PQ: Instructor consent required. Online submission deadline: 11/16/09. Submit a 3–5 page writing sample, preferably fiction, and a one-paragraph statement of intent.
Staff. Day and Time: Tues, 1:30 to 4:20 PM.
PQ: Instructor consent required. Online submission deadline: 11/16/09. Submit a 3–5 page writing sample in fiction and a one-paragraph statement of intent.
In this course, we will focus equally on writing of drafts and the dedicated revision of those drafts. Using student work as the basis of much of our conversation, we will discuss what we want to achieve, and what specific tools we can use to strengthen our storytelling craft. Close readings of selected fictional voices from elsewhere will enlarge our notions of what fiction does and how it does it. Risk-taking and the development of rigorous practices will be encouraged. Students are welcome to write stand-alone short stories, stories that form part of a collection, or submit excerpts from a novella or novel.
This workshop-centered course aims at the development of extended projects for students completing their BA/MA theses or working on major projects. These projects include novels, novellas, or short story collections. Within the workshop, we will seek to make significant revisions to these projects, particularly in aspects of plotting, character development, and focus. To this end, we will examine work by other contemporary writers, including Gayl Jones, Jhumpa Lahiri, Stacey Levine, and Mary Gaitskill.
PQ: Instructor consent required. Open only to students completing creative theses or major projects. Online submission deadline: 11/16/09. Please submit a 3–5 page writing sample in fiction and a brief plan for your project.
This course addresses a range of techniques for writing poetry, making use of various compelling models drawn primarily from international modernisms on which to base our own writing. In this sense, the course will constitute an apprenticeship to modern poetry. We will consider the breadth of approaches currently available to poets, as well as the value of reading as a means of developing an understanding of how to write poetry. Each week students will bring poems for discussion, developing a portfolio of revised work by the quarter’s end. Additionally, students will keep detailed notebooks, as well as developing critical skills for understanding poetry in the form of two short essays.
Instructor: Staff. Day and Time: Thurs, 1:30 to 4:20 PM.
PQ: Instructor consent required. Online submission deadline: 11/16/09. Submit a 3–5 page writing sample in poetry and a one-paragraph statement of intent.
This course invites students to investigate the practice and theory of literary translation. We will use a workshop format to provide feedback on your respective translation projects, which may include translating a sequence of poems, a short story, or a one-act play. We will also consider various theories of translation by Frederick Schleiermacher, Walter Benjamin, Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Lewis, and others. Proficiency in a foreign language is preferable for admission to the course.
Instructor: James Shea. Day and Time: Thurs, 1:30 to 4:20 PM.
PQ: Instructor consent required. Online submission deadline: 11/16/09. Submit a one-page letter of application, detailing your experience with foreign languages, your background in translation (if any), and the proposed text for your translation project.
The terms “sound” and “voice” may evoke—with regard to poetry workshop—ideas of poetic prosody, development of the individual voice, and study of the lyric. This course will construe “sound” and “voice” in broader parameters, allowing us to explore counter-intuitive concepts related to acoustics, representation, and meaning in a number of media, that will contribute to our production of profoundly sonically sensitive writing. Topics under consideration in class will include: relations among voice, language, affect / expression, and the body; the representation of nonverbal sound in poetry and of extra-musical sound and phenomena in music; sound poetries’ innovative use of the sonic properties of language; the sonic realization of visual poetry texts and of visual musical scores in performance; deconstructions of the opposition between silence and sound and renovations of the category of “silence”; strategies for pointing to the limits of the verbal medium and for transcending or instrumentalizing those limits via linguistic sonority (for instance, canceling meaning/expressivity through sound); the concept of the “acousmêtre” and other salient aspects of film sound; lyric apostrophe and the figure of prosopopoiea, the possibility of a primordially written lyric, and issues of recording, citation (appropriation), and collage in relation to lyric presence; the representation of sound in painting; micro-prosodies of standard and non-standard Englishes. Materials within our purview: sound art, performance and sound poetries, music, visual musical scores, visual poetry, “acoustic” paintings, film sound, and traditional and avant-garde poetries as well as poetries in non-standard Englishes. Students are encouraged to do their own sonic research and to bring in media relevant to the class.
Instructor: Judith Goldman. Day and Time: Thurs, 1:30 to 4:20 PM.
PQ: Instructor consent required. Online submission deadline: 11/16/09. Submit a 3–5 page writing sample in poetry and a brief plan for your project.
PQ: Instructor consent required. Online submission deadline: 11/16/09. Submit a 3–5 page writing sample in creative nonfiction and a one-paragraph statement of intent.
Journalists today are expected to know the standards that guided reporters in the 20th Century, but they are expected to write to those standards more quickly and more often for the dynamic media of the 21st Century. In this course we will study and practice traditional forms of newswriting while taking note of the pressures pushing journalism toward new forms. We will practice the objective style, the inverted pyramid, narrative journalism, hybrid and alternative forms, and the interactive conversation that now brings readers into dialogue with writers and their stories. We will cover the news, conduct interviews, produce profiles, write arts reviews, discuss the legal and ethical obligations of the profession. As much as possible, we will follow the rituals of the job, completing weekly assignments that target the audience of a particular publication.
Instructor: Jeff McMahon. Day and Time: Tues/Thurs, 12:00 to 1:20 PM.
PQ: Instructor consent required. Online submission deadline: 11/16/09. Submit a 3–5 page writing sample, preferably journalistic, and a one-paragraph statement of intent.
Instructor: Dan Raeburn. Day and Time: Tues, 9:00 to 11:50 AM.
PQ: Instructor consent required. Open only to students working on creative theses or major projects. Online submission deadline: 11/16/09. Submit a 3–5 page writing sample in nonfiction and a brief plan for your project.
PQ: No prerequisites. Online bid.
This workshop for playwrights will focus on the varieties of play structure, looking to playwrights both past and present who have left plainspoken (though often contradictory), nuts and bolts advice on how a play “works.” In addition to working on our own plays, each week we’ll read a play and one or two short essays by a single playwright that give his or her thoughts on how a piece for the theater might be constructed. Playwrights to be read will include Moliere, Strindberg, (Marsha) Norman, Mamet, Brecht, Scribe.