Course descriptions vary with particular faculty members. The following are generic course descriptions; for specific descriptions by faculty teaching in the current year, contact the Office of Graduate Studies or visit the SLC Web site at www.sarahlawrence.edu.

Graduate Workshop in Creative Nonfiction. We are currently in the golden age of literary nonfiction. Memoirs, travel writing, confessions, biographies, personal essays, nature writing, profiles, and a host of other hard-to-classify — but compelling — artifacts define our literary moment. They offer a rich terrain in which to develop a writing life, and the demand for them in the publishing and magazine worlds is strong, and will remain so. They are a resource and a vital alternative for poets and fiction writers, and for people from virtually every other field of human endeavor who have a story to tell and a need to tell it.

Sarah Lawrence’s graduate workshops in creative nonfiction are designed to develop the individual voices of students and help them gain control of their subject matter. The workshops address both the local issues of writing and the larger social and philosophical implications of our students’ work. Much attention is paid to mechanics and style, and biweekly individual conferences with instructors reinforce the intensive, detail-oriented bias of the program. Expectations in individual workshops vary with the instructors, but the goal of the program as a whole is to lead writers through the maze of their own possibilities to strong, finished pieces of creative work. The workshops are accompanied by an eclectic reading series that brings some of the most exciting contemporary writers to campus. They are also the centerpiece of a program that, like creative nonfiction itself, reaches out to many different areas of the Sarah Lawrence intellectual community.

Graduate Workshop in Fiction. Student fiction is the focus of this course, as well as conversations about writing issues, informed by published essays and stories. Primarily, students write on their own, while working with the instructor in individual, biweekly conferences. One important goal is to help the student locate his or her truest material. Of necessity this brings up questions of voice, matching structure to content, and imaginative redraftings and reconceptions. At the same time, students learn to be one another’s engaged readers and listeners, creating a forum in which people can do their best work. It is suggested that students take four workshops with four different instructors during their two years in the program. Stories or novel excerpts resulting from the workshops and accompanying conferences help create the substantial body of work needed to fulfill the thesis requirement of the program.

Graduate Workshop in Poetry. This seminar examines issues of craft and vision in the practice of poetry. How is a poem developed, deepened, and formed? The group works to form a responsive, critical audience for one another’s work. Though our primary text is student writing, we also read the work of contemporary American poets and essays in poetics. We divide our time among discussing readings, occasional writing exercises, and discussion of student poems.

The following craft classes and graduate writing electives are open to students from all genres and are meant to introduce the entire writing student body to techniques and strategies with which to assimilate the voices of others and the details of the world into the literature they create.

The Craft of Creative Nonfiction. Sarah Lawrence’s classes in creative nonfiction are high-level seminars in literary praxis. They are primarily text-based, but also venture out into oral history, new media, and radio writing. They examine the large- and small-scale structures of selected pieces of writing, usually well-known pieces, but occasionally wayward and curious work, ranging from the personal essay and memoir to the profile and the true-crime story, and provide students with a serviceable body of tools to use in shaping and fashioning their own material. They address, in a rigorous way, issues of style, point of view, narrative, and dramatic coherence, and pay careful attention to problems involving the assimilation of facts into the body of a piece, the treatment of memory data, the use of detail and scene-setting, and the relationship between fictional and poetic strategies and nonfiction writing. Instructors develop their reading lists with a clear sense of the needs of students combined with an inclusive but well-defined curriculum designed to introduce students to the best contemporary nonfiction and the acknowledged classics of the past. Assignments vary according to the judgment of individual instructors, but the integrated purpose of the curriculum is to help students locate themselves in the landscape of contemporary nonfiction writing and to discover through their own writing and a close reading of the work of others the lineaments of their own literary character.

The Craft of Fiction. In this course, students engage craft issues through the teaching of literature. No writer can know the seriousness and the possibilities of his or her calling without reading widely among authors that came before us, and paying close attention to our contemporaries. Each instructor has his or her own reading list. Basic questions of fiction, such as structure, point of view, speech or dialogue, storytelling, and the relation of these to meaning and meaningfulness are examined. However, the craft course is neither a survey course nor the equivalent of a handbook. Instead, it is an opportunity for students to experiment in both their thinking and their writing. Writing assignments vary, some creative and some critical, focusing on either the reading or theoretical issues raised in class. Students should be prepared to read intensively and to consider the assigned readings, rather than their own writing, to be the center of this course. The aim is for students to leave the course with an increased understanding of how various aspects of craft are central to the meaning of every book, and how they operate in the writing of class members.

The Craft of Poetry. This is a course designed to examine the technical and historical aspects of poetry writing, as well as to generate discussion and formulation of our own “poetics.” Through close readings of individual poems and contemporary essays on craft, theory, legacy, and the creative process, we consider both the fine points of writing poetry (e.g., line break, meter, scansion, stanzaic form, image, tension, and metaphor), and the larger issues of writing as it relates to politics, publishing, influence, voice, personal and social responsibility, and ethics. This is a forum in which to explore openly matters of aesthetics and fundamental beliefs about writing, without which technical and critical abilities would seem superfluous. Just how “free” is free verse, and to what extent are we liable to its terms? What are our own assumptions and situations as writers? Emphasis is on assigned readings and engaged class participation.

In addition to traditional craft classes and workshops, the program also offers a craft course devoted exclusively to techniques of research.

Graduate Writing Electives. The three electives offered each year by the Graduate Writing Program are part of the seminar conference system and include a biweekly conference. Each elective is developed with a particular teaching emphasis by individual faculty. Examples from the past include: “Saying the Unsayable/Expanding the Poetic Toolbox”; “Oral History”; “Teaching Writing”; “Elements of Style in Nonfiction, Fiction and Poetry”.

Summer Writing Seminar. A week-long seminar in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction provides each student with six 2-hour workshops and one hour-long conference. Participants may earn one graduate credit. (Open to general public — see graduate Web site for details.)