Global Arc

Elio Vittorini's 1941 anthology Americana--showcasing thirty-three American writers translated for the first time into Italian - transformed the literary consciousness of a nation under fascism. More recently, the publication of Elena Ferrante in English has met with unanticipated and overwhelming success. In both instances, literary translation broke through barriers of parochialism and became a defining cultural phenomenon. In this workshop we will divide our time between translating excerpts of Italian fiction to English and vice-versa in order to better understand the beauty, breadth, points of connection and challenges of both languages.

What compels us to write about ourselves? And what drives us to read about the lives of others? In this workshop we will examine different approaches to writing about the people, places and events that have made us who and how we are. Through the reading and discussion of a number of autobiographical texts, we will gather a set of writerly tools that will help us in writing about our own life experiences. In other words, we'll pay close attention to the craft-based choices made by writers of memoirs and personal essays, and see what those choices will yield when applied to our own material.

In this writing workshop, students will be invited to write literary nonfiction essays that address their chosen imagined audience. We will engage writing by authors who have done the same in their work. From the fields of Oral History and Memory Studies we will borrow ideas of listening as a dialogic and intersubjective encounter, and the embodied self. We will reframe conversations about voicelessness + facelessness, and consider instead concepts of un-hearing + un-seeing - inviting new agencies and accountabilities into our creative practice.

The Body: we all have one and inhabit it in a myriad of ways, as a source of joy, a contradiction to be reckoned with, a failed experiment, an inadequate container for all that we are, and an unending mystery. In traditional workshops we don't discuss what we are writing about and why; content and context come second to craft. In Vital Signs we will explore narratives of the body, beginning by reading material illustrative of a wide-range of expression and experience while working toward finding language for our individual physical and emotional experience.

All literature is short - compared to our lives, anyway - but we'll be concentrating on poetry and prose at their very shortest. The reading will include proverbs, aphorisms, greguerias, one-line poems, riddles, jokes, fragments, haiku, epigrams and microlyrics. Imagism, contemporary shortists, prose poems, various longer works assembled from small pieces, and possibly even flash fiction. Students will take away from the thrift and edge of these literary microorganisms a new sense of what can be left out of your work and new ideas about how those nebulae of pre-draft in your notebooks might condense into stars and constellations.

This workshop explores the link between racial identity and poetic innovation in work by contemporary poets of color. Experimental or avant-garde poetry in the American literary tradition has often defined itself as "impersonal," "against expression" or "post-identity." Unfortunately, this mindset has tended to exclude or downplay poems that engage issues of racial identity. This course explores works where poets of color have treated racial identity as a means to destabilize literary ideals of beauty, mastery and the autonomy of the text while at the same time engaging in poetic practices that subvert conceptions of identity or authenticity.