Undergraduate Academics
Writing
Sarah Lawrence College offers a vibrant community of writers and probably the largest writing faculty available to undergraduates anywhere in the country. We offer courses in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry and encourage students to explore an array of perspectives and techniques that will extend their writing ability whatever their preferred genre. In workshops, students share their writing in a supportive atmosphere. In conferences, teachers provide students with close, continual mentoring and guidance. Visits from guest writers, who give public readings and lectures throughout the year, are an important component of the curriculum.
Our writing courses are equitable forums for free and open expression that encourage experimentation, play, and risk-taking in students’ writing and reading. Accordingly, faculty members do not provide trigger or content warnings. We believe that students are invigorated, not harmed, by contact with art and ideas that challenge and disturb. We favor inquiry over censure, discussion over suppression, and understand both to be an important part of a student’s education in the art of writing. We seek to foster a community of writers whose members draw inspiration from their artistic and intellectual differences as much as from their areas of agreement.
Sarah Lawrence College also takes full advantage of its proximity to the New York City literary scene, with its readings, literary agencies, publishing houses, and bookstores, as well as its wealth of arts and culture. The city provides fertile ground for internships in which students can use their writing training in educational programs, schools, publishing houses, small presses, magazines, and nonprofit arts agencies.
Writing 2026-2027 Courses
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First-Year Studies—Year | 5 credits
WRIT 1016
“You write. I read. We talk.” That ought to be the only description of my class, but since I've been urged to pad this paragraph... what do we talk about? How a character is formed. How a plot develops. Mostly, how language is used. Sometimes it lies as flat as an orange cat crushed under nine of an eighteen wheel truck's tires, and sometimes it soars. We aspire to the latter. In fall until mid-semester, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; thereafter through spring, individual conferences will be biweekly.
Faculty
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First-Year Studies—Year | 10 credits
WRIT 1026
What does it mean to be a writer today? How do we discover our subject matter, our voices? 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 weekly reading and writing assignments, we will begin the journey into understanding who we can be as fiction writers. We will explore questions of craft: What makes a story a story? How does one go from word to sentence to paragraph to scene? What are the tools of a fiction writer? The workshop will be divided between discussions of student stories and of published fiction writers, including Amina Gautier, George Saunders, Katya Adaui, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, among others. We will also read from other genres, including essays on craft by authors such as Richard Russo, Rita Dove, and Crystal Wilkinson. Students will be required to do additional conference reading, as well as to attend at least two campus readings per semester; writing time will also be structured into class. Perhaps most importantly, we will work on developing our constructive criticism from the very start. When developed in a supportive atmosphere, our critiques should help us better grasp the workings of our stories and see what they can be in the world. In fall until mid-semester, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; thereafter through spring, individual conferences will be biweekly.
Faculty
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First-Year Studies—Year | 10 credits
WRIT 1047
In the first half of this yearlong course, we will read, and use as models for our own essay writing, a range of classic essays and well-known near-contemporary and contemporary essays and memoir fragments that address the panorama of our experience on this planet. We will engage with work that considers nature, class, gender, race, deep memory, political praxis, aesthetic appreciation, existential joy or dread, and personal and family life. We will look at how the traditional essay appropriates narrative and lyric energy both to accommodate and create a living mind on the page. We will sharpen our own writing by developing principles of practical criticism that expose the tangled interactions of form and content. The second half of the course will focus on one or two canonical literary figures, whose work we will read closely and to which we will respond by employing all the new and radical literary forms of our moment-mashups, fan fiction and nonfiction, adaptations, interviews, podcasts, and any and all other ways contemporary mediums confront and assimilate the past. We will write clearly, dramatically, and well about many crucial things. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly.
Faculty
Fiction
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Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits
WRIT 3250
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.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits
WRIT 3268
It’s not a stupid question, especially at a time when writing may seem harder than ever. We will spend the first weeks of the semester engaging in writing exercises, thought experiments, intelligence gathering, and craft discussions designed to get your own ideas flowing and to provide seeds for new stories as well as approaches to deepen writing you may already be doing. The rest of the semester will be devoted to workshopping your stories, with the class coming together to create a constructive community of readers with the kindness, toughness, honesty, and sensitivity that can make a workshop a unique and valuable writing tool. Ambition and risk-taking will be encouraged as we address a slew of other not-stupid questions such as: What makes a plot strong? Does a character have to be likable? How much fact goes into fiction? Outside reading will be designed to take students in and out of their comfort zones, running the gamut from realism to fabulism and featuring a multitude of rule-makers and rule-breakers for students to admire and inspire, love and loathe—sometimes simultaneously. All flavors of fiction are welcome.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits
WRIT 3454
A multi genre course involving practice in the elements of writing, and an exploration of structures that help put apparently unrelated pieces together to make a whole. We will write short weekly pieces focusing on time, character, place, dialogue, pacing, and editing, then use what's significant in our work to create a series of episodes that reverberate against each other. Weekly assignments, along with 100-word pieces to sharpen editing skills, will be assigned. Conference work will involve using what we have done and revising, arranging, or creating new episodes and an overall sense of structure. Readings will include essays, poems, and fiction, in an anthology from many times and places, with a focus on the ways people have put significant words together.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits
WRIT 3324
This is a course with writing at its center, and other arts, mainly, but not exclusively, visual, around it. There are weekly assignments that involve making something significant from our explorations into silent movies, graffiti, stories told in pictures, illuminated manuscripts, the visual portrayal of emotions, words and photography, and words and clothing. We have made graffiti, narratives without words, political messages, ads for significant beliefs, clothing with messages, representations of emotions. Conference work has included memoirs with pictures or music, wisdom books with photographs, animations, documentaries, album covers and cds, an everyday chemistry book for children, a tale of a train and a soldier, illustrated advice for medical appointments, a book about pain, a menu with restaurant stories, a map of the body, an exploration of figures from Asian popular culture, and many other projects.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits
WRIT 3229
In her extraordinary essay, “Fascinated to Presume,” Zadie Smith says that what ultimately draws her to a work of fiction is not necessarily its content. Rather, it has to do with “a certain type of sentence.” I know just what she means. Fiction workshops are (more often than not) hung up on issues of plot, character, and theme; only rarely do we take time to look at the behavioral characteristics of sentences, that tiny domain in which, arguably, all the magic happens. In this course, rather than workshopping stories, we will be workshopping sentences, as students experiment with various topographical approaches to language, based around our encounters with published works driven by highly intentional sentence-writing. We will be reading Garielle Lutz’s essay, “The Sentence Is a Lonely Place,” alongside the kind of sonically-attuned fiction she admires (including stories by Dawn Raffel and Sam Lipsyte). We will look at a muscular style known as “parataxis,” and the kinds of sentences it engenders, through the work of A. M. Homes, Raymond Carver, and Cormac McCarthy. We will look at heavily “internal” prose interested in unpacking consciousness (Virginia Woolf), and we will read masters of the run-on, including excerpts from the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai’s War and War, a novel whose chapters are each exactly one sentence long. We will think about syntax (Clarice Lispector, David Foster Wallace), about image and surprise (Lauren Groff, Jo Ann Beard), and about the many ways to inflect sentences with personality, as we ask our own sentences to do more than merely convey information. There will be weekly writing prompts, and each student will, on three occasions, bring a set of five to 10 sentences into the workshop, where we will carefully dissect and analyze these specimens, thinking about how each might be altered to optimize its effect. By mid-semester, each student will settle on a final conference project, which will be a full-length (10 or more pages) story written in one of the many styles we will be examining, along with a short nonfictional account of the student’s attraction to that particular type of sentence. The course is probably best suited to students who have not yet decided, with certainty, who they are on the page; curiosity, playfulness, and a supportive attitude are the main expectations for interested students.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits
WRIT 3352
This fiction workshop seeks to draw inspiration in both our reading and writing from the work of Asian American writers. In addition to coming together to support one another in a writing workshop environment—discussing matters of “craft,” “technique,” and the like—we will also spend our time discussing questions about race, immigration, nationality, and storytelling (in addition to any other questions) as they arise through the fiction of Asian American writers. We will begin with Sui Sin Far (Edith Eaton) and work our way “forward” to a reading list that may include Maxine Hong Kingston, Frank Chin, Shawn Wong, Hisaye Yamamoto, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Jessica Hagedorn, R. Zamora Linmark, Amy Tan, Don Lee, Anthony Veasna So, Ocean Vuong, Julie Otsuka, David Wong Louie, K-Ming Chang, Nam Le, Chang-Rae Lee, Gish Jen, Jhumpa Lahiri, Bharati Mukherjee, Akhil Sharma, Paul Yoon, Jenny Zhang, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Lan Samantha Chang, and Ayad Akhtar, among others. To be clear, this is a writing course and not a critical survey of Asian American literature and literary history—at least not in the manner that my colleagues in the literature program might be able to provide. Nevertheless, Asian American fiction will constitute the common source material from which, I hope, students might derive their pleasures (and lessons) as aspiring fiction writers regardless of their chosen subjects. In addition to actively participating in class discussions and providing their peers with constructive feedback for their work, students will be expected by the end of the semester to develop and produce—through the conference system—a portfolio of short fiction.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits
WRIT 3259
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.
Faculty
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Open, Small Lecture—Fall | 5 credits
WRIT 2024
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, 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, Danielle Evans, Percival Everett, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, Carmen Maria Machado, Katherine Mansfield, Lorrie Moore, ZZ Packer, 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.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Year | 5 credits
WRIT 3310
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.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Year | 10 credits
WRIT 3701
This yearlong seminar has two distinct—but related—parts. The premise for the first semester is this: Writing begins 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, all our stories are born this way; speculation itself is imaginative projection. We will explore ways to release our writing from cerebral control while mindfully steering it: breaking patterns that do not work for us anymore, supporting the processes that feed creation, and collaborating with other writers. We will look at how what we might have considered deficits are actually the sources of our powers as writers. By the beginning of the spring semester, we will all have a solid process and practice foundation. We 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—and then we will use what we learned in the fall to break the rules ourselves. Across the year, we will generate new writing through experiments during and outside of class. These will include experiential exercises such as 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. Each week, we will workshop student writing. Our workshop discussions will always take writers’ questions and priorities into account. All the work we are doing as a class will be folded into our workshops. 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 inform our work throughout the year.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits
WRIT 3286
This course will be an opportunity to write from life, in any genre, from overheard conversations, beloved landscapes, old photographs, memories, and events happening around us, public and private, in dormitories, families, commuter trains and cars, on our phones, laptops, in nature, shops, laundromats, campus walks, classrooms and dinner tables. We will carry notebooks at times and use our notes as the start of weekly pieces, and we will transform short practice pieces into a longer work for conference work. Students will be asked to bring in and present writing that is meaningful to them and connect it to our focus.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits
WRIT 3021
Who doesn’t love Frog and Toad? Have you ever wanted to write something like it—or like Charlotte’s Web or A Snowy Day? Why do our favorites work so well and so (almost) universally? We will begin by reading books we know and books we missed and discuss what makes them so good. We will be looking at read-to books, early readers, instructional books for children, rude books, chapter books, books about friendship, and (possibly) young adult books. We may consider what good children’s history and biography might be like. We will talk about the place of the visual, the careful and conscious use of language, notions of appropriateness, and what works at various age reading levels. Invariably, we will talk about childhood, our own and as part of an ever-changing set of social conditions. We will try our hand at writing picture books, early readers, friendship stories, collections of poems like Mother Goose. Conference works have involved making a finished children’s book for any age, a chapter of a middle school book, an educational game, meaningful items of dress, and anything else you can talk me into that will speak to the class.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits
WRIT 3351
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 audio fiction and creative sound 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 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 Audible, 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 to companies like Audible, iHeart, and other publishers of audio fiction.
Faculty
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Open, Small Lecture—Spring | 5 credits
WRIT 2203
There are many ways to read a book (or an essay, or a story, or a poem). We can read for pleasure or for edification, to be enlightened or to be moved. We can read to accumulate facts, to frame an argument, to inform a paper we are writing. But reading fiction as a fiction writer is a special kind of reading. Writers—especially young writers who are trying to absorb and understand craft—must read a work not only to appreciate its merits but also to see how it was constructed, what conceits it puts into play, what narrative strategies it’s employing. This lecture course will endeavor to break down stories and novels from this writerly perspective and to tease out the craft-level decisions that create a work of fiction’s overall effect. Our weekly class sessions—which are more large-seminar conversations and not one-way lectures—will revolve around short novels and short stories that use one of four engines to generate their energies: language, structure, voice, or ideas. Our reading list will likely include Cormac McCarthy, Ottessa Moshfegh, Han Kang, Akwaeke Emezi, Harlan Ellison, Dawn Raffel, László Krasznahorkai, Franz Kafka, and Ted Chiang, among others. Each of our discussions will culminate in a weekly writing prompt. Group conferences will be used to share some of these prompt responses aloud, to discuss how putting different narrative strategies into practice deepens our relationship to our reading, and to (occasionally) generate new work. The course’s ideal student will be curious about the borders of fiction and interested in exploring many approaches to the blank page without privileging any one of them.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits
WRIT 3333
What do coming of age stories teach us about growing up—and what do they tell us about narrative? In this course, we will read classic and contemporary short stories that re-invigorate the literary genre of the bildungsroman, which traditionally depicts a young person’s moral or spiritual education. As we read, we will study both the craft and the literary themes of these stories, mining them for information about structure, exposition, subtext, and character. Using a host of in-class writing prompts, we will develop and workshop our own coming-of-age tales. Readings will include stories by James Baldwin, A.S. Byatt, Michael Clune, Kelly Link, Herman Melville, ZZ Packer, and Leo Tolstoy, among others. Students will be required to workshop once over the course of the semester, and discuss their peers’ work both in class and on the page.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits
WRIT 3370
Speculative fiction is a blanket term for writing that speculates on a world unlike our own. Sci-fi, fantasy, and horror are a few of the best-known categories; but speculative fiction also encompasses the uncategorizable—work that challenges our understanding of causality, time, the self, the mind, and the cosmos…or that just barely cracks the surface of the familiar, allowing the weird to seep through. At its best, speculative fiction uses imagination and metaphor to explore ideas and facets of the human experience that would otherwise remain unexpressed. In this course, we will read short stories and novels by mostly contemporary speculative-fiction authors, with a writerly eye for technique. We will also workshop fiction by students; discuss process and goals; and form a supportive, constructive community where even the wildest visions can flourish.
Faculty
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Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits
WRIT 3365
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; TaNehisi 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?
Faculty
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Intermediate, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits
WRIT 3323
Prerequisite: at least two prior writing courses
This writing workshop will examine the art of revising fiction. What do we talk about when we talk about revision? What do writers do when they revise? What, for that matter, is revision? This course has been designed with these seemingly simple questions in mind. Most weeks, students will read an example of a revision from a published writer, complete (and prepare to discuss) a short revision exercise, and workshop revisions of student work. My hope is that our workshops and discussions will provide each of you with some concrete tools, strategies, and conceptual frameworks for your revisions; it is also my hope that we might be able to generate collective excitement about the possibilities of the practice. Students must have completed drafts of work from prior writing courses that they wish to revise in this course.
Faculty
Interdisciplinary
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Advanced, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits
WRIT 4024
Prerequisite: restricted to seniors; at least 20 writing credits
This will be a capstone, multi-genre course for seniors who have taken at least 20 credits in writing and seek to develop and refine a substantial body of work suitable for use as a graduate school writing sample. At the start of the semester, students will distribute an initial manuscript (10 to 15 pages of poetry or 20 to 25 pages of prose). Over the course of the term, each student will receive sustained feedback on an expanded portfolio (20 to 25 pages of poetry or 40 to 50 pages of prose). Class sessions will be devoted to workshop, with two to three students discussed each meeting, and each student workshopped twice during the semester. In addition to full-class workshops, students will participate in genre-specific small groups outside of class several times during the term. Students are expected to read all submissions closely and provide approximately 250 words of written feedback for each manuscript prior to class. By the end of the semester, each student will submit a revised portfolio along with a reflective statement describing their revision process and artistic choices.
Faculty
Nonfiction
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Open, Seminar—Fall | 3 credits
WRIT 3733
In service of The Phoenix, Sarah Lawrence’s community newspaper, this course will produce news, feature, and editorial articles, crafting them from inception to drafting and, as the process unfolds, final editing. Students will be encouraged to report on and in every crease and crevice of campus, as journalism is where the writer meets the world, all for the ultimate benefit of the reader. The course will focus on basic elements of the news story, the engine of all journalism, with strong emphasis on writing timely, accurate, and vivid campus news accounts. The course will also explore journalism ethics and news-gathering techniques, including varied methods of interviewing. Special focus will be placed on what linguistic knowledge and documented industry standards achieve a rigorously edited news account through all layers of editing, from top line to copy-editing. We will survey methods for writing riveting features, imperative investigative reports, thought provoking (and satirical) editorials, and sports that go deeper than the score of a game. In both words and images that will spill across the pages of The Phoenix, students will learn how to cover campus events and issues in a manner as riveting as it is responsible. Final decisions on the inclusion of stories to The Phoenix will be determined by the paper's editors.
Faculty
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Open, Small Lecture—Fall | 5 credits
WRIT 2027
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 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." This is not a history or a literature course; our lens will be that of a writer, using deep study and playful practice to figure out the dilemmas and best practices of the present. Although this is a lecture course, students will be asked to participate, improvise, and work with a partner, as well as participate in one seminar a week, which will function as a writing workshop. At the end of the course, students will be asked to present what they have learned in the form of an 8- to 10-page letter—to your partner, to me, or to anyone else you choose, living or dead—addressing some of our class questions and your responses to them. The only expectation is the courage to think out loud with other people—a.k.a. the courage required to learn.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits
WRIT 3752
We are living in an era in which narrative audio journalism has shaped a generation of reporting and journalistic investigations with shows like This American Life, Radiolab, The New Yorker Radio Hour, and NPR. While the industry continues to shift, great narrative journalism and journalistic investigations continue. This is all happening while journalism feels as though it is on a precipice, with an increasing number of the public getting their information from a growing collection of media sources. This course will teach students the fundamentals of how narrative journalism, investigative reporting, and audio storytelling continues to thrive despite the doomsdayers. We will explore where the field of journalism is going and how the entertainment industry continues to intrude. Students will learn the 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 to the last question is “yes.” We will discuss why.) Producers, editors, and freelancers for This American Life, Audible, Radiolab, The New York Times, The New Yorker Radio Hour 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.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits
WRIT 3702
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.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits
WRIT 3129
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.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits
WRIT 3763
This course will be divided into three units, each of which will involve reading published essays and writing our own. In the first, People You Know, students will write personal narratives involving people in their lives and read, as models, published examples of such works: for instance, 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 we will read for this unit are “Stranger in the Village,” by James Baldwin, and Annie Dillard’s essay, “Aces and Eights.” The third unit is called The Personal in the Critical/Journalistic (PCJ). A work in that genre combines personal reflection with consideration of an outside subject—for example, a favorite movie, or an event like the January 6 riot; 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. An example: Jonathan Lethem’s personal essay about the movie The Searchers.
Faculty
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Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits
WRIT 3750
Shame is always a social problem. In this writing workshop, we will embark upon a study of shame and culture in order to consider how it emerges as both a boon and a stricture for writing from different perspectives and out of varying aesthetic and political needs. We will think about the consistency of what can or “cannot” be written along party lines, psychological barriers, or potential social punishment—and why. We will consider a few examples of pushing through taboo or potential humiliation, and why it is important that we continue trying to do so, against increasing fears of abandonment or being misunderstood.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits
WRIT 3715
It would be safe to say that journalism and nonfiction writing are currently undergoing a transformation. Our most storied publications are in a state of crisis. Big-city newspapers are failing by the day. Magazines are imperiled. Book publishers face encroaching competition from handheld electronic devices and online search engines that do not recognize copyright laws. What is an ambitious, intuitive writer to do going forward? Quite simply, harness all of the strengths of the storytelling past to a new world of few space restrictions, more flexible tones, and the ready presence of video, audio, and animation—which can either enrich or encroach upon text—and comprehend the role of writer in such a way as to include and exploit new media. We will examine the relationship between literary nonfiction, which has always been cinematic in focus and flexible in tone, and the once and future practice of journalism. Masters of 20th-century nonfiction such as V. S. Naipaul, Truman Capote, Joseph Mitchell, and Roger Angell—steeped as they are in the journalistic practice of their time—can serve as guideposts to our uncertain future. We will examine, through reading and writing, the ways in which the formulas of journalism are transformed into literature. We will emphasize the importance of factuality and factchecking and explore adapting modern storytelling to video, photography, and sound. As the semester progresses, literary nonfiction will be both discovered and reinvented to fit our new world.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits
WRIT 3366
A course examining the much maligned but remarkably fruitful miscegenation of fiction and nonfiction. For roughly the first half of the semester, we will read and discuss works that are either composed of both fiction and nonfiction or that call such genre distinctions into question. The second half of the semester will be devoted to workshopping the students’ own mixed-genre works, the composition of which will be the primary focus of their conferences. Among the questions to be discussed in class will be: What are the differing advantages of fiction and nonfiction? How does genre affect an author’s obligations to readers? Is there a clear distinction between the genres? When does blurring that distinction render thrilling art, and when does it amount to a con job? Some of the writers discussed will include Rachel Cusk, Italo Calvino, Lauren Slater, Jenny Boully, and Alejandro Zambra.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits
WRIT 3739
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.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits
WRIT 3767
This course will be divided into three units, each of which will involve reading published essays and writing our own. The first, 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; the class will read essays whose authors juxtapose seemingly disparate topics in forming coherent works. Melissa Febos’s “All of Me,” for instance, 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 Robert Warshow’s essay “The Gangster As Tragic Hero,” about gangster films.
Faculty
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Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits
WRIT 3047
In addition to being the title of Michael Clune’s memoir or a theory in the hands of McKenzie Wark, video games have now invaded social space—and, therefore, our literary imaginations—in a way that would have been unthinkable 30 years ago. And yet, how do we write about games? About the experience both of playing these aesthetic objects and living in an arguably gamified world with the same intensity, curiosity, and rigor that we might otherwise bring to any centuries-old ekphrastic attempt? In this course, we will query the limits, techniques, and new forms of nonfiction writing made possible through video games, taking the anthology Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games as a springboard for our own experiments through short exercises and workshop. We will focus on the interplay between social position and form where, rather than an escape, video games pose new questions of difficulty in prose and in life. No experience playing video games will be required, though this will certainly not hurt; smaller indie games may be used as examples.
Faculty
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Intermediate, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits
WRIT 3163
Prerequisite: prior writing course work
In this course, we will practice the art of revision. Ideally students will come into the class with a work of memoir, at least 10 pages in length, written in a previous creative writing course, that they are willing to radically revise, though there will be time in the first weeks to generate new material for revision this semester. Students will deepen their skills of reading, writing, and observing the world through thoughtful, compassionate, and playful engagement with their own and their peers' work. Together we will break down and reconstruct short memoir stories at the sentence, paragraph, and structural level.
Faculty
Poetry
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Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits
WRIT 3123
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 in poetry 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, 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.”
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits
WRIT 3551
This poetry workshop will focus on revision and the generative act. How are the two tied together? How do we let go of one to embrace the other? Where are the hinges that open the poem further and when do we shut it down? How do we simultaneously move toward and away from a singularity? These are the questions we will investigate as we write poems and revise them into different entities. By drafting and redrafting, by analyzing form and choices in craft, by tracking the evolution and ecologies of particular poems, we will engage each other with understanding how the poem is an invitation toward possibilities as opposed to searching for a finish.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits
WRIT 3519
In this workshop, we will explore the universe of American poetry over the past quarter-century alongside students’ personal universes. We will read five collections that span a range of styles and subjects, discussing craft questions such as the relationship between form and content, the poetic line, and how to balance clarity and mystery. Poets we study may include Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Victoria Chang, Terrance Hayes, Marie Howe, Ada Limón, Diane Seuss, and Patricia Smith. Students can expect to keep a daily notebook, complete in-class exercises, post weekly to our online discussion board, and write a poem each week, all while engaging thoughtfully with their classmates’ work. At the end of the semester, students will turn in a portfolio of six revised poems and a critical reflection. Curiosity, experimentation, and a generosity of spirit are encouraged, and all are welcome.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits
WRIT 3528
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 a deep interest in poetry.
Faculty
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Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Year | 10 credits
WRIT 3505
Note: Closed to students who have taken First-Year Studies: Hybrids of Poetry and Prose (WRIT 1005).
One of the exciting literary developments in recent years is the plethora of work that disrupts the notion of genre—by writers such as Eula Biss, Jenny Offill, and Ben Lerner. In this workshop, we will read a book each week and consider architecture, diction, association, metaphor, and other issues of craft. Students will be required to bring in a new piece of writing each week and to write critical responses to the reading. This course will be a good fit for students who are comfortable reading 100-200 pages a week, in addition to generating their own creative writing. For workshop, students may submit poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, or anything in between. We will aim to locate a piece’s heat—its linguistic, figurative, and musical energy—and consider how that energy might be developed, or maximized, in subsequent drafts. Half of each class will be devoted to discussing the weekly reading; the other half will be spent discussing student work. Occasionally, we will also do in-class writing exercises. There will be weekly writing prompts. For conference, students will work on their own hybrid projects. At the end of each semester, students will turn in a revised, final portfolio with at least one earlier draft for each piece, as well as their hybrid project.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits
WRIT 3545
Note: Occurring at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, this course will bring together students from both Sarah Lawrence and Bedford Hills. Because of the Bedford Hills clearance requirements, a minimum age of 21 and permission of the instructor is required. Interviews with the instructor to receive enrollment permission will occur during the fall registration period.
There is nothing like a zuihitsu, and its definition slips through our fingers. It is a classical Japanese genre that allows a series of styles, and everything can be constantly reshuffled and reordered in every conceivable way. —Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Following Millennium
The name zuihitsu is derived from two Kanji: “at will” and “pen.” In this course, we will explore the poetic form of the zuihitsu: as readers, via three required texts—The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, and two versions of Narrow Road to the Interior, one by Bashō and one by Kimiko Hahn—and, as writers, using the materials of haiku, lists, interviews, dialogues, travelogues, monologues, letters, maps, orts, scraps, fragments, and poems of all varieties. Participants will be required to make a zuihitsu, and to contribute to the making of a collective one. The only expectations are a desire to be challenged, a thirst for reading that equals your thirst for writing, the courage to give up spectatorhood for active participation, and a willingness to undertake whatever labors might be necessary to read and write better on our last day of class than on our first.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits
WRIT 3545
There is nothing like a zuihitsu, and its definition slips through our fingers. It is a classical Japanese genre that allows a series of styles, and everything can be constantly reshuffled and reordered in every conceivable way. —Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Following Millennium
The name zuihitsu is derived from two Kanji: “at will” and “pen.” In this course, we will explore the poetic form of the zuihitsu: as readers, via three required texts—The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, and two versions of Narrow Road to the Interior, one by Bashō and one by Kimiko Hahn—and, as writers, using the materials of haiku, lists, interviews, dialogues, travelogues, monologues, letters, maps, orts, scraps, fragments, and poems of all varieties. Participants will be required to make a zuihitsu. The only expectations are a desire to be challenged, a thirst for reading that equals your thirst for writing, the courage to give up spectatorhood for active participation, and a willingness to undertake whatever labors might be necessary to read and write better on our last day of class than on our first.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits
WRIT 3552
We 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. We will read a book each week. Students will write a critical response for each book and also have weekly creative writing prompts. Authors to be read 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—and an analytical paper comparing a more recent Pitt poet with a writer from the syllabus.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits
WRIT 3607
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.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits
WRIT 3136
In this generative workshop, we will explore the poetics of the archive. While poetry can spring from us in an outpouring of spontaneous emotion, engagement with exterior texts can unlock new possibilities for the page. We are, of course, archives ourselves, of our own lived experiences—all we have known and felt, all we have learned from the interior and exterior texts of our lives. We will investigate the relationships between our inner and outer archives, and the fruitful tensions that this interplay opens up in our poems. Students will also be asked to work extensively with an archive of their choosing. This could take the form of a personally held archive—letters from an ancestor, for example, or engagement with materials at one of the many amazing archives nearby, such as the Lesbian Herstory Archive in Brooklyn. Our reading companions will be books featuring archival work, such as Cameron Awkward-Rich’s "An Optimism," Anne Carson’s "Nox," Alice Oswald’s "Memorial," Marwa Helal’s Invasive species, Jos Charles’ feeld, and Wendy Xu’s The Past.
Faculty