Writing Courses

Offsite: SUNY Purchase College

Amy Beth Wright, SUNY Purchase Faculty
Madeleine Mori, Craft Class Advisor

Prerequisites: completion of at least two semesters in the MFA Writing program; participation via application only, due June 5.

This course will prepare student-teachers with a working knowledge of theories, methods, and procedures for teaching functional and academic reading and writing skills to first-year college students. The course has two main components, which include attendance in the Teaching Good Prose pedagogy seminar held on Fridays from 12:30 to 2:10 pm, as well as a supervised teaching assistantship in a freshman writing class at SUNY Purchase. In the pedagogy seminar, readings and class discussions will explore strategies for designing and teaching lessons that will improve students’ability to compose analytical college essays; express ideas clearly and effectively in well-developed, focused arguments with relevant and adequate evidence; and use the style and conventions of standard academic prose. Student-teachers are supervised by an instructor and are required to attend one session of a freshman writing class per week. Additionally, student-teachers are expected to meet with students outside of class for 1-2 hours per week.

Here the body and the landscape are understood to be complimentary concepts…each in a constant process of ‘becoming’ through the other.” —Hannah Macpherson

In this cross-genre craft class, we will be guided by writers who apprehend, appreciate, and articulate the mysteries of the body (cells) and of nature (stars) with special power. We’ll proceed from the premise that fluency in writing about the body and the natural world is a gift that transcends genre to immensely nourish any writer’s work. We’ll learn from writers who transmit ineffable physical states, via the page, directly to their reader’s body and from those who render such fine-grain portraits of our living landscape that we see the familiar anew. Active, embodied writing exercises, as well as focused craft assignments, will invite us to do the same. For inspiration, we may make (quick) forays into other creative disciplines that translate from somatic experience to the environmental idiom, such as photography, theatre, and dance (e.g., Edward Weston, David Cale, Bill T. Jones). Writers we’ll read may include: Kiese Laymon, Annie Dillard, Robin Wall Kimmerer, John Berger, Jimmy Chen, Lorna Marshall, Nanao Sakaki, Tracy K. Smith, Michael Ondaatje, and Kaveh Akbar.

In this craft seminar, I want to look at works where a poet or artist takes a form or medium or idea and puts pressure on it with nearly tedious and childlike focus and fascination, on a circumscribed field of play, and in the process discovers and learns and broadens horizons of the possible. Picasso’s images of women at the fountain; Jennifer Bartlett’s painting series, “Rhapsody”; Erik Satie’s “Vexations”; Rene Gladman’s Plans for Sentences; Darger’s Realms of the Unreal; Giacometti’s portrait-painting process; Keats’s 4,000 pentameter lines in Endymion; Stevens’s “Sea Surface Full of Clouds” and “Study of Two Pears”; Messiaen’s Vingt Regards…all of these works do something very exciting. They start with a limited form or an idea or an image or a medium, small in size and circumscribed in scope—often something that they are compelled by or obsessed with—and put pressure on it through repetition, variation, and play. In the process, they create patterns and extend them, raise expectations and disappoint them; they experiment with their medium, offer us the promise of a resolution that is held out then subsequently denied and altered. What does this mean for us? In daily writing, we will do our own versions of this: Find a word or image, form or idea, problem, or memory that fascinates us or compels us and then put pressure on it by writing a certain kind of line a thousand times or using an image or form over and over until it breaks and rebuilds—always, in the process, learning how to surprise ourselves and the reader and make discoveries about our process, our craft, and ourselves. We will no doubt touch on issues of the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity, the perceiver and the world as perceived, and, importantly, how pressure and variation can make a poem move and live—possibly the most essential thing that we can learn in poem-making.  I am very excited about what we will make in this class, and I hope you will join me.

It's an old adage that "writing is rewriting," but workshops often don’t spend adequate time exploring what that rewriting actually entails—such as the various methods that effective writers employ to improve their work and how they motivate themselves to keep revising in the midst of boredom, frustration, and despair. This craft class will consist of readings on revision by the likes of Peter Ho Davies, Annie Dillard, Matt Bell, Zadie Smith, and others, as well as conversations with guests about their revision processes. There will also be weekly revision prompts, where students will be asked to examine and re-examine the same material throughout the semester so they can find new ways to reimagine their writing and turn revision into a process that is just as, if not more, generative than the initial draft.

What special value does the child protagonist have in literary fiction? What can an author say through the child narrator that they cannot say with an adult one? How do authors create this voice in the first person and make it believable? What advantages and pitfalls does a third-person perspective have when writing a young protagonist? How can we, ourselves, capture this energy on the page? In this generative craft class, students will read closely from the works of Jesamyn Ward, Jeanette Winterson, Ha Jin, Mariana Enriquez, Toni Cade Bambara, Louis Sachar, Anton Chekhov, Elena Ferrante, Joy Williams, Angela Carter, Henry James, and more to explore modes of dramatic irony, psychic distance, and ingenuity in prose.

Writers don’t discriminate between forms or genres as much as critics or academics do. Writers read fiction and nonfiction alike—novels and memoirs, stories and essays—scavenging ideas and techniques omnivorously. This will be a creative nonfiction class; but we’ll primarily be reading fiction, as well as some books on the fuzzy boundary between fiction and non, scrutinizing them for anything we can steal and put to our own purposes. Can’t nonfiction prose be as opulently gorgeous as lyric novels? Is there a place in nonfiction for genre conventions like melodrama or suspense—for surprise twists or strategically withholding information? Does your story need to be in boring. old chronological order? Do you have to be a reliable narrator? How much does your persona and voice overlap with the real you? We’ll also, unavoidably, wade into the icky ethical mire of exactly how true things need to be for the purposes of nonfiction—and who gets hurt or implicated by the truth—and just slog on through. Students will write some exercises to explore these questions and incorporate the techniques that we study into their own works-in-progress.

A portal to another world, time, or place may seem to be a relatively straightforward fictional device; but once you fall through one, anything is possible. In this class, we’ll enter mysterious doorways, passageways, and wormholes to figure out what this deceptively simple trope can offer. More broadly, we’ll focus on the ways that employing speculative elements can allow writers to tackle thorny real-world topics. For instance, what can a supernatural portal convey about the way power functions via borders and checkpoints? And in terms of literary forms rather than literal devices, can a book create a portal from, say...memoir to sci-fi? Although we’ll discuss genre conventions, most of our reading is not found on fantasy or sci-fi shelves and is in no way genre-cohesive. We want to get an idea of the most wide-ranging things that a portal (broadly defined) can do. Authors include Mohsin Hamid, Samanta Schweblin, China Mieville, the Strugatsky Brothers, Kathe Koja, Jonathan Lethem, Russel Hoban, Ted Chiang, Samuel Delany, Renee Gladman, William Gibson, Anna Kavan, and Hillary Leichter. Our primary method of investigation is close reading of novel-length works, but we will also take the material as prompts for short writing exercises.

The spark and sustaining fire for our work is a tercet from Octavia E. Butler’s unfinished novel, Parable of the Trickster: “There’s nothing new / under the sun, / but there are new suns.” We take those lines as inspiration and aspiration, reckoning with what we create, how we create, and for whom we need to create. At the heart of this generative seminar pulses an ever-evolving progression of catalytic writing experiences and conversations about daring, form-bending art. And as a coda to those explorations, we will challenge ourselves to design outreach projects that engage with the public sphere and redefine the possibilities of poetry and community.

Literary translation spans several interdisciplinary fields, including comparative literature, linguistics, cultural studies, and creative writing. Therefore, this craft course will explore all of those academic disciplines at varying and overlapping intervals. Innovatively structured, this program will proceed conceptually and cumulatively––mixing history, theory, and practice. “Perhaps a time will come when a translation will be considered as something in itself,” said Jorge Luis Borges in English, during one of his Norton Lectures at Harvard in the fall of 1968. That time may have arrived. To discover whether it has, we will delve into a diverse array of literary works (poetry and fiction) alongside their respective English translation(s). The languages and authors we will study include, but are not limited to, Spanish (Borges, Pizarnik), Portuguese (Pessoa, Lispector), French (Follain, Pizarnik), Italian (Rosselli, Lahiri), German (Celan), and Chinese (Wang Yin). Reading as translators, we will engage with common translation challenges, such as style, Latinate/Germanic choices, cognates/false friends, and prosody. We will investigate the benefits of re-translation and collaborative translation, as well as generative aspects of self-translation and transcreation. Curiosity, rigor, collaboration, and creativity will guide us on this journey across voices and languages. While English is the target language of the course––with translators such as W. S. Merwin, Suzanne Jill Levine, Forrest Gander, and Margaret Jull Costa––each student will select, for the final semester project, a literary work to translate, written in any source language of their choice. The course aims to sharpen literary translation skills, ensuring participants also become more insightful readers and writers of literature. It is open to all graduate students––with experience in one or more foreign languages or even without any prior experience! Either way, come with a native language and leave with a world beneath the tongue.

Toni Morrison once wrote, “If writing is thinking and discovery and selection an 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 (perhaps the largest?) charge that she, as an author, faced; the characters she created—in part from pictures, in part from the imaginative act—yielded “a kind of truth.” We are experiencing a new age of Black artists and activists, charging the world to heed their own truths; as writers, we’ll delve into the fullness of their experiences. Nana Ama 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 and Roxane Gay posit large questions about writing and Black identity, while Nafissa Thompson-Spires uses satire to address themes of class and culture; and both Danielle Evans and Jamel Brinkley write in a charged realist tradition that is RIEBY (my new acronym: right in everybody’s back yard!). Class readings will include essays on technique, short stories, and memoir. We’ll discuss the elements of craft as they pertain to the published literature as well as to our own work. 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 Toni Morrison so prized?

Okay, you’ve gotten the words out, but now what? While no workshop can sit beside you while you stare at the screen, wondering what you’re supposed to do next, this class aims to get you excited about revision. Together, we’ll examine the underlying architecture of stories and have discussions that generate the kind of specific, constructive feedback that makes the revision process less like walking blindfolded. The very beginning of the semester will be centered on generating new work, the final third of the semester will be centered on revision, and what you do in between is up to you! I aim to foster a community of readers with the kindness, toughness, honesty, and sensitivity that can make the workshop a unique and valuable writing tool. Ambition and risk-taking will be encouraged. Through the work, we’ll discuss the makings of strong plots, memorable characters, and strategies for creating and sustaining narrative momentum. Outside reading will be wide-ranging and geared to the needs and concerns of the class. Likely suspects include Lesley Arimah, Richard Bausch, Edith Pearlman, and Tom Perrotta.

This course will focus on the intersection of literature and activism, challenging participants to explore the complexities of using specifically speculative fiction as a tool for social change. Through a multidisciplinary approach drawing from critical theory, postcolonial studies, and literary analysis, students will interrogate the role of genre narrative in advocating for justice and equity. Discussions will center on the ethical considerations, historical precedents, and aesthetic strategies employed by writers engaged in activism. While analyzing a diverse range of texts spanning genres and cultures, students will cultivate a nuanced understanding of the strengths—as well as the limitations—of fictional storytelling as a means of advocacy.

What were the first works of speculative fiction that made you want to travel through worlds of your own creation? In Origin Stories, we’ll look at our earliest influences and trace the threads from those works to our current projects. Students will lead discussions of stories or excerpts of novels that sparked their writing. We will also explore dreams, early memories, daydreams, and our bodies as sources of speculative fiction. Each student will have two workshop dates. While two different pieces may be given to the group, revisions are also welcome for the second round of workshops. In addition to the students’ literary influences, we will read authors such as Ray Bradbury, Ursula Le Guin, and Gilbert Hernandez. 

This course, which takes its title from Vivian Gornick’s classic book, is intended to help students settle into their voices and produce work that resonates with their experiences, interests, and insights. The prime focus will be personal essay and memoir. The course work will include workshop pieces that students develop in conversation with the instructor and shorter exercises intended to open the student’s awareness as both a reader and a writer. We will engage in a deepened practice of reading and learn to draw connections between writing and other creative fields, such as music and film.

This semester, we will experiment with using the museum as our muse. We’ll take a class field trip to a museum, and students will go in pairs to other museums around the City. We’ll look for inspiration in museums (with methods that go beyond ekphrastic poetry) and make our own exhibits as a class. Perhaps you will be inspired by security guards or museum catalogs or architecture. Perhaps you’ll write poems about an imaginary museum. Books discussed will include Desire Museum by Danielle Cadena Deulen, Information Desk by Robyn Schiff, The Octopus Museum by Brenda Shaughnessy, Museum of the Americas by J. Michael Martinez, and Voyage of the Sable Venus by Robin Coste Lewis. There will be writing prompts and class presentations and a group chat, through which we’ll challenge one another to approach poetry from this new angle.

This course focuses on the relationship between nonfiction and reality; that is, how writers—that’s us—construct reality on the page rather than assume its coherence. Each week in class, we will discuss nonfiction by writers such as Ursula Le Guin and Samuel Delany, alongside a wide array of prose that troubles the distinctions between fact and fiction through syntax, critical engagement, or experiments in narrative form. Our aim in reading as writers will be in metabolizing the formal strategies of language situated across “genres” in order to make something new through short exercises and longer nonfiction workshops. Likely writers we will read include Jami Lin Nakamura, Saidiya Hartman, Tanya Tagaq, and Fernanda Melchor, among others. We will pay special attention to the relationship between difference and truth, across a range of perspectives, making difficulty the focus and vantage point in the writing we produce for class.

The story begins, “Once upon a time.” Or the story begins, “Call me Ishmael.” And with this initiating sentence, a fictional world unspools. The word and the sentence are our first tools as writers; and, in this class, we will study how sentences shape story. We will also consider how the story requires more than great sentences. This is a class heavy on writing and reading. We will develop our craft through 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, reinvented in a work of fiction, family memory, historical memory, as well as the use of memory inside a work of fiction (character memory, place memory, historical memory). Students will develop their work from first draft through at least one extensive revision. Handouts will include: George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, in which four Russians give a master class on reading, writing and life, the rest TBD.

This is a prose workshop—open to all who write sentences—where I will encourage you to innovate and where I will expect you to write as much as possible. The priority here will be on your writing—I believe that a workshop should not train you to be a critic but, rather, to be a writer. Depending on the number of students, you will workshop, three-to-four times, submissions of up to 25 pages in length. I’m interested in talking about narrative as the movement or momentum of a piece of writing. We will speak about character, yes, and suspense or tension through writing but also about tone, atmosphere, landscape, language, rhythm or cadence, texture. The tradition of writing that I come from, and that I teach from, is that writing is thinking. I will assign reading for the class when it makes sense, permission-granting writers like Amina Cain, Renee Gladman, Hiroko Oyamada, Annie Ernaux, and others. In conference, besides discussing your workshop pieces and revisions, I will also encourage you to read closely other writing that is conversation with the tradition of your own work.

This is a graduate poetry workshop: serious writers, serious readers. I urge you to give this period in your life as much time and energy as you can, to be courageous and radical, to write into real experience, to learn how to walk the tightrope of language into the unknown. We will read published poems to learn from them. We will read your own work to improve it. You will each meet with another writer in our class on a weekly poetry date. You will keep an observation notebook. You will hand in one poem each week. You will meet with me every other week in an individual conference so that you and I can look more closely at your work. I expect you to attend, to be on time, to read everything two or three or four times, to be generous and rigorous with yourselves and with each other. You will collect your revised poems into a manuscript in May. We will have a wonderful time. 

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, 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. So, 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, 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 leaning toward forms that illustrate more experimental ideas (though not entirely). It will absolutely include dark, complicated, and emotionally difficult readings. Several of those 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 we created something original, enduring, and compelling in the end.