MFA Writing Courses

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. 

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 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.

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

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 course 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 fiction and nonfiction are relative newcomers, still emerging from the shadows of their 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 and memoirists who have engaged with these questions as well as directors and playwrights: Virginia Woolf, Constantin Stanislavski, Anton Chekhov, Patricia Lockwood, 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, When My Brother Was an Aztec by Natalie Diaz, Concentrate by Courtney Faye Taylor, 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. Throughout the semester, we will also be at work on our individual "Personal Resource Collections"—a digital folder or paper notebook that will become a trove of material to pull from as you continue to work on your books beyond this class. 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 or television project. Though filmmaking is a collaborative medium, the script is the blueprint for what ultimately happens on screen. It all begins with the writer and an idea.

In this screenwriting course, students will learn the fundamentals of writing for the screen: story structure, character development, dialogue, outlining, formatting, and revision. Weekly writing assignments will be given, then read and discussed in class. Students will also read a selection of screenplays, primarily short-form along with some feature-length work, as a way of strengthening their script-analysis skills and gaining a better understanding of how stories work on the page and on screen.

For the final project, students will outline, pitch, write, and revise an original short screenplay. By the end of the course, students will have developed a practical screenwriter’s toolkit that they can continue to use in future 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, point of view, 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

This craft class will explore narratives in which the very nature of reality is upended, transformed, or simply revealed to be not what we had initially imagined. Reality upheavals can be insane and chaotic, renting old worlds asunder to slap together the new, or they can look more like subtle and unsettling alterations doled out carefully. They can be pulp-style shock and awe, intricate postmodern freak-outs, or goofy surprises; they are the kinds of narratives in which a family haunted by ghosts discovers that it is they who are the ghosts, or a man realizes that his whole life is a television show and he's the only one not acting, or an alien planet populated by hyper-intelligent apes turns out to be a future Earth. (These are all descriptions of movies we are not watching for class, since I am not trying to spoil any texts). We will examine work that remakes itself with regards to time and place and space, with characters who, like people, help us to create our reality, or more ominously, simply do it for us, and explore how and why these texts do what they do. We will discuss questions such as: What is a text saying about the world via its blatant play with reality and perception? How do narrative surprises and reconfigurations feel "unfair" versus "fair", and how much does that matter? And once you know the trick, what's left? Is it worth it?

Faculty

• Alice Sola Kim

Seminar—Spring | 4 credits

WRIT 7813

The idea behind this course is that while life itself may or may not have meaning, our personal narratives and reflections must. The class will look at the techniques 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 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. For each class, students will write a paragraph about each reading, discussing the meaning conveyed and the techniques involved in doing so. 

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 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—Spring | 4 credits

WRIT 7850

This course is oriented toward practice over product. We will read as writers—reverse-engineering texts to identify the choices authors make and why—and then apply what we learn to our own work. Exercises (drawing from Ursula K. Le Guin's manual Steering the Craft) will target the building blocks of fiction: voice, tone, point of view, tense, speed, and dialogue. We will explore concepts such as Kelly Link's idea of "nighttime logic" and Mark Fisher's writing on the weird and the eerie, as touchstones for the particular demands (and possibilities) of speculative fiction. Weekly reading will include Haruki Murakami, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ling Ma, Stansław Lem, Brian Evenson, Olga Ravn, Liliana Colanzi, and Jonathan Lethem, spanning essays, novels, and stories across a genre mix. Students should be prepared to read a lot, share their work, and write a final project. 

Faculty

• Elvia Wilk

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

Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

WRIT 7017

Be epic, take up space, forget that poetry is an art of endings. In this workshop, you will experiment with insistence, extremity, suspension, suppleness, dispersion, brittleness, time constraints, recursion, fractals, stanzaic forms, collage, and yes, narrative, all toward the writing of a poem that takes up the space of an entire book. You will investigate the impulse to end the poem at the page’s end, and practice seeing how the writing of the poem can meld with your daily rituals to become part of the ritual itself. Our readings will include some book-length works, likely Proof of Stake: An Elegy by Charles Valle; Ossuaries by Dionne Brand; My Life by Lyn Hejinian; The Plentitude We Cry For by Sarah Appleton; Poemland by Chelsey Minnis; Deepstep Come Shining by C.D. Wright; I Love a Broad Margin to My Life by Maxine Hong Kingston; Crawl by Héctor Viel Temperley; Midwinter Day by Bernadette Mayer; Pink Waves by Sawako Nakayasu; and The Book of the Green Man by Ronald Johnson.

Faculty

• Darcie Dennigan

Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

WRIT 7710

In this workshop, humor and joy will be the leavening agents we invite one another to integrate into material of any weight or gravity. Humor—whether used as the driving force of a satirical piece or merely as levity within a largely serious work—affords writers a way to disarm and charm readers; to share a breath, across time. Likewise, finding artful ways to animate joy on the page is a gift only rare writers have fully explored—it can often feel indulgent or unnecessary. But in environments alive with worry, uncertainty, and despair, joy in our writing matters more than ever; it’s a power source to propel us forward, not with blind optimism, but with deep appreciation for what is worth preserving. This workshop will challenge writers to fold humor and joy into any creative nonfiction narrative under development, while balancing these inspirations against each piece’s overarching aims and architecture. As effortless as humor and joy may appear on the page, like any conscious act of craft, these are deliberate gestures the writer has chosen to enrich their work. Our aim will be to harness the special momentum that joy and humor offer creative nonfiction and to amplify both within our own writing.

Writers whose work may serve as guides, from creative nonfiction and other genres, include: Elizabeth Alexander, John Berger, David Cale, Chen Chen, Issa Rae, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, George Saunders, Hanif Abdurraqib, Virginia Woolf, Jo Ann Beard, and Caitlin Moran.

Faculty

• Heather Harpham

Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

WRIT 7452

While today the term “speculative fiction” casts a very wide net, encompassing nearly everything that is not straight-up literary realism, this super-genre’s roots are a lot more specific. The term was (arguably) coined in 1941 by Robert Heinlein, who wanted to classify a certain type of science-fiction that didn’t care so much about the science. Heinlein was a member of the vanguard of this initial “speculative fiction,” which was a sub-genre, not a super-genre. These original spec writers were more interested in the human than the technological, and they wanted their fiction cordoned off from the harder science-fiction (or what was sometimes called “science-fact-ion”) of writers interested in real-science hypotheses and explorations.

This course will revert to that initial understanding of speculative fiction. You won’t see stories by Ted Chiang (or Andy Weir, or Isaac Asimov) on the syllabus—writers who really get the science but seem only marginally invested in character and language. What you will see are both contemporary (Kim Fu, Kelly Link) and golden-age (Harlan Ellison, Ursula Le Guin) spec writers who employ a soft science-fiction to explore the big themes that we often associate with more “literary” writing. We’ll be looking at these fictions from two primary perspectives: First, we will ask, What does this writer have to say and how are their goals served by genre?; second, we will ask, How is this story constructed at the level of language, voice, and structure?

My own work is usually considered “speculative,” but I don’t write with this in mind. I believe that great fiction is interested in the deep mysteries of consciousness, time, and suffering. Genre—and more specifically what I’m calling Science(less) Fiction—can serve as a delivery system for these themes… as a path into the mystery. The work on our syllabus will reflect this point of view. 

Faculty

• David Hollander

Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

WRIT 7306

Human nature is flawed, so it would be surprising if the only people we come across in this world were to be 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…[h]owever degrading he may find it, [the writer] has no choice but to overcome his squeamishness and soil his imagination with the filth of life… —Anton Chekhov to Maria Kiselyova, 14 January 1887

I kept being virtuous, and virtuous in ways that were destroying me. And when I let the repellent in, I found that I was alive on my own terms. —Philip Roth, on his early work, to Saul Bellow

For the drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent. —Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story

In addition to coming together to support one another through workshopping, our readings will be structured around thinking about the uses of antagonists 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, the deviant. We will examine fiction from writers that may include Anton 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, 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 7306

“Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality,” José Esteban Muñoz famously wrote in Cruising Utopia. He went on to conclude that “the future is queerness's domain.” In this workshop, we will explore what is unique about queer fiction, an umbrella term that seems both reductive and indecisively broad. Beyond the sexual orientation and gender of its subjects, what makes a piece of fiction queer? How do queer writers play around with time, character, setting, and desire in manners that seem uniquely queer? Must a queer book contain queer characters, or can queerness be a lens through which the author writes about any subject? We will read texts from Torrey Peters, Carmen Maria Machado, Djuna Barnes, Dennis Cooper, and others to get a better sense of what exactly we mean when we talk about queer literature. In addition to class readings, all students will workshop twice during the semester. Students do not need to be writing queer literature to enroll in the class. All fiction submissions are welcome.

Faculty

• Isle McElroy

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 towards 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

Plot is an essential component of fiction for some readers, not for others. It's in vogue, then it's out. But desire is timeless. A character who desperately wants something, or someone, is one we can identify with, in our own living and breathing yearning. But rarely is that desire fully satisfied on the page. Anne Carson defines the conditions for eros as "the lover, the beloved, and that which comes between them." How might we apply this to our understanding of fictional structures, both in our own short fiction and that of Anton Chekhov, Annie Proulx, Zadie Smith, and others? In this workshop, we will look closely at how desire serves to motivate stories into page-turners, while teasing readers toward pleasure in the process. 

Faculty

• Ben Purkert

Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

WRIT 7710

This workshop is intended to be taken as a continuation of Nonfiction Craft: The Craft of Memoir (WRIT 7813) as a yearlong sequence, but is open to all students. In this workshop, we will follow a feedback protocol that seeks to hold a mirror up to the author and their work rather than critique it in the traditional workshop format. We will use a template of questions that help the author become more conscious of their choices and the effects those choices have on the reader. Authors can and should participate actively in the workshop of their own material so that no voice is ever silenced. A workshop letter of 1-2 pages following specific guidelines will be required for each workshop submission. Students—new and continuing from the fall—must have a minimum of 20-30 pages of new (not previously workshopped) creative nonfiction ready to submit. Due to the length and depth of the reading required by the workshop, there will be no syllabus outside student work.

Faculty

• Domenica Ruta

Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

WRIT 7323

The aim of this workshop is to help students write a long-form work—novel, memoir, or some hybrid project—from beginning to an approaching end. Its parallel goal is to give you, through theory and discussion, a grounded understanding of what drives a text, and thereby drives a reader to read it. We will begin discussing traditional conventions of plot and character as a launching point for more unconventional approaches. It will be an ambitious class, as outside readings and discussion will supplement the discussion of student work. 

Longer work demands a commitment from the reader. We need to understand how to make our ideas interesting to a stranger coming at our story, cold. I believe that first grasping traditional ideas of plot, unity, and catharsis is the best way of then branching off into other methods of building narrative interest. So, a part of each session will be devoted to outside readings, ideas, and some theory; the other half will be given to a more conventional peer workshop. Topics covered will include Aristotle's Poetics and contemporary adaptations of the theory of plot, but soon move into other modes of thinking: how narrative plots are driven by metaphor, image chains, recursion and consecution, rhizomatic models and their variants, animistic and divinatory poetics, psychological and neurological concepts, models of desire, cinematic form, musical form, and so on. The ideas will be supported throughout with creative interpretations so that you can see how they work in practice, beyond the theory.

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. 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 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 we created something original, enduring, and compelling in the end.

Faculty

• David Ryan

Seminar—Spring | 5 credits

WRIT 7452

Taking its name from Julia Kristeva’s essay on abjection, this speculative fiction writing workshop will focus on horror as a hyper-lucid form of writing that deliberately pushes us beyond the preconceived notions of our own comfort and desire. We will consider critical reflections on horror as genre, structure of feeling, general revulsion, and sociopolitical critique alongside our readings of new, classical, and experimental fictions around the genre. We will ask what is horror’s relationship to other genres on the screen and on the page, and how it has changed in our own lifetimes and over the last hundred or so years. Across the primary and secondary divide we will read works by writers like Julia Kristeva herself, Bram Stoker, Shirley Jackson, Anne Rice, Henry James, Victor La Valle, Mariana Enriquez, and Grace Byron.

Faculty

• Joseph Earl Thomas