2012-2013 Writing Courses

The most delicate choices a writer makes significantly affect a story or novel. In this workshop, we'll take a close-up look at your fiction. We'll focus on precision of language, explore the mysteries and mechanics of point of view, and talk about building a stable world with words. We'll treat our stories as laboratories of the imagination that accommodate daring and complex experiments. Empathy is a prerequisite for effectively discussing each other's work. In workshop discussions, we'll cultivate articulate critiques that always keep the writers' intentions in mind. Revision will be emphasized; over the course of the semester, each student will revise a story or novel excerpt at least twice and will have the option to workshop different drafts. The published stories that we read will be chosen in response to students' writing and may include work by authors such as Ann Beattie, Gary Lutz, Denis Johnson, Robert Lopez, Blake Butler, Anton Chekhov, Junot Diaz, Barry Hannah, and Joy Williams. We may also read essays by Lutz, Italo Calvino, Jo Ann Beard, and others.

The focus of most of our discussions will stem from the students’ work. Whose story is it? What is a particular writer’s intention for tone? How is the voice in keeping or in counterpoint with the subject matter? How is the story structured in time? What are you beginning to recognize as the most mysterious and promising material of the story? Which details seem spooky and informative of a larger revelation? What actions, events, and memories are beginning to form a pattern in the story, and how can these patterns be recognized and better developed? The questions, conceptions, and issues that arise in the workshop are as rich and varied as the enterprise of fiction. As a complement to the discussion of students’ work, we will spend one-third of our time reading essays on the craft and process of fiction, as well as master stories by selected authors. All of the members of the workshop are encouraged to contribute these readings.

I will say up front that I am suspicious of peer critique. Would it be terrible if we each “workshopped” only one piece per semester? Would it be terrible if students responded to short assignments each week, and a select group read them aloud? Would it be terrible if we took two or three “breaks” from the workshop routine to spend a class discussing a short, great (and, for those of you who don’t know me, likely unorthodox) novel? Would it be terrible if we spent a whole class telling each other stories? Well, maybe it would be terrible. What we actually end up doing will depend greatly on who you are and what you’re here for. The formulaic nature of many workshops often seems (to me) antithetical to what it means to “Make Art.” Nevertheless, every time I have tried to deviate from a peer-critique-centric paradigm I have met with confusion or resentment. My opinion is that the only way to become a better writer is to read a lot and write a lot. It may also help to have an instructor whom you trust and who is willing to work for you. That’s a philosophy, not a course description. Here’s what I know: I don’t want to workshop parts of your novel in my class but will read your novel for conference. I don’t want to workshop stories you’ve already workshopped in other classes unless you have a very good reason for wanting to do so (and you don’t). I want to create a forum for honest conversation about what we’re trying to do here—and for conversations about your fiction to occur within that larger context. If this sounds interesting, show up—and we’ll work out the details.

This class is for students who are writing novels. I’ll read your work and talk about it with you in conference; in class, we’ll talk about novels by dead people. We’ll read a few books that are firmly lodged in the canon (Ulysses, The Magic Mountain), a few that keep being rediscovered and then forgotten again (The Man Who Loved Children, The Locusts Have No King, Stoner, Mrs. Bridge, If He Hollers Let Him Go, Nightwood), and, if we have time, a couple of books of students’ choosing. I should mention that I haven't read all of these books, so the class will be filled with discoveries for all of us...I hope.

The job of a writer is to make the reader want to turn the page. This can be accomplished by various means; but, ultimately, what will draw the reader in and keep him there is the story. While this course will address itself to all aspects of fiction writing, including voice and character development, its focus will be on the art of storytelling. What is a story and how does it get made? How do we move from one event to another, and what kind of causality does that movement entail? As Flannery O’Connor once said, the end of a story must both surprise and feel inevitable. We will look at short novels and stories that accomplish this task. Most readings, however, will be individually assigned to meet the needs of each student in conference. In workshop, we will mainly look at the work that the students bring to the class and think about how well a story is being told. Is there any element of the story about which the writer might make better use? And is there anything that stands in the way of the story being told?

In this yearlong course, we will study the form of the personal essay with the goal of creating literary works that emphasize the universal meaning inherent in each personal story. This is a course in which to experiment with narrative techniques—developing ideas through character, voice, structure, and story. The first semester will be devoted to reading and analyzing literature (nonfiction, fiction, and what falls between) and to writing short informal essays; the second semester will be conducted as a workshop, and students will write longer and more layered essays with a focus on metaphor and meaning. Students will be asked to meet once a month in small groups to discuss books the first semester and films the second semester.

The writer’s work is to make sentences. Everything else is secondary. But too often, our intentions blind us to the sentences that we are actually making—or we feel that, somehow, form or genre is more important than the sentence itself. This workshop will scrutinize your nonfiction prose, looking for the opportunities, the energy, the clarity that may be lying hidden there. We’ll be aided by many other writers—Auden, Didion, McPhee, Baldwin, Joseph Roth, Kapuscinski, Dillard, Oates, etc. We’ll be thinking about writing as an act of discovery and the sentence as the smallest unit of perception. That means we’ll be using your writing. I’ll expect you to be writing something new each week for this course, and we’ll all be reading each other’s work every week as we go through the semester. The goal is, quite simply, to clarify the act of discovering sentences and, in doing so, discovering the better writer within you.

While the larger focus of this class will be on the art of storytelling, the minute-by-minute concern will center on the particular choices and movements of a piece of writing as it unfolds and develops. We will be very specific and concrete, and conceive of ourselves as the mechanics and engineers of our souls. We will spend a lot of time exploring rhetoric as the art of persuasion, and concentrate on tone, diction, rhythm, pacing, and transitions in effective prose. We will figure out how a writer generates, sustains, and controls energy on the page. Reading will comprise a series of essays and at least one book. Writing will comprise five to seven exercises of no more than five hundred words and two larger pieces, approximately three thousand words each, which will be discussed by the whole class. The discussion will be lively and pertinent.

This course will focus intensively and humanistically on participants’ own work. Roughly one-third of discussion time will be devoted to classics and to work that will never be found in the canon. We’ll pay close attention to the development of the individual voice and examine poetics, prosody, issues of form and tone in contemporary and classical poetics, and the radically experimental text. We’ll focus on the revision process: How do artists push themselves towards new worlds? How do poets achieve spontaneity without sacrificing rigor? How do texts reconcile clarity and unpredictability? Expect to read widely, to approach texts in new ways, and to create many wild drafts and a finished portfolio of six to ? poems.

We’ll immerse ourselves in the soul and song and art of poetry. We’ll generate writing, critique each other’s work, and read deeply from the long and varied world tradition. We’ll compose in the usual and some unusual ways. Conferences will be a combination of individual and small groups. Weekly poetry dates, field trips, hard work, awe...we’ll have a wonderful time.

During the semester, we will focus on looking at poems not only through the lens of “How do I make this better?” but also through the lens of “What other possible routes/avenues can I take with this poem?” We will look at revision in terms of “conventional” editing and also discover a radical approach to revising poems through which I will guide the workshop participants as the term  progresses. Workshop participants will be encouraged to generate new work from the poems they already have, while revising those poems at the same time. Indeed, we will discover that writing a new poem is often the same as revising an old poem.

In this class, we will read poets who push the boundaries of logic and utilize wild, irrational imagery that often stops the reader in his or her tracks. Poets to be read include 19th-century French Symbolists; French and Spanish Surrealists of the 1920s-’30s; American poets from the ’60s whose work is fueled by stark, leaping imagery; post-World War II Eastern Europeans; and a number of contemporary writers who drive their imaginations above the proverbial speed limit. Class time will be split between discussing published work and student work. In addition to our weekly workshops, there will be biweekly screenings where we will examine surrealist cinema, including several films by Luis Buñuel, looking for parallels and conversation between the genres. Through writing exercises and revision, students will be pushed to explore associative imagery in their own poetry and to discover for themselves the various ways that similes and metaphors can be employed to create a more three-dimensional experience for the reader. Students will read the equivalent of a book a week and turn in a new poem each week. The semester will culminate with students vigorously revising a small manuscript of poems.

Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time,” a sequence of seven novels written between 1909 and 1922, is one of the landmarks of world literature. By exploring the events of his life from childhood on, Proust wrote with revolutionary precision and openness about an incredible range of subjects: every variety of love from the maternal to the sexual; art, music, and literature; politics, including the explosive Dreyfus Affair; jealousy and possessiveness; social status and snobbery; the marginality of Jews and gays; and much more. This seminar will be devoted to reading the complete “In Search of Lost Time,” discovering Proust’s world and examining the themes and structures of his novels. Reading assignments will average 250 pages each week.

In this class, we will read, discuss, and closely study stories that are: (1) between 2,000 and 12,000 words; (2) labeled fiction; and (3) published after 1960. We will think about how each story makes us feel and what thoughts we have at what moments in each story. We will try to determine exactly why (due to which sentences, words, images, connections and due to what from our own lives, prejudices, likes/dislikes) we feel or think what we think about each story. We will discern techniques (general, author-specific, story-specific), structures, types of titles, and types of endings (special attention to the beginnings and endings of stories) and maintain a public website listing our notes on each story, creating a kind of database of terms. We will think about why each story was written, what message or emotion or mood the author wanted to convey, explore, memorialize, organize. We will read interviews with and essays by short-story writers, introductions and reviews of short-story anthologies, and articles criticizing or defending contemporary short-story trends. We will read one or two short stories by the following: Amy Hempel, Curtis Sittenfeld, Lorrie Moore, Joy Williams, Frederick Barthelme, Ann Beattie, Bobbie Ann Mason, Kevin Brockmeier, Trinie Dalton, David Foster Wallace, Rebecca Curtis, Deb Olin Unferth, Lydia Davis, Diane Williams, James Purdy, Todd Hasak-Lowy, Denis Johnson, Haruki Murakami, George Saunders, Donald Barthelme, A. M. Homes, Stephen Dixon, Lore Segal, Arthur Bradford, Sherman Alexie, Charles Johnson, and others.

In this course, we will read and discuss fiction written and published in our own century. Topics of particular interest will include technology and the self, 9/11 and the age of the war on terror, religion and fantasies of apocalypse (cultural, environmental, religious, etc.). Attention will be paid to questions of form, technique, and style. We will endeavor to survey our own cultural imaginary and to try and anticipate (or even shape) our eventual periodization—assuming, of course, that there’s anyone left in the future to look back at us. We’ll be reading novels, novellas, and short stories by: Don DeLillo, Dennis Cooper, Darcey Steinke, Cormac McCarthy, Joshua Cohen, Christine Schutt, Tao Lin, Sam Lipsyte, Jim Shepard, Lydia Millet, Barry Hannah, and more. We’ll read chronologically by original publication date, with occasional cheating. Course work will include in-class writing exercises and “book reviews” (500-1,000 word response papers) that will help you organize your thoughts for discussion and develop your critical faculties.

In this craft class, we will discuss what it means to be a creative nonfiction writer in terms of truth (and sometimes the lack thereof) and in terms of the ethics involved in depicting real events and real people. Students will write for this craft class, mostly informal exercises designed to illuminate how these issues pertain to their own work and the work of their peers. It will also be fun—because, along the way, we’ll be reading controversial works by some of our best (and worst) contemporary writers and documentary filmmakers.

Too often the emphasis on and in personal writing fails to consider the universality broached through local examinations. As writers, we must seek to bring thoughtfulness and introspection into this confessional landscape of bloggers and tabloids; we must be artful, intellectual, and accessible. This circumspection need not exclude emotional intimacy. As Virginia Woolf said, “A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us; but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out.” A writer can discuss experiences of sex, addiction, violence, love, madness, and all manner of internal phenomena while avoiding pitfalls of navel gazing and insularity. In this class, students will examine the way experience, emotion, research, and intellection are integrated in the personal essay form through structure, pacing, dialogue, and other craft methods. On a weekly basis, students will attempt to artfully place the subjective in the context of the larger world through short exercises. We will examine published works that succeed at this in a broad spectrum of styles, from classic essays to recent, more experimental forms. Among these will be the work of Kathryn Harrison, Zadie Smith, Nancy Mairs, James Baldwin, bell hooks, Mark Doty, Alison Bechdel, Jamaica Kincaid, John D’Agata, Bernard Cooper, and Eula Biss.       

In this craft seminar, we will explore how various technologies have housed and shaped the poem, that strange and adaptable animal. We will read collections and poems by artists who have incorporated an awareness of these technologies—from the alphabet to the Internet—into their work and consider how that awareness enables them to harness energy and meaning. Along the way, we’ll grapple with some questions. What does “publication” mean? How do the readers manuscripts create differ from those imagined by printed books? Will the digital age return poetry to the mouth? Which technologies are you using in your own work, and why? How do poems decay? Additional reading will help us contextualize our understanding within historical, cultural, philosophical, and scientific frameworks. Our texts will include: Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary, Inger Christenson’s Alphabet, Christian Hawkey’s Ventrakl, Aram Saroyan’s Complete Minimal Poems, Oni Buchanan’s Spring, Herbert Mason’s Gilgamesh: a Verse Narrative, and Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho; selections from Stanislas Dehaene’s Reading in the Brain, Amalia E. Gnanadesikan’s The Writing Revolution, Marshall Mcluhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy, Marjorie Perloff’s Unoriginal Genius, and Plato’s Phaedrus; poems by Emily Dickinson, Phyllis Wheatley, John Donne, Jack Spicer, W. B. Yeats, Guillaume Apollinaire, Gertrude Stein, John Cage, and others; and videos or images from sites such as Continental Review, jubilat, The Volta and Internet Poetry. Our goal will be to make all technologies feel noticeable and available as a means of transmission. You will experiment with some forms of transmission yoursel, and will be periodically asked to respond (alphabetically, in print, on screen, etc.) to ideas that we encounter in the course.

This is a radio writing and production course that uses facty-fiction as its guide. Fiction will be used to tell truths, and truths will be used to tell fiction. Throughout the semester, we’ll examine radio works that use fact as the inspiration for some of the best audio dramas, monologues, and mockumentaries aired in the past 100 years.  We’ll listen to and dissect works from well-known shows such as The Moth Radio Hour and This American Life, as well as introduce works from less mainstream shows such as Benjamen Walker’s Too Much Information and American Public Media’s The Truth, a contemporary drama podcast. We’ll also tune the ear to radio works from around the world: England, Australia, Germany, and Norway. You’ll discover how knitting with dog hair fooled a nation and hear the letter that President Nixon wrote if Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had crash-landed rather than land on the moon. We’ll also look at how fiction can illuminate truth—and discuss what happens when those lines blur. We’ll ask, “Are there times when the crossover can be unethical?” “How much should you trust your audience to ‘get’ what you're doing?” “What's the difference between a fiction that accidentally scares a nation (Orson Welles) and a fiction that fools a nation (Mike Daisey)?” Producers for This American Life and the Moth Radio Hour will visit class to share their wisdom, and we’ll tour WNYC New York Public Radio. We’ll also have organized performances throughout the semester for those who would like to participate. Students will learn how to write for radio, produce and mix pieces, and create a podcast. At the end of the semester, we’ll create and upload works to the Public Radio Exchange and have an open gallery show of the final conference projects at the UnionDocs Gallery in Brooklyn. 

This class is intended to help students learn how to teach (as well as build a teaching resume). This is a chance to teach writing and have a supervision group to whom to come back. The teaching is in a variety of settings— primarily high schools and middle schools—and is often done with a partner. Placements begin in September and continue until winter break. Students will have the option to continue in the placement during spring semester under the Community of Writers program. The supervision group will meet and raise, but not exhaust, the following topics: classroom management, ideas for teaching expository writing, fiction and nonfiction, curriculum construction, materials, ways of grouping assignments, collaborative learning, and our greatest hits—model exercises and readings. This is an opportunity to teach in an atmosphere of supportive discussion by peers and experienced teachers rather than in an education class, which it assuredly is not. For students who are thinking of enrolling in the collaborative program with St John’s for a Masters in Education, credits earned in this course can be transferred to that masters degree.

To become a better writer, by far the most useful and interesting thing that you can do is to become a better reader. (That is the way good writers have always learned how to write.) In this course, we will explore a range of great texts—from the ranks of fiction, drama, poetry and film—with the aim of understanding how these great texts work and why they succeed as well as they do. As you actually retrace closely the footsteps of the literary imagination, you will widen and deepen your own work—in any genre. Our informal class discussions will be oriented toward the project of expanding your powers and acquiring new techniques. Texts will include: Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse; Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory; Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day; James Joyce, “A Little Cloud,” from Dubliners; G. B. Shaw’s drama, Saint Joan; Samuel Beckett’s one-act play, Krapp's Last Tape; the Epstein Brothers and Howard Koch, screenplay for Casablanca. Poetry may include poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, Walt Whitman, Stanley Kunitz, D. H. Lawrence. Films may include The Sting, The Fallen Idol, Babette's Feast, and The Lives of Others. There will be two short class papers (written at home on a topic related to class work). Conference topics and writing will be individually arranged.

In this class —devoted to the lonely, exhilarating, terrifying process of creating fiction—we will strive to create a constructive community of readers with the kindness, toughness, honesty and sensitivity that can make a workshop a unique and valuable writing tool.  Ambition and risk-taking will be encouraged, along with memorable voices and compelling characters.  Through the work presented, we will discuss what makes a plot strong and what strategies exist for creating and sustaining narrative momentum.  Outside reading will be geared to the needs and concerns of the class.

from field work interviews.   Readings will include Driss ben Hamed Charhadi, Joseph Mitchell, Dave Eggers, Carolina Maria de Jesus, Alessandro Portelli,  Christopher Isherwood, Flora Nwapa, Paul Bowles and Jane Bowles.

Run like a fiction workshop, this class gives students a chance, three or four times a semester, to submit comic and graphic novel scripts for critique and discussion. The format is simple: A handful of students brings in copies of their work each week; the rest of the class takes the work home, writes up comments, and comes in ready to discuss the submitted pieces in class the following week. Each week, the instructor will bring in packets of contemporary comics and graphic books in order to discuss various craft elements (e.g., metaphor, dialogue); but the real focus of the class will be the students' work. And the golden rule of the class: Students may write comics only about what interests them. That means students will come to class ready to write solely about the things that excite, frighten, move, and inspire them.

This craft class will focus on the history of twentieth-century avant-garde poetry. We will begin briefly in the nineteenth century with Charles Baudelaire, Emily Dickinson, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Lautréamont, and then examine various avant-garde, experimental, and non-mainstream poetry movements, including Symbolism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Imagism, Harlem Renaissance, Négritude, Black Mountain School, Beats, New York School, Black Arts Movement, concrete poetry, feminist poetry, ethnopoetics, Language poetry, spoken word poetry, hip-hop, and more. We will end by focusing on recent and current trends such as Flarf, Conceptual writing, ecopoetics, and digital poetry. Along the way, we will pause to talk more extensively about important figures in this history such as T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Aimé Césaire, Robert Creeley, Adrienne Rich, Alice Notley, as well as read the work of a few younger writers. We will also occasionally reference parallel developments in twentieth-century avant-garde art and music. During the semester, we will look to incorporate into our own poetry some of the avant-garde techniques and strategies presented in class.

"Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing, a forcing of what and how.... The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.”

                                                                                                                 Donald Barthelme

In this workshop, we will discuss how to proceed as writers from within this mysterious state of not-knowing. How might we move beyond our habitual ways

of seeing? Must we know what we are writing about before we begin? How is an emotionally charged experience translated into fiction? A particular emphasis

will be placed on how to notice things that others might overlook- the small, the peculiar, the commonplace-and then how to transform them with the force of our attention. We  will read a wide variety of short fiction in addition to workshopping student stories in great detail. (Novel excerpts will not be discussed in class, but may be brought to conferences.) Our goal will be to look at stories not only at a thematic level, but also at the level of the sentence. Why this adverb? Why this adjective? Why this sudden flaring into image? Why this quiet pulling back? At times, we will broaden our focus to encompass larger philosophical concerns, exploring such things as the science of attention, false vs. true lyricism, “the discipline of rightness” (as Wallace Stevens once described it) and why it is that feeling so often precedes form.

The most delicate choices a writer makes significantly affect a story or novel. In this workshop, we'll take a close-up look at your fiction. We'll focus on precision of language, explore the mysteries and mechanics of point of view, and talk about building a stable world with words. We'll treat our stories as laboratories of the imagination that accommodate daring and complex experiments. Empathy is a prerequisite for effectively discussing each other's work. In workshop discussions, we'll cultivate articulate critiques that always keep the writers' intentions in mind. Revision will be emphasized; over the course of the semester, each student will revise a story or novel excerpt at least twice and will have the option to workshop different drafts. The published stories that we read will be chosen in response to students' writing and may include work by authors such as Ann Beattie, Gary Lutz, Denis Johnson, Robert Lopez, Blake Butler, Anton Chekhov, Junot Diaz, Barry Hannah, and Joy Williams. We may also read essays by Lutz, Italo Calvino, Jo Ann Beard, and others.

The focus of most of our discussions will stem from the students’ work. Whose story is it? What is a particular writer’s intention for tone? How is the voice in keeping or in counterpoint with the subject matter? How is the story structured in time? What are you beginning to recognize as the most mysterious and promising material of the story? Which details seem spooky and informative of a larger revelation? What actions, events, and memories are beginning to form a pattern in the story, and how can these patterns be recognized and better developed? The questions, conceptions, and issues that arise in the workshop are as rich and varied as the enterprise of fiction. As a complement to the discussion of students’ work, we will spend one-third of our time reading essays on the craft and process of fiction, as well as master stories by selected authors. All of the members of the workshop are encouraged to contribute these readings.

I will say up front that I am suspicious of peer critique. Would it be terrible if we each “workshopped” only one piece per semester? Would it be terrible if students responded to short assignments each week, and a select group read them aloud? Would it be terrible if we took two or three “breaks” from the workshop routine to spend a class discussing a short, great (and, for those of you who don’t know me, likely unorthodox) novel? Would it be terrible if we spent a whole class telling each other stories? Well, maybe it would be terrible. What we actually end up doing will depend greatly on who you are and what you’re here for. The formulaic nature of many workshops often seems (to me) antithetical to what it means to “Make Art.” Nevertheless, every time I have tried to deviate from a peer-critique-centric paradigm I have met with confusion or resentment. My opinion is that the only way to become a better writer is to read a lot and write a lot. It may also help to have an instructor whom you trust and who is willing to work for you. That’s a philosophy, not a course description. Here’s what I know: I don’t want to workshop parts of your novel in my class but will read your novel for conference. I don’t want to workshop stories you’ve already workshopped in other classes unless you have a very good reason for wanting to do so (and you don’t). I want to create a forum for honest conversation about what we’re trying to do here—and for conversations about your fiction to occur within that larger context. If this sounds interesting, show up—and we’ll work out the details.

This class is for students who are writing novels. I’ll read your work and talk about it with you in conference; in class, we’ll talk about novels by dead people. We’ll read a few books that are firmly lodged in the canon (Ulysses, The Magic Mountain), a few that keep being rediscovered and then forgotten again (The Man Who Loved Children, The Locusts Have No King, Stoner, Mrs. Bridge, If He Hollers Let Him Go, Nightwood), and, if we have time, a couple of books of students’ choosing. I should mention that I haven't read all of these books, so the class will be filled with discoveries for all of us...I hope.

The job of a writer is to make the reader want to turn the page. This can be accomplished by various means; but, ultimately, what will draw the reader in and keep him there is the story. While this course will address itself to all aspects of fiction writing, including voice and character development, its focus will be on the art of storytelling. What is a story and how does it get made? How do we move from one event to another, and what kind of causality does that movement entail? As Flannery O’Connor once said, the end of a story must both surprise and feel inevitable. We will look at short novels and stories that accomplish this task. Most readings, however, will be individually assigned to meet the needs of each student in conference. In workshop, we will mainly look at the work that the students bring to the class and think about how well a story is being told. Is there any element of the story about which the writer might make better use? And is there anything that stands in the way of the story being told?

In this yearlong course, we will study the form of the personal essay with the goal of creating literary works that emphasize the universal meaning inherent in each personal story. This is a course in which to experiment with narrative techniques—developing ideas through character, voice, structure, and story. The first semester will be devoted to reading and analyzing literature (nonfiction, fiction, and what falls between) and to writing short informal essays; the second semester will be conducted as a workshop, and students will write longer and more layered essays with a focus on metaphor and meaning. Students will be asked to meet once a month in small groups to discuss books the first semester and films the second semester.

The writer’s work is to make sentences. Everything else is secondary. But too often, our intentions blind us to the sentences that we are actually making—or we feel that, somehow, form or genre is more important than the sentence itself. This workshop will scrutinize your nonfiction prose, looking for the opportunities, the energy, the clarity that may be lying hidden there. We’ll be aided by many other writers—Auden, Didion, McPhee, Baldwin, Joseph Roth, Kapuscinski, Dillard, Oates, etc. We’ll be thinking about writing as an act of discovery and the sentence as the smallest unit of perception. That means we’ll be using your writing. I’ll expect you to be writing something new each week for this course, and we’ll all be reading each other’s work every week as we go through the semester. The goal is, quite simply, to clarify the act of discovering sentences and, in doing so, discovering the better writer within you.

While the larger focus of this class will be on the art of storytelling, the minute-by-minute concern will center on the particular choices and movements of a piece of writing as it unfolds and develops. We will be very specific and concrete, and conceive of ourselves as the mechanics and engineers of our souls. We will spend a lot of time exploring rhetoric as the art of persuasion, and concentrate on tone, diction, rhythm, pacing, and transitions in effective prose. We will figure out how a writer generates, sustains, and controls energy on the page. Reading will comprise a series of essays and at least one book. Writing will comprise five to seven exercises of no more than five hundred words and two larger pieces, approximately three thousand words each, which will be discussed by the whole class. The discussion will be lively and pertinent.

This course will focus intensively and humanistically on participants’ own work. Roughly one-third of discussion time will be devoted to classics and to work that will never be found in the canon. We’ll pay close attention to the development of the individual voice and examine poetics, prosody, issues of form and tone in contemporary and classical poetics, and the radically experimental text. We’ll focus on the revision process: How do artists push themselves towards new worlds? How do poets achieve spontaneity without sacrificing rigor? How do texts reconcile clarity and unpredictability? Expect to read widely, to approach texts in new ways, and to create many wild drafts and a finished portfolio of six to ? poems.

We’ll immerse ourselves in the soul and song and art of poetry. We’ll generate writing, critique each other’s work, and read deeply from the long and varied world tradition. We’ll compose in the usual and some unusual ways. Conferences will be a combination of individual and small groups. Weekly poetry dates, field trips, hard work, awe...we’ll have a wonderful time.

During the semester, we will focus on looking at poems not only through the lens of “How do I make this better?” but also through the lens of “What other possible routes/avenues can I take with this poem?” We will look at revision in terms of “conventional” editing and also discover a radical approach to revising poems through which I will guide the workshop participants as the term  progresses. Workshop participants will be encouraged to generate new work from the poems they already have, while revising those poems at the same time. Indeed, we will discover that writing a new poem is often the same as revising an old poem.

In this class, we will read poets who push the boundaries of logic and utilize wild, irrational imagery that often stops the reader in his or her tracks. Poets to be read include 19th-century French Symbolists; French and Spanish Surrealists of the 1920s-’30s; American poets from the ’60s whose work is fueled by stark, leaping imagery; post-World War II Eastern Europeans; and a number of contemporary writers who drive their imaginations above the proverbial speed limit. Class time will be split between discussing published work and student work. In addition to our weekly workshops, there will be biweekly screenings where we will examine surrealist cinema, including several films by Luis Buñuel, looking for parallels and conversation between the genres. Through writing exercises and revision, students will be pushed to explore associative imagery in their own poetry and to discover for themselves the various ways that similes and metaphors can be employed to create a more three-dimensional experience for the reader. Students will read the equivalent of a book a week and turn in a new poem each week. The semester will culminate with students vigorously revising a small manuscript of poems.

Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time,” a sequence of seven novels written between 1909 and 1922, is one of the landmarks of world literature. By exploring the events of his life from childhood on, Proust wrote with revolutionary precision and openness about an incredible range of subjects: every variety of love from the maternal to the sexual; art, music, and literature; politics, including the explosive Dreyfus Affair; jealousy and possessiveness; social status and snobbery; the marginality of Jews and gays; and much more. This seminar will be devoted to reading the complete “In Search of Lost Time,” discovering Proust’s world and examining the themes and structures of his novels. Reading assignments will average 250 pages each week.

In this class, we will read, discuss, and closely study stories that are: (1) between 2,000 and 12,000 words; (2) labeled fiction; and (3) published after 1960. We will think about how each story makes us feel and what thoughts we have at what moments in each story. We will try to determine exactly why (due to which sentences, words, images, connections and due to what from our own lives, prejudices, likes/dislikes) we feel or think what we think about each story. We will discern techniques (general, author-specific, story-specific), structures, types of titles, and types of endings (special attention to the beginnings and endings of stories) and maintain a public website listing our notes on each story, creating a kind of database of terms. We will think about why each story was written, what message or emotion or mood the author wanted to convey, explore, memorialize, organize. We will read interviews with and essays by short-story writers, introductions and reviews of short-story anthologies, and articles criticizing or defending contemporary short-story trends. We will read one or two short stories by the following: Amy Hempel, Curtis Sittenfeld, Lorrie Moore, Joy Williams, Frederick Barthelme, Ann Beattie, Bobbie Ann Mason, Kevin Brockmeier, Trinie Dalton, David Foster Wallace, Rebecca Curtis, Deb Olin Unferth, Lydia Davis, Diane Williams, James Purdy, Todd Hasak-Lowy, Denis Johnson, Haruki Murakami, George Saunders, Donald Barthelme, A. M. Homes, Stephen Dixon, Lore Segal, Arthur Bradford, Sherman Alexie, Charles Johnson, and others.

In this course, we will read and discuss fiction written and published in our own century. Topics of particular interest will include technology and the self, 9/11 and the age of the war on terror, religion and fantasies of apocalypse (cultural, environmental, religious, etc.). Attention will be paid to questions of form, technique, and style. We will endeavor to survey our own cultural imaginary and to try and anticipate (or even shape) our eventual periodization—assuming, of course, that there’s anyone left in the future to look back at us. We’ll be reading novels, novellas, and short stories by: Don DeLillo, Dennis Cooper, Darcey Steinke, Cormac McCarthy, Joshua Cohen, Christine Schutt, Tao Lin, Sam Lipsyte, Jim Shepard, Lydia Millet, Barry Hannah, and more. We’ll read chronologically by original publication date, with occasional cheating. Course work will include in-class writing exercises and “book reviews” (500-1,000 word response papers) that will help you organize your thoughts for discussion and develop your critical faculties.

In this craft class, we will discuss what it means to be a creative nonfiction writer in terms of truth (and sometimes the lack thereof) and in terms of the ethics involved in depicting real events and real people. Students will write for this craft class, mostly informal exercises designed to illuminate how these issues pertain to their own work and the work of their peers. It will also be fun—because, along the way, we’ll be reading controversial works by some of our best (and worst) contemporary writers and documentary filmmakers.

Too often the emphasis on and in personal writing fails to consider the universality broached through local examinations. As writers, we must seek to bring thoughtfulness and introspection into this confessional landscape of bloggers and tabloids; we must be artful, intellectual, and accessible. This circumspection need not exclude emotional intimacy. As Virginia Woolf said, “A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us; but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out.” A writer can discuss experiences of sex, addiction, violence, love, madness, and all manner of internal phenomena while avoiding pitfalls of navel gazing and insularity. In this class, students will examine the way experience, emotion, research, and intellection are integrated in the personal essay form through structure, pacing, dialogue, and other craft methods. On a weekly basis, students will attempt to artfully place the subjective in the context of the larger world through short exercises. We will examine published works that succeed at this in a broad spectrum of styles, from classic essays to recent, more experimental forms. Among these will be the work of Kathryn Harrison, Zadie Smith, Nancy Mairs, James Baldwin, bell hooks, Mark Doty, Alison Bechdel, Jamaica Kincaid, John D’Agata, Bernard Cooper, and Eula Biss.       

In this craft seminar, we will explore how various technologies have housed and shaped the poem, that strange and adaptable animal. We will read collections and poems by artists who have incorporated an awareness of these technologies—from the alphabet to the Internet—into their work and consider how that awareness enables them to harness energy and meaning. Along the way, we’ll grapple with some questions. What does “publication” mean? How do the readers manuscripts create differ from those imagined by printed books? Will the digital age return poetry to the mouth? Which technologies are you using in your own work, and why? How do poems decay? Additional reading will help us contextualize our understanding within historical, cultural, philosophical, and scientific frameworks. Our texts will include: Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary, Inger Christenson’s Alphabet, Christian Hawkey’s Ventrakl, Aram Saroyan’s Complete Minimal Poems, Oni Buchanan’s Spring, Herbert Mason’s Gilgamesh: a Verse Narrative, and Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho; selections from Stanislas Dehaene’s Reading in the Brain, Amalia E. Gnanadesikan’s The Writing Revolution, Marshall Mcluhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy, Marjorie Perloff’s Unoriginal Genius, and Plato’s Phaedrus; poems by Emily Dickinson, Phyllis Wheatley, John Donne, Jack Spicer, W. B. Yeats, Guillaume Apollinaire, Gertrude Stein, John Cage, and others; and videos or images from sites such as Continental Review, jubilat, The Volta and Internet Poetry. Our goal will be to make all technologies feel noticeable and available as a means of transmission. You will experiment with some forms of transmission yoursel, and will be periodically asked to respond (alphabetically, in print, on screen, etc.) to ideas that we encounter in the course.

This is a radio writing and production course that uses facty-fiction as its guide. Fiction will be used to tell truths, and truths will be used to tell fiction. Throughout the semester, we’ll examine radio works that use fact as the inspiration for some of the best audio dramas, monologues, and mockumentaries aired in the past 100 years.  We’ll listen to and dissect works from well-known shows such as The Moth Radio Hour and This American Life, as well as introduce works from less mainstream shows such as Benjamen Walker’s Too Much Information and American Public Media’s The Truth, a contemporary drama podcast. We’ll also tune the ear to radio works from around the world: England, Australia, Germany, and Norway. You’ll discover how knitting with dog hair fooled a nation and hear the letter that President Nixon wrote if Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had crash-landed rather than land on the moon. We’ll also look at how fiction can illuminate truth—and discuss what happens when those lines blur. We’ll ask, “Are there times when the crossover can be unethical?” “How much should you trust your audience to ‘get’ what you're doing?” “What's the difference between a fiction that accidentally scares a nation (Orson Welles) and a fiction that fools a nation (Mike Daisey)?” Producers for This American Life and the Moth Radio Hour will visit class to share their wisdom, and we’ll tour WNYC New York Public Radio. We’ll also have organized performances throughout the semester for those who would like to participate. Students will learn how to write for radio, produce and mix pieces, and create a podcast. At the end of the semester, we’ll create and upload works to the Public Radio Exchange and have an open gallery show of the final conference projects at the UnionDocs Gallery in Brooklyn. 

This class is intended to help students learn how to teach (as well as build a teaching resume). This is a chance to teach writing and have a supervision group to whom to come back. The teaching is in a variety of settings— primarily high schools and middle schools—and is often done with a partner. Placements begin in September and continue until winter break. Students will have the option to continue in the placement during spring semester under the Community of Writers program. The supervision group will meet and raise, but not exhaust, the following topics: classroom management, ideas for teaching expository writing, fiction and nonfiction, curriculum construction, materials, ways of grouping assignments, collaborative learning, and our greatest hits—model exercises and readings. This is an opportunity to teach in an atmosphere of supportive discussion by peers and experienced teachers rather than in an education class, which it assuredly is not. For students who are thinking of enrolling in the collaborative program with St John’s for a Masters in Education, credits earned in this course can be transferred to that masters degree.

To become a better writer, by far the most useful and interesting thing that you can do is to become a better reader. (That is the way good writers have always learned how to write.) In this course, we will explore a range of great texts—from the ranks of fiction, drama, poetry and film—with the aim of understanding how these great texts work and why they succeed as well as they do. As you actually retrace closely the footsteps of the literary imagination, you will widen and deepen your own work—in any genre. Our informal class discussions will be oriented toward the project of expanding your powers and acquiring new techniques. Texts will include: Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse; Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory; Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day; James Joyce, “A Little Cloud,” from Dubliners; G. B. Shaw’s drama, Saint Joan; Samuel Beckett’s one-act play, Krapp's Last Tape; the Epstein Brothers and Howard Koch, screenplay for Casablanca. Poetry may include poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, Walt Whitman, Stanley Kunitz, D. H. Lawrence. Films may include The Sting, The Fallen Idol, Babette's Feast, and The Lives of Others. There will be two short class papers (written at home on a topic related to class work). Conference topics and writing will be individually arranged.

In this class —devoted to the lonely, exhilarating, terrifying process of creating fiction—we will strive to create a constructive community of readers with the kindness, toughness, honesty and sensitivity that can make a workshop a unique and valuable writing tool.  Ambition and risk-taking will be encouraged, along with memorable voices and compelling characters.  Through the work presented, we will discuss what makes a plot strong and what strategies exist for creating and sustaining narrative momentum.  Outside reading will be geared to the needs and concerns of the class.

from field work interviews.   Readings will include Driss ben Hamed Charhadi, Joseph Mitchell, Dave Eggers, Carolina Maria de Jesus, Alessandro Portelli,  Christopher Isherwood, Flora Nwapa, Paul Bowles and Jane Bowles.

Run like a fiction workshop, this class gives students a chance, three or four times a semester, to submit comic and graphic novel scripts for critique and discussion. The format is simple: A handful of students brings in copies of their work each week; the rest of the class takes the work home, writes up comments, and comes in ready to discuss the submitted pieces in class the following week. Each week, the instructor will bring in packets of contemporary comics and graphic books in order to discuss various craft elements (e.g., metaphor, dialogue); but the real focus of the class will be the students' work. And the golden rule of the class: Students may write comics only about what interests them. That means students will come to class ready to write solely about the things that excite, frighten, move, and inspire them.

This craft class will focus on the history of twentieth-century avant-garde poetry. We will begin briefly in the nineteenth century with Charles Baudelaire, Emily Dickinson, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Lautréamont, and then examine various avant-garde, experimental, and non-mainstream poetry movements, including Symbolism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Imagism, Harlem Renaissance, Négritude, Black Mountain School, Beats, New York School, Black Arts Movement, concrete poetry, feminist poetry, ethnopoetics, Language poetry, spoken word poetry, hip-hop, and more. We will end by focusing on recent and current trends such as Flarf, Conceptual writing, ecopoetics, and digital poetry. Along the way, we will pause to talk more extensively about important figures in this history such as T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Aimé Césaire, Robert Creeley, Adrienne Rich, Alice Notley, as well as read the work of a few younger writers. We will also occasionally reference parallel developments in twentieth-century avant-garde art and music. During the semester, we will look to incorporate into our own poetry some of the avant-garde techniques and strategies presented in class.

"Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing, a forcing of what and how.... The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.”

                                                                                                                 Donald Barthelme

In this workshop, we will discuss how to proceed as writers from within this mysterious state of not-knowing. How might we move beyond our habitual ways

of seeing? Must we know what we are writing about before we begin? How is an emotionally charged experience translated into fiction? A particular emphasis

will be placed on how to notice things that others might overlook- the small, the peculiar, the commonplace-and then how to transform them with the force of our attention. We  will read a wide variety of short fiction in addition to workshopping student stories in great detail. (Novel excerpts will not be discussed in class, but may be brought to conferences.) Our goal will be to look at stories not only at a thematic level, but also at the level of the sentence. Why this adverb? Why this adjective? Why this sudden flaring into image? Why this quiet pulling back? At times, we will broaden our focus to encompass larger philosophical concerns, exploring such things as the science of attention, false vs. true lyricism, “the discipline of rightness” (as Wallace Stevens once described it) and why it is that feeling so often precedes form.