MFA Writing Courses

Seminar—Fall and Spring | 1 credit

WRIT 7205

Note: Restricted to Second Years.

The Master of Fine Arts Literary Colloquium is 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 Master of Fine Arts writing students and some open to the public and whole Sarah Lawrence campus. Students enrolled in the one-credit colloquium are responsible for attending 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

Conference—Year

WRIT 790125

Note: Primary thesis reader serves as instructor.

Students begin their theses when they have two semesters left to complete. The Sarah Lawrence writing program provides an unparalleled number of one-on-one contact hours with faculty; by the time students begin the thesis process, they will have had 12 private conferences with their workshop teachers, with 12 more to come during their second year. As students expand their ideas about writing and refine their voice and technique, each of the conferences with their four workshop teachers may be seen as a component of the thesis process. Each student and their thesis advisor will set up a schedule of meetings together. Please note that it is the responsibility of the student to reach out to their advisor to set up the first thesis meeting.

Thesis—Year | 1 credit

WRIT 7999

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

Students begin their theses when they have two semesters left to complete. A thesis may take many different forms. It might be a collection (of stories, poetry, or essays) 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 classes, 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. Each student and their thesis advisor will set up a schedule of meetings together.

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 7813

Over the course of the semester, we will devote ourselves to reading memoirs in their entirety and studying their narrative architecture. We will seek out each memoirist’s sui generis gifts—from mesmerizing voice, to propulsive structure, to characters so alive that they stride off the page and loiter in our imagination. We will also think with care about what “memoir” encompasses—a memoir frames a specific time period or dramatic event or arc of psychic evolution within the memoirist’s life. Knowing where to place the frame, having the courage and insight to cut the extraneous and preserve the essential, is the core task of the memoir writer. We will learn from an array of contemporary memoirists’ approaches to storytelling and story framing. These will likely include Salman Rushdie’s Knife, Carvell Wallace’s Another Word for Love, Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water, Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Margo Jefferson’s Negroland, and Gabriel Byrne’s Walking with Ghosts. This will be a fast-moving and demanding course in both reading load (ten memoirs in total) and in work expectations. Though a craft course, we will have a scaled-down conference schedule in which each student will begin to outline, or blueprint, their memoir. In the second semester, we will write through these blueprints toward a complete first draft of each student’s memoir. Though this course is designed as the first half of a yearlong progression in drafting a memoir manuscript, it may be taken as a semester course.  

Faculty

• Heather Harpham

Seminar—Fall | 4 credits

WRIT 7813

Writers do not 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 will 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 will 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.

Faculty

• Timothy Kreider

Seminar—Fall | 4 credits

WRIT 7410

This course will be focused on structuring your novel or short fiction around a propulsive plot that will satisfy your readers. Through in-class discussion, writing exercises, and independent reading, we will identify techniques for building a compelling, coherent narrative. In collaboration with classmates, you will distill your own chosen story down to its essential conflict. You will name your story’s innate strengths and weaknesses, main characters, and major turning points. You will then create an outline of your story in order to strengthen its internal logic and navigate through any structural, pacing, or plotting roadblocks. As we develop your outline over the semester, you will gain clarity on your story’s shape and characters’ motivations. This course is for writers at any stage of a project, whether you are first contemplating a new work or deep into your umpteenth revision. No matter where you are at, we will aim to help you gain clarity. After all, the more you understand your work, the better you’ll be able to advocate for it. The course is intended to help you not only develop and deepen your existing project but also to more effectively pitch it to agents, publishers, and readers in the future. Getting a firm grasp on your story’s structure will serve you through the entire life of the work. Readings will include selections from The Anatomy of Story, by John Truby; My Sister, the Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithwaite; The Hole, by Hye-Young Pyun; Long Way Down, by Jason Reynolds; The Collector, by John Fowles; Kindred, by Octavia E. Butler; as well as short fiction such as “The Wind,” by Lauren Groff; “Benji,” by Chinelo Okparanta; and “Trailhead,” by E. O. Wilson.

Faculty

• Julia Phillips

Seminar—Fall | 4 credits

WRIT 7410

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 course, 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.

Faculty

• Domenica Ruta

Seminar—Fall | 4 credits

WRIT 7750

This workshop aims to help students write a long-form work: a novel, memoir, or some hybrid project—from the beginning toward the end. The yearlong workshop 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. The first semester 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 first-semester discussions, with many exercises and weekly prompts. In the second semester, we will workshop what people have put together during the first semester, hopefully having benefited from learning these principles. Because it is a yearlong effort, we will have latitude for stretching beyond the conventional boundaries of “craft class” and “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 unconventional ideas (though not entirely). It will absolutely include dark, complicated, and emotionally difficult readings, which may be triggering to some people. Peers will be free to write what they want, as well. The class includes open discussion, free of remonstration, in the interest of experience and learning, where discussions and ideas will continue to unpack long after the class is over. Our goal will be to create something original, enduring, and compelling in the end.

Faculty

• David Ryan

Seminar—Fall | 4 credits

WRIT 7440

“World-building” in speculative fiction often brings to mind the maps on the endpapers of fantasy novels, showing the terrain that characters will traverse on their journeys. But in many great novels and stories, characters start out embedded in the heart of a labyrinth...and never find their way out. In this course, we’ll look at fictive universes that trap and delude their inhabitants, sending them on twisting routes to dead ends or keeping them in ignorance of the powers-that-be who are secretly determining the shape of their lives. We will closely read stories and novels from contemporary authors—including Kelly Link, Victor LaValle, Jonathan Lethem, Kazuo Ishiguro, Samantha Hunt, and others—in order to reverse-engineer the all-encompassing systems they present in their fiction, and students will try their hands at writing exercises inspired by these texts. Ultimately, we will ponder how writers can use systems to convey meaning and how characters can find meaning within them.

Faculty

• Chandler Klang Smith

Seminar—Fall | 4 credits

WRIT 7850

This course will explore the essay not merely as a form but also as a mood that is frequently deployed in other writing genres. We’ll start with a brief overview of the form’s history and the qualities that distinguish the essay from other writing, then spend the first half of the course reading a range of essays that both exemplify the genre and test its boundaries. The second half of the course will be devoted to exploring how the essay mood shows up in other genres—speculative and literary fiction, memoir, poetry, and hybrid forms. Throughout, we will engage in writing exercises that connect to the readings. Authors we will read for this course include Virginia Woolf, Susan Sontag, George Orwell, Teju Cole, and Cathy Park Hong.

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

Seminar—Fall | 4 credits

WRIT 7850

This course explores narratives that begin after the end—stories in which only one (or a few) characters remain after a world-changing event. While we will read some classics of post-apocalyptic fiction, we will move beyond the last-man-standing trope to examine how authors across genres contend with isolation, memory, and the limits of narrative. How do you tell a story with only one character? How do you evoke the world that was and render what has been lost? We will look at how authors balance interiority with worldbuilding, the vast with the mundane, the aftermath with the event. Readings will include a mix of short stories and novels (expect to read a novel a week) from authors including Marlen Haushofer, Jacqueline Harpman, Solvej Balle, Octavia Butler, Ray Bradbury, Jeff VanderMeer, Victor Serge, J. G. Ballard, Doris Lessing, and Cormac McCarthy. There will be short writing exercises throughout the semester and a final project.

Faculty

• Elvia Wilk

Seminar—Spring | 4 credits

WRIT 7813

The rapid expansion of digital media over the past two decades has given us unprecedented access to the lives of strangers. From social media and message boards to gossip sites and newspaper archives, the internet has encouraged all of us to breach the barricades of one another’s privacy for the simple pleasure of looking. Observing histories of Hollywood fandom, true crime, and our new parasocial fantasy lives, this class will examine the areas of overlap between the self and the other, focusing on whether or not it is possible to find redemptive value in our collective voyeurism. Each student will spend the semester researching an individual of their choosing; final papers will focus on determining parallels between the life of the writer and the life of their subject.

Faculty

• Alissa Bennett

Seminar—Spring | 4 credits

WRIT 7410

Narrative prose is a relative newcomer still emerging from the shadows of its older siblings, poetry and drama. This turns out to have big implications, both for writing and for workshopping. It's hard enough to talk about the poetic elements of a great story or novel (or profile or memoir)…but what about the dramatics? What makes characters come to life on the page? In what plot or plots should they find themselves? What separates an urgent scene from a flat one? What is "the three-act structure" and how can it help or hinder? And what can any of this tell us about the larger drama of writing itself? This craft class, designed for anyone who's ever wrestled with the "story" part of storytelling, will focus on the complex relationships among the dramatic elements of character, plot, and structure—and what writers of narrative can steal, and have stolen, from their colleagues in the theatre. Craft readings will draw on the work of novelists who have engaged with these questions as well as directors and playwrights: Virginia Woolf, Constantin Stanislavski, Anton Chekhov, Suzann Lori-Parks, David Mamet, Deborah Eisenberg, Edward P. Jones, Grace Paley, Mavis Gallant, Yoon Choi, and others.

Faculty

• Garth Risk Hallberg

Seminar—Spring | 4 credits

WRIT 7115

In this course, we will read and thoroughly engage with one contemporary debut collection of poetry per week to dissect each book until we understand its anatomy. We will examine everything from the poet’s voice(s) to what makes an effective first poem and last poem to the precision behind a book’s structure and sequencing. Most importantly, we will cultivate a practice of asking questions of these books to seek answers that guide our own books in the making: How do collections touching on numerous topics hold the reader with a guiding thread? How do collections navigating a singular obsession or central narrative incorporate moments of reprieve or surprise for the reader? What is a book’s relationship to the reader in the first place? What is the difference between a middle poem that feels like filler versus a middle poem that makes the collection fuller? How do we balance experimentation with conventionally textual poems? How do we discern what is essential to our collections and what we need to let go? As we scrutinize and learn from an array of debut poetry collections such as Seam by Tarfia Faizullah, Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco by K. Iver, Ghost Of by Diana Khoi Nguyen, Concentrate by Courtney Faye Taylor, Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love by Keith S. Wilson, and others, we will generate new poems with our manuscripts in mind while holding those manuscripts loosely enough to let them evolve with our discoveries. The course will also be a practical space to discuss strategies for first-book submissions and answer questions about publishing. Our end goal is to demystify what makes a memorable debut collection and leave eager to work on our own books.

Faculty

• Eugenia Leigh

Seminar—Spring | 4 credits

WRIT 7410

A solid screenplay is the foundation of any great film, television program, or web series. Though filmmaking is a collaborative medium, the script is the blueprint for what happens on screen. It all begins with the writer and an idea. In this course, students will learn the fundamentals of writing for the screen: story structure, character development, dialogue, outlining, and formatting. Weekly writing assignments will be given, then read and discussed in class. In addition, students will read several feature-length and short-length screenplays as a way to strengthen their script-analysis skills. For the final project, students will outline, pitch, write, and revise an original short screenplay. Overall, the writer will build a screenwriter’s toolkit, useful for any future opportunities that may emerge with regard to writing for the screen.

Faculty

• K. Lorrel Manning

Seminar—Spring | 4 credits

WRIT 7410

Lingering, enduring, meaningful fiction is built on a singular foundation: the relationship between the writer and the reader. It is in that porous space where the author offers their hand and the reader takes it, agreeing to be led through every kind of emotional terrain imaginable—joyous, heartbreaking, comical, tragic, and more. The reader entrusts their safety to the author, who promises not to bungle that trust. When we are successful, we bring readers along on a fiercely intimate journey, facilitating a space where the biggest of raw feelings, of all stripes, are allowed to thrive—indeed, are taken seriously. A space where a reader might stop and think to themself, “Whoa. I’ve felt that way or had that thought myself.” This allows a reader to feel seen, heard, and validated in some particular way, perhaps for the first time. It is a genuine, intimate, human connection. But how do we get to that point when, as writers, we may not be sharing the same space or time as our readers? How do we open ourselves on the page as writers, and how do we earn the trust of a reader so that they might open themselves to our work? How do we create that intimacy? In this craft course, we will use various elements of the craft of fiction—voice, POV, character, to name a few—to better discern how we might approach building intimacy and trust with readers in our own fiction. Writers we read may include Elizabeth Strout, Toni Morrison, Taiye Selasi, Justin Torres, Deesha Philyaw, Alexander Chee, Hilary Leichter, Emma Copley Eisenberg, Yiyun Li, Jhumpa Lahiri, Torrey Peters, Nami Mun, and Bryan Washington, among others. This craft course will include generative prompts inspired by the readings.

Faculty

• Denne Michele Norris

Seminar—Spring | 4 credits

WRIT 7440

Do we keep houses—or do they keep us? In this course, we will explore the house as a character with agency, capable of imprisoning, manipulating, disorienting, and profoundly altering its inhabitants. As we read a range of novels and short stories, ranging from unsettling realism to weird speculative fiction to outright classic horror, we will consider the literary techniques that can bring architecture and place to such uncanny life. Students will observe the unique and compelling ways that authors use points of view, typography, nested stories, in-world documents, flashbacks/flashforwards, and more to elevate the house beyond mere setting and will have an opportunity to put these tools to use in their own biweekly fiction exercises, which we will workshop and discuss as a group. At the end of the semester, each student will turn in a portfolio that reflects a new understanding of the house and all it can make room to conceal.

Faculty

• Chandler Klang Smith

Seminar—Spring | 4 credits

WRIT 7813

The idea behind this craft class is that, while life itself may or may not have meaning, our personal narratives and reflections must. The class will look at the techniques that published authors have used to create a sense of movement in works of nonfiction and at how they have gone about suggesting meaning in ways that are not overly neat and that leave readers with something to contemplate. The published essays that we will discuss include “All of Me” by Melissa Febos, “Equal in Paris” by James Baldwin, “Aces and Eights” by Annie Dillard, and “Against Joie de Vivre” by Phillip Lopate, among others. As part of our discussions, students will take turns introducing published essays in class, with a focus on the way each writer approaches the challenge of conveying meaning. We will also have some in-class prompts and, as with workshops, students will meet with the instructor every other week in conferences. 

Faculty

• Clifford Thompson

Seminar—Spring | 4 credits

WRIT 7115

In our time together, I will try to provide you with as much matter as possible for your meditations on writing. The course is attuned to poetry, and your writing assignments will allow you to choose to write in forms or to choose prompts from The Practice of Poetry. Each week, I hope our discussions in the workshop will inspire you to write. Langston Hughes’s work will give us a way of looking at how one poet chose the scope of his poetic project and how he pursued it. I will bring in excerpts from the Tao Te Ching (Dao De Jing), a huge influence on my work and my life. We will also read Gem of the Ocean by August Wilson, which gives us a place to talk about drama as poetry in motion, as Suzanne Langer described it. Wilson’s work is often about what brings order and disorder to our lives. Tree Lines is an anthology compiled during the pandemic. I think it is a lovely window overlooking contemporary poetry. With close reading, we will visit poems by the dead poets. A lot has happened in poetry since 1950, my generation. Last note: Each class will begin with a short meditation and free writing.

Faculty

• Afaa Weaver

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

It’s not a stupid question, especially at a time when writing may seem harder than ever. We will spend the first month 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 that 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 you in and out of your comfort zones, running the gamut from realism to fabulism and featuring a multitude of rule makers and rule breakers for you to admire and inspire, love and loathe—sometimes simultaneously. All flavors of fiction are welcome.

Faculty

• Myla Goldberg

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 7017

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 December. We will have a wonderful time.

Faculty

• Marie Howe

Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

WRIT 7306

This workshop will focus on the short story. We will begin with Frank O’Connor's claim, in his introduction to The Lonely Voice, that the short story is a form defined not by its length as much as by its subject matter—what he calls the lives of “submerged population groups,” individuals in their loneliness for whom a “normal society is the exception rather than the rule.” Each week, we will workshop up to two student manuscripts and discuss a set of readings in the interest of thinking further about the form and its possibilities. A familiarity with “canonical” short-story collections—James Joyce’s Dubliners, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, and Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, among others—is recommended.

Faculty

• Rattawut Lapcharoensap

Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

WRIT 7452

This course explores how elements from mystery and crime fiction—such as a central sleuth, red herrings, and suspense—may 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.

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 7452

What were the first works of speculative fiction that made you want to travel through worlds of your own creation? We will 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 LeGuin, and Gilbert Hernandez.

Faculty

• Nelly Reifler

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. The 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 7710

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 that 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 that we produce for class.

Faculty

• Joseph Earl Thomas

Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

WRIT 7017

This workshop is inspired somewhat by the great field of pataphysics (the science of imaginary solutions) and somewhat by the collective terror of the blank page. We will spend some time exploring different modes of beginning and growing a poem, modes that are loosely based in, and then range beyond, the French surrealists and the Oulipians. We will play games of chance, invoke dream states, and practice listening for (your own) "inexhaustible murmur"—and we will also play with numbers, examine relationships between contexts and constraints, and make rules (impossible, labyrinthian rules!) born out of the tendencies of your current work. While neither absolute freedom nor imprisoning form may ultimately work for you, my hope is that you will see where on the spectrum your own writing processes feel most alive and where and how these modes may help you re-enter and revise your poems. The poets who will help us include Cody-Rose Clevidence, M. Nourbese Philip, Anne Garreta, Sawako Nakayasu, Farnoosh Fathi, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Mónica de la Torre, and Mathias Svalina. Alfred Jarry will be our lodestar.

Faculty

• Darcie Dennigan

Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

WRIT 7710

Designed for writers working on a memoir manuscript, each student will have the opportunity to blueprint their project as a whole in conference meetings, as well as to workshop sections of their material in class. Ideally, workshop conversations will be gently informed by the inquiry and discovery of the first semester, including: recognizing and amplifying the idiosyncratic charms of the narrator’s voice, reimagining approaches to time and dramatic structure, locating and leaning into the heat/drama of individual scenes, writing characters alive enough to wander into readers’ dreams, and identifying the primary engines of momentum/tension/propulsion. We will also continue to investigate what “memoir” encompasses. Knowing where to place the frame—having the courage and insight to cut the extraneous and preserve the essential—is the memoir writer’s first, most crucial task. Typically, a memoir frames a specific time period or dramatic event or arc of psychic evolution within the memoirist’s life. And atypically? We will think together about how far the form can be bent without breaking. Ideally, by semester’s end, every writer will have a clear frame around the story that they are telling and will be actively working toward a full first draft. Though this class is designed as the second half of a yearlong progression in drafting a memoir manuscript, it is also open to new writers. The instructor is happy to meet in advance with anyone wondering whether the class can serve their work in progress.

Faculty

• Heather Harpham

Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

WRIT 7306

While this workshop will not break the workshop mold and will feature many of the conventions of the genre (peer critique, analysis of published works, writing prompts, etc.), our reading list will focus exclusively on formal experimentation in fiction. I hope to share with my students the freedom and mobility entailed by structural play and innovation and to promote varieties of writing that do not heavily rely on what the novelist John Hawkes once called “the enemies of the novel”—plot, character, setting, and theme. Students will workshop two stories over the course of the semester, the second of which ought to employ (or be inspired by) some of the structural chicanery that we will be discussing in class. Our weekly writing exercises will, likewise, require students to seek out new arrangements for their work. Our reading list will include patterned escalation stories (Donald Barthelme, Julio Cortazar), “listing” stories (Merc Fenn Wolfmoor, Lucia Berlin, Margaret Atwood), circular stories (Jorge Luis Borges, Maurice Sendak), stories poured into structures not normally associated with fiction (Carmen Maria Machado, Yann Martel, Harlan Ellison), and stories collaged from disparate parts (Michael Ondaatje, Shelley Jackson). The goal is to expand the borders of fiction, to experience modalities outside the traditional plot-and-character-driven narrative scheme, and (most importantly) to play on the page…to see fiction as a kind of serious play. Students should be excited to step outside their normal compositional process, to take risks, and to support their peers’ risk-taking. Alis grave nil, friends. May language release you from its lies.

Faculty

• David Hollander

Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

WRIT 7306

Human nature is flawed, so it would be surprising if the only people we would come across in this world were the righteous. Those who think the task of literature is to extract a “pearl” from a gang of villains is to deny its very essence.... To limit its functions to nothing but the extraction of “pearls” would threaten its very existence as much as insisting that, when Levitan paints a tree, he should ignore its inconveniently grubby bark or its yellowing leaves…. In for a penny, in for a pound: However degrading he may find it, [the writer] has no choice but to overcome his squeamishness and soil his imagination with the filth of life…. The writer is no different from your average newspaper reporter. How would you regard a reporter who, from misplaced delicacy or a willingness to pander to his readers, never wrote about anyone but honest burghers, idealistic ladies or virtuous railwaymen?

To the chemist, there is no such thing on this earth as an impure substance. The writer must be as objective as a chemist. He must turn his back on the subjective preferences of the world and recognize that dung heaps have a useful role to play in the countryside, that ignoble passions are every bit as much a part of life as noble ones.

—Anton Chekhov to Maria Kiselyova, 14 January 1887

“The death of Satan was a tragedy / For the imagination. A capital / Negation destroyed him in his tenement / And, with him, many blue phenomena,” claims the speaker of Wallace Stevens’s “Esthetique du Mal.” In addition to coming together to support one another through workshopping, the readings in this workshop will be structured around thinking about the uses of the antagonist in fiction—of representations of the evil, the malign, the morally errant; of the criminal and criminalized; of the poetry of “bad behavior” (to use the title of Mary Gaitskill’s first story collection); of the repellent, the antisocial; of the “blue phenomena” available to writers through such examinations. We will begin with essays from Agnes Callard, Charles Baxter, and Maggie Nelson before turning our attention to examples of the antagonist in fiction from writers that may include Chekhov, Grace Paley, Flannery O’Connor, Leonard Michaels, Mary Gaitskill, Kate Braverman, Edward P. Jones, Iris Owens, Haruki Murakami, Dorothy Baker, Otessa Moshfegh, Garth Greenwell, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth, William Gay, and Tove Ditlevsen, among others. While students need not submit work with such emphases—everybody is encouraged to submit whatever work they imagine would be most useful to receive feedback about—the readings have been selected in the hopes of conducting a semester-long conversation about antagonists and moral complexity in fiction.

Faculty

• Rattawut Lapcharoensap

Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

WRIT 7017

This course will focus primarily and humanistically on participants' own work. Roughly a third of discussion time will be devoted to seminal contemporary poems, with attention to poets of color and marginalized voices. We will examine poetics, prosody, issues of form, pace, voicing, and tone in contemporary poetry and in radically experimental texts. We will 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—how do we go beyond intent? How do poets take advantage of the dazzling array of options in contemporary poetry while honing a unique voice? Where there are no answers, we will explore. Our emphasis will be on craft and individual style, not judgment. Expect to read hungrily, to approach texts in new ways, and to create many wild drafts and a finished portfolio of six-to-infinity poems. 

Faculty

• Dennis Nurkse

Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

WRIT 7306

Life, friends, is linear. We march ever onward—minute by minute, day by day. Blah. But in fiction? We zip ahead to the future, then dip back into the past. We flash, dilate, tease, jump, or lapse entirely. This is, at least in part, the magic of storytelling: total freedom of temporal movement. But how do you make good use of that freedom? How do you activate an experience for your reader that’s at once bold and seamless, bloody raw and richly considered? In this workshop, we will turn our eye to how your writing navigates—and manipulates—time. We will examine how temporal shifts can influence tone, both on the level of the story as well as the sentence. We will also engage with a wide range of contemporary short-story writers—such as Justin Torres, Jenny Zhang, Zadie Smith, Zach Williams, Jhumpa Lahiri, Lorrie Moore, and Ben Lerner—to see what we can pick up from the tools and strategies that they introduce. But our primary focus will be your work and mobilizing the possibilities that lie within it.

Faculty

• Ben Purkert

Graduate Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

WRIT 7710

Why are our families so good at pushing our buttons? Because they were the ones who installed them. In this class, we will examine how authors depict and recreate their closest loved ones on the page. A mix of generative prompts, reading analysis, and antiracist workshop format will center on the theme of family. Authors we will read include James Baldwin, Vladimir Nabokov, Isle McEllroy, Michelle Filgate, Hyesung Song, Julia Blackburn, and others. 

Faculty

• Domenica Ruta

Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

WRIT 7323

This workshop aims to help students write a long-form work: a novel, memoir, or some hybrid project—from the beginning toward the end. The workshop is perhaps slightly different on two fronts: It is a yearlong class. It will include a craft component with a lot of theory and discussion to give you a grounded understanding of what drives a text and thereby drives a reader to read it. The course spans two semesters. The first semester 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's important to understand just what is compelling to a stranger coming to your story cold. So, we'll 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'll 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, beyond the theory. Outside readings will form a core to the first-semester discussions, with many exercises and weekly prompts. In the second semester, we'll workshop what people have put together during the first semester, hopefully having benefited from learning these principles. Because it's a yearlong effort, we'll have latitude for stretching beyond the conventional boundaries of "craft class" and "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 unconventional ideas (though not entirely). It will absolutely include dark, complicated, and emotionally difficult readings. Several may be triggering to some people. Peers will be free to write what they want, as well. I'd like to ensure an open discussion, free of remonstration, in the interest of experience and learning. Please consider this before committing to the class. I'm aiming for a gestalt here, and I hope the discussions and ideas will continue to unpack long after the class is over. I'll be learning alongside you. I may try to write something, too. I'd love to think that, in the end, we created something original, enduring, and compelling.

Faculty

• David Ryan

Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

WRIT 7452

“I feel like something bad is going to happen to me. I feel like something bad has happened. It hasn't reached me yet but it's on its way.” —Lake Mungo (2008)

In this workshop, we will explore the topic of dread in fiction. Dread is incredibly powerful and multifaceted: It is both anticipation and fear, attraction and repulsion. On the page, dread can manifest as anything from a subtle mood of disquiet to a gorily ostentatious splash of horror. We will read stories from writers such as Donald Barthelme, Lisa Tuttle, ’Pemi Aguda, Tony Tulathimutte, and Nathan Ballingrud to learn how they evoke dread masterfully, in a variety of ways, and discuss craft techniques and thematic approaches to imbuing our own work with dread. While some of the reading list can be classified as horror, this class is genre-agnostic. We will follow dread anywhere it is to be found; and, luckily for us, it can be found everywhere.

Faculty

• Alice Sola Kim

Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

WRIT 7452

This course is a writing workshop interested in worldbuilding and the distinction(s) between what we might call realism and speculative fiction: fantasy, science fiction, horror, and especially everything in-between. Following an artistic trajectory that, at varying historical junctures, has either valorized or disparaged the fantastic—whether such criticisms took into account the importance of literary details, techniques and genres with regards to representing categories of difference—we will interrogate and create literature that thinks through the simultaneous gap and proximity between fantasy and reality. In order to do this we will read widely across primary and secondary texts that take up these concerns and, when appropriate, suggest ongoing dimensions of critique related to our contemporary moment. We will read work by writers such as George Schuyler and Yoko Towada, Gayl Jones and Renee Gladman, Fernanda Melchor and Samuel Delany, NK Jemisin and Mariana Enriquez.

Faculty

• Joseph Earl Thomas