MFA Writing Courses

Thesis—Fall | 1 credit

WRIT 7989

Note: Pass/Fail. Primary thesis reader serves as instructor. Restricted to Second Years.

Students complete their thesis in the final two semesters of the program. A thesis may take many different forms. It might be a collection (of stories, poetry, or essays), or it might consist of a longer work or excerpts from a longer work. Students also have the option of compiling a thesis portfolio—a selection of the best work that they’ve written for workshops, craft courses, and conferences during their time here. The final thesis for fiction and speculative fiction should be 80-120 pages. The poetry thesis should be at least 40-45 pages. The nonfiction thesis should be 80-100 pages. Students are assigned a thesis advisor, and meet approximately twice per semester to discuss their progress in conferences as scheduled between student and advisor.

Seminar—Fall and Spring | 1 credit

WRIT 7205

Note: Restricted to Second Years.

This course will consist of a weekly series of talks given by writing faculty members, visiting writers, and publishing professionals and touching on every aspect of the writing life. Multiple credit-eligible events are offered each week, with many only open to graduate writing students, and some open to the public and Sarah Lawrence community. Students must attend four eligible events by the end of the semester and may select which events they wish to attend. Students are encouraged to attend as many events as are of interest.

Faculty

• Paige Ackerson-Kiely

Seminar—Fall and Spring | 2 credits

WRIT 7210

Note: Restricted to First Years.

This course will consist of a weekly series of talks given by writing faculty members, visiting writers, and publishing professionals and touching on every aspect of the writing life. Multiple credit-eligible events are offered each week, with many only open to graduate writing students, and some open to the public and Sarah Lawrence community. Students must attend six eligible events by the end of the semester and may select which events they wish to attend. Students are encouraged to attend as many events as are of interest.

Faculty

• Paige Ackerson-Kiely

Thesis—Spring | 1 credit

WRIT 7999

Note: Pass/Fail. Primary thesis reader serves as instructor. Restricted to Second Years.

Students complete their thesis in the final two semesters of the program. A thesis may take many different forms. It might be a collection (of stories, poetry, or essays), or it might consist of a longer work or excerpts from a longer work. Students also have the option of compiling a thesis portfolio—a selection of the best work that they’ve written for workshops, craft courses, and conferences during their time here. The final thesis for fiction and speculative fiction should be 80-120 pages. The poetry thesis should be at least 40-45 pages. The nonfiction thesis should be 80-100 pages. Students are assigned a thesis advisor, and meet approximately twice per semester to discuss their progress in conferences as scheduled between student and advisor. 

Seminar—Fall | 4 credits

WRIT 7890

Prerequisite: completion of at least two semesters in the MFA Writing program; acceptance into the internship conditional upon application

Note: Meets at SUNY Purchase College.

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 this pedagogy seminar and 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.

Faculty

• Paige Ackerson-Kiely
• Madeleine Mori

Seminar—Fall | 4 credits

WRIT 7488

What does it mean to read as a translator? How does carrying a text across languages transform the way we write our own?

This craft course approaches literary translation not simply as the transfer of meaning, but as a practice of deep attention to diction, syntax, tone, voice, and form. Translation becomes a mode of close reading, research, and creative re-making: a way of hearing literature from inside language itself while discovering new possibilities for one’s own writing.

Moving across genres, we will read literary works alongside English translations, exploring how writers and translators negotiate sound, ambiguity, style, and cultural distance. Authors may include Fernando Pessoa, Alejandra Pizarnik, César Vallejo, Cristina Campo, Samuel Beckett, Jhumpa Lahiri, Yoko Tawada, Wang Wei, and others. Particular attention will be given to Romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian), while also considering works from other linguistic traditions.

Throughout the semester, we will examine retranslation, collaborative translation, self-translation, transcreation, and the idea of “untranslatability.” We will also consider translation as a historically and ethically charged practice shaped by power, migration, colonial histories, and contemporary asymmetries produced by the global dominance of English. At a moment when artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping how texts navigate across languages, we will discuss what remains essentially human in the translator’s craft.

Students will regularly compare translations, produce their own versions, and workshop evolving drafts. The semester will culminate in a translation project accompanied by a translator’s note reflecting on formal choices, linguistic tensions, and the creative process.

The course is open to writers working in any genre and at any level of experience with foreign languages, no fluency is required. However, curiosity, rigor, and experimentation are essential.

Bring your language. Leave with a deeper sense of how literature moves between tongues—and how writing itself is transformed in the process.

Faculty

• Patricio Ferrari

Seminar—Fall | 4 credits

WRIT 7410

The fun (and challenge) of writing the weird is building a story that defies real-world rules while still earning the reader's trust. We will take a look at impossible stories by the likes of Aimee Bender, Kevin Brockmeier, Ayşe Papatya Bucak, Angela Carter, Julio Cortázar, Nikolai Gogol, and Lauren Groff, among others, to explore the way craft fundamentals apply (and sometimes don't) within radical narrative departures. We will also examine the more subtle end of the speculative spectrum: the ways the term can be applied to include not only the outright fantastical, but a more understated warping of reality. Classes will include teacher- and student-led discussions, in-class writing exercises, and a culminating group reading.

Faculty

• Myla Goldberg

Seminar—Fall | 4 credits

WRIT 7813

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct. –Carl Jung

In this cross-genre craft course, play is the primary prism through which we will behold the work of others and make work together. This course is designed for writers who wish to interrogate and reinvigorate their work habits, stylistic range, and story-building apparatus with a spirit of artistic risk-taking. As children, most of us experienced creative decision-making as innate; we made choices fluidly, joyfully, and spontaneously. As adults engaged in a ‘serious’ artistic pursuit, we can still access a “flow state,” where language feels limitless, storytelling intuitive and imagination abundant.

To this end, class will be held in a “studio” environment with open floor space where (on occasion) we will engage in physical exercises intended to bypass the more typical neurological pathways to narrative. Instead, we will aim to create text that arises from a portal of somatic awareness, tapping the body’s innate creative intelligence. Beyond this physical approach, we will play together within our writing exercises, trying on odd forms, unfamiliar expressive modes, and purposeful restrictions.

Lastly, we will read in two modes. Firstly, we will read about the liberating effect of play on the artistic practice (Lorna Marshall; Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi; Stephen Nachmanovitch, etc). Secondly, we will read work in which the writer’s own instinct for play is alive on the page; sometimes expressed explicitly in humor (Sherman Alexie; Chen Chen; Samantha Irby; Caitlin Moran, etc.) or more implicitly by writers breaking and refashioning linguistic conventions (Catherine Lacey; ZZ Packer; Anne Carson; Zora Neale Hurston; George Saunders, etc.). Expectations for this course include an appetite for experimentation and creative improvisation; a willingness to play physically; and a wish to write beyond the borders of your habitual idioms or patterns in pursuit of imaginative epiphany. Again, writers across genres are welcome. 

Faculty

• Heather Harpham

Seminar—Fall | 4 credits

WRIT 7813

You are much likelier to get paid for writing about something other than yourself, whether it’s an article or op-ed, profile or review, speech or a letter. Even essays and memoirs, ultimately, should not be solely about the writer. So even if you intend to write about your own experience, it is a necessary discipline to write about something else first—to learn to look outward, to engage with the world around you. Consider it an ascetic practice. This course will be a survey of creative nonfiction that excludes memoir and personal essay, encompassing everything from reportage, op-eds and profiles to criticism, history, and philosophy; writing on politics and culture, science and travel, sports and food. We will even read letters and speeches. Lastly, we will look at writing that intertwines elements of the above forms and genres with the personal essay. Students will be required to write some short exercises and responses to the readings each week, and, over the course of the semester, one essay about a subject of their choosing, excluding themselves.

Faculty

• Timothy Kreider

Seminar—Fall | 4 credits

WRIT 7850

Writing can be hard. Being a writer can feel even more challenging. We have chosen to spend a lot of time alone with our imaginations. But we are also driven to connect with other people—otherwise our writing would remain in our journals, for only ourselves to read. This course is about active, ethical, generous literary citizenship and joyfully embracing our identities as writers in the world.

We will have weekly goals, including (but not only) connecting with writers you have never met in writing and in person; submitting works to journals, magazines, and contests; writing pitches for personal essays, even if you are not an essayist; applying for residencies, fellowships, and grants; and writing book reviews. Students will collaborate on organizing at least one off-campus literary event with participants from outside the Sarah Lawrence community. And each student will create a small chapbook of their own writing. Class sessions will be spent sharing our projects, setting next goals, and supporting each other as we look ahead to life beyond the SLC MFA. In class discussions, we will explore a range of topics from the mundane (email tone) to the sticky (working with a cranky editor) to the similarities between rejection anxiety and acceptance anxiety. We will also talk about how to stay connected to our writing and actively embrace everything that makes it uniquely beautiful and maybe even strange.

Among other readings, we will look at Courtney Maum’s Before and After the Book Deal, Walter Mosley’s writing on maintaining a routine, and excerpts from Boris Kachka’s Hothouse (a history of publishing houses Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). We will touch on literary movements and pivotal moments, from the Beats to the women's salon to the establishment of the Clarion Workshops and the founding of Soft Skull Press.

Faculty

• Nelly Reifler

Seminar—Fall | 4 credits

WRIT 7813

This craft course is intended to be taken just prior to Nonfiction Workshop (WRIT 7710) as a yearlong sequence. Students will co-create a laboratory to deepen your understanding of art of memoir on and off the page. We will read 10 book-length memoirs that approach the form from different angles: humor memoirs, graphic memoirs, autofiction/hybrid memoirs, and traditionally structured memoirs. Every class will center on a craft analysis of the book of the week and will also include 1-2 generative in-class writing exercises loosely inspired by the reading. Some texts we will read are Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, The Ugly Cry by Danielle Henderson, The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, and We Were Witches by Ariel Gore. Students will meet for conference up to three times to map out and begin a larger memoir project.

Faculty

• Domenica Ruta

Seminar—Fall | 4 credits

WRIT 7750

This course aims to help students write a long-form work: a novel, memoir, or some hybrid project—from the beginning toward the end. The course will include a craft component with a lot of theory and discussion in order to give a grounded understanding of what drives a text and thereby drives a reader to read it. Intended to be taken just prior to Longform Prose Workshop (WRIT 7323) as a yearlong sequence, this course will focus on elements of craft: how we build longer narratives with unity and perpetual interest. Longer work demands a commitment from the reader—a sustained attention, where dead spots and weak links can ruin the reading. It is important to understand just what is compelling to a stranger coming to your story cold. So, we will discuss what makes something inherently interesting through traditional conventions of plot, character, and form as a launching point for unconventional approaches. Aristotle’s Poetics and contemporary adaptations of dramatic action will begin our theory of plot. But we will move into other modes of thinking about narrative interest: how plot can be driven by metaphor, dualities, 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. Because I believe that the principles of writing a compelling thriller are absolutely useful for a better understanding of how to write a memoir, most of the readings will lean toward fiction and autofiction. We will probably discuss a couple of films and some film theory—which is, to me, one of the best delivery systems of theories of form and narrative drive. The ideas will be supported throughout with creative examples, allowing you to see how they work in practice and beyond the theory. Outside readings will form a core to the class discussions, with many exercises and weekly prompts.

Faculty

• David Ryan

Seminar—Fall | 4 credits

WRIT 7440

This course is inspired in part by Giorgio Agamben's essay "In Praise of Profanation." Agamben describes "profanation" 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. This is the pressurized space metaphor and irony create. But bound up in that, too, is the concept of irrealism—a kind of narrative unrealism that defies genre, but understands the multiplicity of truth. A truth that transcends factual and counterfactual. A truth that sings into both. How do we as writers work with that liminal space between two states to create a separate, transcendent place for the reader to occupy? I would like to navigate this sense of liminality and what it can produce in creative writing, of any kind, over the semester. We will read more Agamben, some theory in Nelson Goodman's Ways of Worldmaking and Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, essays from Sergei Eisenstein's Film Form, and other perspectives on the spaces between human and animal nature, consciousness and the unconscious, and whatever else comes up. We will 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. By the end of the semester, you will understand how to make art that defies any reduction back to its original parts. You will understand a kind of practice of the sublime. The readings will be challenging. Also, this course will approach its subject and all readings agnostic to political or moral implications.

Faculty

• David Ryan

Seminar—Fall | 4 credits

WRIT 7850

This course, open to writers of any genre, will explore somatic methods as ways to enhance and deepen our writing practice. Whether in the studio, at a seminar table, or outdoors, we will incorporate the body as a vibrant means through which we communicate, and use what movement and the senses reveal to examine our work. Processes we will explore include physical activities such as walking and gardening; somatic methods such as tai chi and the Alexander Technique; and creative practices that explicitly engage the body like theater and dance. The hope is that by semester's end, each of us will come away with somatically informed methods we can incorporate into our practices, as well as writing more replete with sensory, corporeal, and spatial understanding. Artists we will read, and sometimes watch, include Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, Jamaica Kincaid, Rebecca Solnit, and Haruki Murakami.

Faculty

• Meredith Talusan

Seminar—Fall | 4 credits

WRIT 7115

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.

Faculty

• R. A. Villanueva

Thesis—Fall | 1 credit

WRIT 7999

Note: Pass/Fail. Primary thesis reader serves as instructor. Restricted to Second Years.

Students complete their thesis in the final two semesters of the program. A thesis may take many different forms. It might be a collection (of stories, poetry, or essays), or it might consist of a longer work or excerpts from a longer work. Students also have the option of compiling a thesis portfolio—a selection of the best work that they’ve written for workshops, craft courses, and conferences during their time here. The final thesis for fiction and speculative fiction should be 80-120 pages. The poetry thesis should be at least 40-45 pages. The nonfiction thesis should be 80-100 pages. Students are assigned a thesis advisor, and meet approximately twice per semester to discuss their progress in conferences as scheduled between student and advisor. 

Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

WRIT 7306

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 (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 will delve into the fullness of their experiences. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah brings magical realism to the doorstep of our daily lives; Edward P. Jones establishes setting as character, garnering comparisons to James Joyce. Ta-Nehisi Coates 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!). Readings will include essays on technique, short stories, and memoir. We will 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?

Faculty

• Carolyn Ferrell

Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

WRIT 7306

What keeps us returning to the short story? This workshop will explore the rigors, the possibilities, and the beautiful mysteries of the form—the tools it uses to catch life on the wing and blow the heart open. Each week we will workshop two student submissions and explore stories by some of the all-time greats, past and present—Chekhov and Welty, Baldwin and Eisenberg, Denis Johnson, Edward P. Jones, and more. Whether workshopping a draft or turning a critical eye on assigned reading, we will seek to revel in the grammar of storytelling and discover the way each writer makes it new.

Faculty

• Garth Risk Hallberg

Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

WRIT 7017

We smile at one another like paintings. —Martha Hollander, “In the Museum”

In this course, we will experiment with using the museum as our muse. We will take a class field trip to a museum, and students will go in pairs to other museums around New York City. We will 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 will 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, class presentations, and a group chat, through which we will challenge one another to approach poetry from this new angle.

Faculty

• Matthea Harvey

Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

WRIT 7306

My workshops have often concentrated on seeing stories architecturally. We have tended to ask (at my behest) questions like: What structural conceits move the story from A to B? How is time handled on the page? In what ways do language and content intersect or diverge? But I have found myself, more recently, wanting to ask questions about influence. Why did the writer submit this work to the workshop? What works have moved or inspired the writer to travel in this direction rather than in some other? What does the writer of this story value in fiction? These questions will, I hope, be the building blocks of this class. Each student will workshop at least once (and probably twice); but when students submit their original stories, they will also submit a published story that inspired them. The links between the published work and the original work may be overt or hidden, thematic or architectural, shallow or deep. Discussions of original work will be preceded by a short discussion of the linked published piece and led by the student who submitted both. In addition to the published “inspirational” pieces, students will occasionally read published works chosen by yours truly (that feature some connection to the work in discussion) and will sometimes respond to writing prompts that, likewise, grow out of our discussions. My expectations are that students will be open to all sorts of fiction, supportive of one another’s efforts, and willing to take risks on the page.

Faculty

• David Hollander

Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

WRIT 7306

“[O]ne’s plan, alas, is one thing and one’s result another,” Henry James says in the New York edition preface to The Wings of the Dove. We will try to think about what James calls, in that preface, “the gaps and the lapses” in our work, “the intentions that, with the best will in the world, were not to fructify,” “the absent values, the palpable voids, the missing links, the mocking shadows” that necessarily haunt any early draft, and our subsequent attempts to exorcize those specters. We will do this primarily by workshopping early drafts of student work alongside revisions of that work, examining the concrete way that each revision meets or fails to meet (or even re-conceptualizes entirely) the ambitions and requirements of its earlier incarnation.

Our assumption will be that most drafts—especially early ones—are largely failures, pocked with the Jamesian voids and lacunae mentioned above. Anyone can fail in this manner, of course—anybody can produce a disastrous first draft—but few are capable of failing (to use Samuel Beckett’s oft-quoted injunction) better. This course aims to provide you with the tools and the strategies to do so.

Faculty

• Rattawut Lapcharoensap

Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

WRIT 7452

This course will explore how elements from mystery and crime fiction—such as a central sleuth, red herrings, and suspense—can be applied to speculative fiction, from fantasy to science fiction to horror. By analyzing classic and contemporary crime fiction, as well as cross-genre fiction, students will learn the craft of creating energized stories that engage readers. The course will guide students to incorporate these techniques into writing at least two new works of speculative fiction—one whodunit and one thriller—as either stories or chapters. Our reading list will include stories by Agatha Christie, Sue Grafton, Raymond Chandler, William Gibson, Ken Liu, Karen Russell, Carmen Maria Machado, a novel by Aliette de Bodard, and others.

Faculty

• Richie Narvaez

Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

WRIT 7017

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’ve 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. Our class will visit at least one archive together as a group, and you will also be asked to work more extensively with an archive of your 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 Dispatch, Anne Carson’s Nox, Alice Oswald’s Memorial, Marwa Helal’s Invasive Species, Ellen Bryant Voigt’s Kyrie and Philip Metres’ Shrapnel Maps.

Faculty

• Miller Oberman

Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

WRIT 7710

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. Coursework 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.

Faculty

• Jacob Slichter

Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

WRIT 7452

E. L. Doctorow famously said of writing a novel, “It’s like driving a car at night: you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” This is undoubtedly a valid approach… but not the only one. In this course, we will work on developing the tools—the atlas, the compass, the GPS—that allow you to relax your white-knuckled grip on the wheel and enjoy the journey with the confidence of knowing where your book is going (and why). If we are lucky, maybe you will even be able to take your eyes off the road for a second to gaze out of the moon roof at the stars. Each student will submit their writing twice: first an excerpt, ideally from the beginning of the manuscript, and then a dossier of materials that concretely lay out the premise, plot, chronology, structure, lore, character arcs, and more. We will talk about process and strategies for shaping the raw material of your imaginings into an expressive whole, and read and discuss two or three contemporary speculative novels with thought-provoking designs. We will consider genre expectations, the way fantastical elements bear on stakes and causality, and how intricate the worldbuilding needs to be in service of your goals. However, fortunately or unfortunately and despite our best efforts, fiction will continue to resist our attempts to demystify it completely. The map is not the territory. No matter what useful routes we chart, we will never predict all the unknowns you will encounter along that lonely midnight road.

Faculty

• Chandler Klang Smith

Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

WRIT 7710

In this course, we will generate our own lyric essays by paying close attention to published works of lyric poetry and prose, particularly work that may come from outside of our own comfort zones. Key areas we will consider are difficulty, intimacy, media, and experimentation. By learning to read as writers—which will include several essential critical essays—we will disentangle the historical, contextual, and stylistic components of “lyric” and “essay” in order to bring them back together in original prose which we will workshop in class together. A few examples of writers from which our readings will be drawn include: John Milton, Giada Scodellaro, Simone White, Sappho, Patricia Lockwood, Cristina Rivera Garza, Audre Lorde, Aimé Césaire, Ariana Reines, James Baldwin, Joy Priest, Sonia Sanchez, Elisa Gabbert, Renee Gladman, Annie Ernaux, Terrance Hayes, Saidiya Hartman, and Myung Mi Kim.

Faculty

• Joseph Earl Thomas

Thesis—Spring | 1 credit

WRIT 7989

Note: Pass/Fail. Primary thesis reader serves as instructor. Restricted to Second Years.

Students complete their thesis in the final two semesters of the program. A thesis may take many different forms. It might be a collection (of stories, poetry, or essays), or it might consist of a longer work or excerpts from a longer work. Students also have the option of compiling a thesis portfolio—a selection of the best work that they’ve written for workshops, craft courses, and conferences during their time here. The final thesis for fiction and speculative fiction should be 80-120 pages. The poetry thesis should be at least 40-45 pages. The nonfiction thesis should be 80-100 pages. Students are assigned a thesis advisor, and meet approximately twice per semester to discuss their progress in conferences as scheduled between student and advisor.