Global Arc

This is a multi-genre writing class that explores daily creative practice. This semester, you'll be challenged to push your creative limits and to take risks in your work. Together we'll explore how we can become more alert to the world and how, through language, we can respond in fresh ways to the events of our lives. As we imagine other experiences and engage in a conversation with the long tradition of writing, we'll practice thinking flexibly and seeing opportunity in failure. In this class, you will be a member of a community of writers prepared to challenge and support each other as we navigate the process of creation.

Poets should come to this class ready to move, yell, play, and discover. Writing and performing our way towards a deeper understanding of ourselves as spoken word poets, we will collaboratively work our way towards a final public performance and, hopefully, the tools to better move the crowds we face, which are the tools to change the world one poem at a time.

Advanced practice in the original composition of poetry for discussion in regularly scheduled workshop meetings. Prerequisites: Two 200-level CWR courses.

Advanced practice in the original composition of poetry for discussion in regularly scheduled workshop meetings. Prerequisites: Two 200-level CWR courses.

Advanced practice in the original composition of fiction for discussion in regularly scheduled workshop meetings.

Advanced practice in the original composition of fiction for discussion in regularly scheduled workshop meetings. Prerequisites: Two 200-level CWR courses.

Advanced practice in the translation of literary works from another language into English supplemented by the reading and analysis of standard works. Prerequisites: 205 or 206 and by application.

Advanced practice in the translation of literary works from another language into English supplemented by the reading and analysis of standard works. Prerequisites: 205 or 206 or by Program permission.

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.