Global Arc

What compels us to write about ourselves? What drives us to read about the lives of others? Where is the intersection between public life and private life? In this workshop we will examine different approaches to writing about the people, places and events that have shaped us.

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.

How do we craft narrative from the material of another person's life? We will look at the oral history interview as an act of spontaneous literature - one that contains both the individual story, and the larger history. Students will learn the art of listening, the ethics of interpretation, and approach the writing process as translation of experience. We will borrow from documentary practices across different media (film, visual storytelling, audio storytelling), allowing them to inspire our efforts to find the literary forms that respond to the lived histories that are shared with us.

A reading-intensive advanced fiction workshop dedicated to a close reading of Primo Levi's The Periodic Table, an indefinable masterpiece of Italian literature which combines autobiographical and fictional elements, calling into question the equivocal relationship between truth and invention. Careful analysis of this text will serve as an ongoing frame of reference for class discussion and creative inspiration.

Writing about people who do not share our race, culture, gender, or sexual orientation is high-risk, particularly if we write from a place of privilege. Often, the fear of appropriation and stereotyping means that we avoid writing about characters of other backgrounds completely. Instead of excluding writing about or from the perspective of characters of Otherness at all, this course will provide the background and space to think critically and openly about the representations our work creates, even as we attempt to create our own work in this context. By application.

Students gain special access to the critical understanding of literature through their involvement in the creative process. Topics include autobiography, prosody, non-fiction, revision and point of view. Students are expected to prepare a manuscript at least every other week. Specific topics and prerequisites will vary. By application.

This course will introduce students to the foundational principles and techniques of screenwriting, taking into account the practical considerations of film production. Questions of thematic cohesiveness, plot construction, logical cause and effect, character behavior, dialogue, genre consistency and pace will be explored as students gain confidence in the form by completing a number of short screenplays. The course will illustrate and analyze the power of visual storytelling to communicate a story to an audience, and will guide students to create texts that serve as "blueprints" for emotionally powerful and immersive visual experiences.