Course Offerings Spring 2022
CRW 6024Teaching Creative Writing
This course will examine the practical and philosophical issues of teaching creative writing at a variety of levels and to a variety of audiences. Its particular focus is on how practicing writers teach writing, so some discussions and readings will relate as much, if not more, to being a writer as they do to being a teacher of writing. The course is required for any MFA/GTAs hoping to be a teaching assistant for CRW 3010: Creative Writing or to teach a Community Workshop.
CRW 6130Workshop: Fiction Writing
Advanced composition in fiction writing, consideration of significant examples of novel and story forms. Aims at perfecting a series of short stories or novel chapters, improving critical abilities.
CRW 6331Poetry Workshop
This is a creative writing workshop focused on advanced composition of poetry. In this course, students write and perfect a series of poems while studying and writing about published poetic works to further improve their abilities in the critical interpretation of poetry. The workshop readings vary by semester but represent poetry written in a variety of forms and by a diverse selection of authors. Class time is split between discussion of student writing and published texts.
PAST COURSE OFFERINGS
CRW 6024Translation Workshop
In an ideal world, all writers would be translators, and all translators would be writers. I have said this many times, but it is no less true for that. Not only does the practice of literary translation allow us to bring as-yet-undiscovered work into another language, but it also forces us as writers to examine the materials of our craft. Translation will make you a better writer and a better reader. In addition to critiquing each other's translations of poetry, prose, or drama into English, we will examine various creative and perhaps unorthodox approaches to translation. You will explore and formulate your own strategies and approaches to both literary translation and creative writing. You do not need to be proficient in a foreign language to take this class.
CRW 6130Workshop: Fiction Writing
This course will focus on the close study of published fiction and the production of new manuscript material.
CRW 6024Nonfiction Forms
This is a workshop to practice writing and analyzing creative nonfiction. Our class time will be split between discussion of published works of nonfiction and workshopping students' writing. We will explore nonfiction written in a variety of forms—personal essay, literary journalism, memoir, the lyric essay—and learn about issues and trends in the genre. Students will offer helpful critical feedback to one another during workshop sessions, complete two installments of nonfiction, and a short reflection statement on their writing and revision plan for one of the pieces to be turned in at the end of the semester.
CRW 6331Workshop: Poetry Writing
The graduate poetry workshop welcomes poets--and also students concentrating in other genres: fiction, nonfiction, and hybrid forms. While the emphasis will be on your writing, the required reading will teach strategies and techniques to 1) enlarge personal experience and powerful personal emotions into the collective experience; 2) construct complex and unorthodox narrators; and 3) above all, to think and feel our way into previously hard to reach places in the psyche. Some of the texts we will use are Scott Barry Kaufman & Carolyn Gregoire's Wired To Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind; Robert Hass's A Little Book on Forms--not at all little and definitely not your typical book on forms; the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, which begins with Whitman and Dickinson; and a packet of poems and essays I have put together.
CRW 6024Prose Forms
In this workshop, students will have the option to write in any or all genres of prose: nonfiction, fiction and/or prose poetry. We will likewise read published work in all three genres (likely texts include: Redeployment by Phil Klay, Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay, and River of Shadows by Rebecca Solnit). Course discussions will address topics such as: a definition and history of form as it relates to prose; how length, audience expectation, content, structure, patterns and variations, style, genre and invented constraints can all serve as forms; the pros and cons of form; the merging of forms; and the value of inventing new forms. But, in the end and at its core, this will be a writing workshop, with the goal of expanding and deepening your writing via practice, analysis, and experimentation.
CRW 6236Creative Nonfiction Workshop
This is a workshop to practice writing and analyzing creative nonfiction. Our class time will be split between discussion of published works of nonfiction, examining essays and articles on craft, trying out techniques through short writing exercises, and workshopping students' writing. We will explore nonfiction written in a variety of forms—essay, literary journalism, memoir, graphic (comic) formats—and learn about issues and trends in the genre. Students will offer helpful critical feedback to one another during workshop sessions, complete both short writing assignments and two longer works of nonfiction, and complete a revision of one to be turned in at the end of the semester.
CRW 6024Teaching Creative Writing
This course will examine the practical and philosophical issues of teaching creative writing at a variety of levels and to a variety of audiences. Our particular focus is on how practicing writers teach writing, so some discussions and readings have as much to do with being a writer as they do to being a teacher of writing. Students develop a teaching portfolio that includes: syllabi and sample lectures for different levels and genres of creative writing classes, individual teaching philosophies, and a curriculum vitae. The course is required for any MFA/GTA students hoping to co-teach CRW 3010: Introduction to Creative Writing.
CRW 6024Special Topics: Creative Writing and Bookarts
This course will combine the traditional creative writing workshop with the practical and theoretical elements of bookarts, examining the development of bookarts as an accepted genre within the art world, and the use of text and art that complement one another and are, in effect, inextricable from one another in the final product. Students will complete focused writing assignments that consider the possibilities of the bookarts context and may be used in their projects. The class will meet half time in the studio at the Jaffe Center for Bookarts, and after several presentations of works from the collection, students will work on their own projects. Some materials will be provided, but students should consider investment of materials in terms of conventional textbook purchases. The culmination of the course will be a bookarts project of the student's own design that includes both creative writing and the skills learned in the studio.