, in the end, we created something original, enduring, and compelling.

This class will investigate the narrative theory, history, and mental processes relating to fabulist and surrealist storytelling. The goal is to understand their cognitive, formal, and historical contexts so that your own writing avoids the trap of simple reiteration and cliché and, instead, pushes beyond conventional genre boundaries into a personally idiosyncratic, vital voice. We will focus on the Brothers Grimm, Kafka’s parables, and selected surrealist texts with an interest in the processes by which they reify the impossible, much the way the mind fuses the irrational to the rational in hallucinatory states. We’ll discuss related theories of cognition and psychology from Aristotle, Jaynes, Jung, Freud, Artaud, Lacan, Kristeva, and Deleuze/Guattari. Finally, we’ll read contemporary experimental and fabulist writing. By then, you should have a deeper understanding of how the imagination works through the history, form, and presentation of the real, the unreal, and the magical operation that erases the wall between the two.

Paul Ricoeur has suggested that written language—through the unique process by which the human brain converts metaphor into image—can make real what in our day-to-day reality would be tangibly impossible. In other words, we can, through the written word, draw from the ether of madness and real-ize it. It’s unique to the word on the page, our brain’s translation of a little cipher into the letter “a,” a combination of ciphers into a word, our internal transmutation of that word into a sound-image—which, combined with other sound-images, produces breathing dreams of logic and paradox and joy and terror and narrative drive. And it’s an internal process that other forms of narrative—like cinema or television or theatre—don’t require of our brains. This internal combustion of words and memories is an amazing alchemy that we, as writers, engineer. We can transfer madness onto a page and make it hard and material. It’s that transference and burnishing of madness—of manipulating metaphor into reality—that I want you to understand deeply and be able to use in new ways by the end of this workshop…to know how to make anything startling and real…to send anyone into the breathing dream. So, rather than a speculative fiction workshop, we might call this an un-realism workshop. We’ll spend about half of each session workshopping student writing but will devote the rest of the time to outside reading: theory and fiction relating to the parable form, Freudian dream work, mise en abyme, frame narrative, mazes, pattern language, conceptual metaphor, surrealism, magical realism, anti-realism, and irrealism. Some caveats: The reading list will be ambitious and mandatory. I tend to run on at the mouth with abstraction, pointy-headed digression, 10-cent words, and apparent non sequiturs. I’ll aggressively point out clichés that you thought were just fine and stop you from writing television shows. If you’re okay with all the above, let’s work together.

This hybrid class will take the shape of both a craft seminar and a workshop on the novella. The craft component, I hope, will be more than enough for most—as we’ll be reading a novella per week, discussing its form, and reverse-engineering approaches to its creation. Class discussions will avoid conventional literary criticism and, instead, look at traditional and experimental plotting methods, the use of compression, extension, constellation, mise en abyme, narrative conventions (and how we can stray from them), psychological, metaphorical, marginal, and linguistic framing, etc. By the end of the semester, you should be saturated with possibilities for your work. The workshop component will be limited to a few students, whereas weekly discussions will approach works in progress. If time allows, we’ll try to make it through your entire novella by the end of the semester. We’ll read and analyze:

Sweet Days of Discipline, by Fleur Jaeggy; Love, by Hanne Ørstavik; The Shutter of Snow, by Emily Holmes Coleman (This is out of print: you can get a used copy or I’ll provide a PDF.); The Passion of Martin Fissel-Brandt, by Christian Gailly; Dinner, by Cesar Aira; Pieter Emily (From The Village On Horseback) , by Jesse Ball; The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, by Michael Ondaatje; The African Shore, by Rodrigo Rey Rosa; Territory of Light, by Yuko Tsushima; Annotations, by John Keene; The Private Lives of Trees, by Alejandro Zambra; The Serpent of Stars, by Jean Giono; An Untouched House, by Willem Frederik Hermans; and Rain, by Kirsty Gunn.

This hybrid class will take the shape of both a craft seminar and a workshop on the novella. The craft component, I hope, will be more than enough for most—as we’ll be reading a novella per week, discussing its form, and reverse-engineering approaches to its creation. Class discussions will avoid conventional literary criticism and, instead, look at traditional and experimental plotting methods, the use of compression, extension, constellation, mise en abyme, narrative conventions (and how we can stray from them), psychological, metaphorical, marginal, and linguistic framing, etc. By the end of the semester, you should be saturated with possibilities for your work. The workshop component will be limited to a few students, whereas weekly discussions will approach works in progress. If time allows, we’ll try to make it through your entire novella by the end of the semester. We’ll read and analyze:

Sweet Days of Discipline, by Fleur Jaeggy; Love, by Hanne Ørstavik; The Shutter of Snow, by Emily Holmes Coleman (This is out of print: you can get a used copy or I’ll provide a PDF.); The Passion of Martin Fissel-Brandt, by Christian Gailly; Dinner, by Cesar Aira; Pieter Emily (From The Village On Horseback) , by Jesse Ball; The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, by Michael Ondaatje; The African Shore, by Rodrigo Rey Rosa; Territory of Light, by Yuko Tsushima; Annotations, by John Keene; The Private Lives of Trees, by Alejandro Zambra; The Serpent of Stars, by Jean Giono; An Untouched House, by Willem Frederik Hermans; and Rain, by Kirsty Gunn.