MFA Writing Courses

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.

"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.

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.

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 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’ approach 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 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 towards a complete first draft of each student’s memoir. Though this course is designed as the first half of a year-long progression in drafting a memoir manuscript, it can be taken as a semester course. 

This course will explore the essay not merely as a form, but 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.

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 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.

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.

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 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 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 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 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.

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.

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?

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 has inspired them. The links between the published work and the original work can 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, 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This course explores 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 stories or chapters.

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.