Fall 2023 Writing Course Book

SCHOOL

ARTSCOLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

OF THE

FALL 2023

COURSEBOOK

Workshops • Seminars • Lectures • Master Classes

Updated: August 28, 2023

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF COURSES BY DAY AND TIME

WORKSHOPS

SEMINARS

LECTURES

MASTER CLASSES

COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

SEMINARS

LITERARY TRANSLATION WORKSHOP

LECTURES

SPECIAL PROJECTS WORKSHOP

MASTER CLASSES

WORKSHOPS

FICTION – OPEN (6 points)

Hannah Lillith Assadi

Fri., 10am-1pm

Maisy Card

Thu., 5:30pm-8:30pm

Frances Cha

Thu., 10am-1pm

Nicholas Christopher

Thu., 1:10pm-4:10pm

Joshua Furst

Thu., 4:15pm-7:15pm

Joanna Hershon

Thu., 1:10pm-4:10pm

Heidi Julavits

Tue., 1:10pm-4:10pm

Sam Lipsyte

Mon., 1:10pm-4:10pm

Ben Marcus

Tue., 1:10pm-4:10pm

*Matthew Salesses

Tue., 10am-1pm

*Note about Salesses workshop structure:

“We will read four short novels, each in a

different form, and write/rewrite the

beginning, middle, and ending of

a novel four times. In other words, each

student will generate four different

beginnings, four different middles, and four

different endings for a single novel.

Students will also be workshopped thrice.

This course will require a lot of writing and

students should be prepared to explain

every craft choice, including those about

the identity positions of their characters,

the power structures the characters inhabit,

the novel’s ideal audience(s), and the

traditions the novel is working within and

against.”

NONFICTION – OPEN (6 points)

Jaquira Díaz

Tue., 4:15pm-7:15pm

Wes Enzinna

Tue., 5pm-8pm

Michelle Orange

Mon., 1:10pm-4:10pm

Heather Radke

Wed., 9:30am-12:30pm

NONFICTION – THESIS (9 points)

Second-Years only

Cris Beam

Fri., 1:10pm-4:10pm

Lis Harris

Tue., 1:10pm-4:10pm

Leslie Jamison

Mon., 1:10pm-4:10pm

Wendy S. Walters

Tue., 1:10pm-4:10pm

Kate Zambreno

Mon., 10am-1pm

POETRY – OPEN (6 points)

Mark Bibbins

Thu., 1:10-4:10pm

Timothy Donnelly

Thu., 4:15pm-7:15pm

Shane McCrae

Tue., 10am-1pm

Asiya Wadud

Mon., 4:15pm-7:15pm

Lynn Xu

Tue., 10am-1pm

SEMINARS

Seminars and translation workshops

are 3 points.

(FI) = Fiction (NF) = Nonfiction

(PO) = Poetry (CG) = Cross-Genre

(TR) = Translation

——MONDAY——

Gideon Lewis-Kraus (NF)

Reporting Non-News

Mon., 1:10pm-3:10pm

Yasmine Seale (TR)

Translation Workshop

Mon., 4:15pm-6:45pm

Jaquira Díaz (NF)

Speculative Nonfiction: Speculation,

Invention, and Innovation

Mon., 4:15pm-6:15pm

Erroll McDonald (FI)

William Faulkner and World Fiction

n., 4:15pm-6:15pm

Keri Bertino (CG)

The Writer as Teacher

n., 4:15pm-7:15pm

——TUESDAY——

Monica Ferrell (CG)

Word and Image: Reading and Writing

Contemporary Poetry for Prose Writers

Tue., 10am-12pm

Lynn Steger Strong (FI)

Unhinged Narrators

Tue., 10am-12pm

Rivka Galchen (FI)

Science in Literature, Science as Literature

Tue., 10am-12pm

Timothy Donnelly (PO)

Nonsense

Tue., 1:10pm-3:10pm

Leslie Jamison (NF)

Archive Fever

Tue., 1:10pm-3:10pm

Binnie Kirshenbaum (FI)

The Word, The Sentence, and The

Paragraph

Tue., 4:15pm-6:15pm

Jeremy Tiang (TR)

Tracing the Uncanny in Translated

Southeast Asian Literature

Tue., 4:15pm-6:15pm

Alan Gilbert (CG)

Avant-Garde Writing and Movements

Tue., 4:15pm-6:15pm

B.K. Fischer (CG)

The Comma Sutra: Grammar, Syntax, and

Praxis

Tue., 4:15pm-6:15pm

Thom Donovan (CG)

Special Projects Workshop

Tue., 6:30pm-9:30pm

——WEDNESDAY——

Chloé Cooper Jones (NF)

Integrations

Wed., 10am-12pm

Nalini Jones (FI)

Place in Fiction

Wed., 10am-12pm

Ruth Franklin (FI)

Contemporary Politics and the Novel

Wed., 10am-12pm

Lara Vapnyar (FI)

Building a Scene

Wed., 10am-12pm

James Cañón (FI)

Link ‘Em Up! Bridging the Boundary

Between Short Stories and Novels

Wed., 2pm-4pm

Katrine Øgaard Jensen (TR, PO)

Supernatural Poetics

Wed., 2pm-4pm

Susan Hartman (NF)

Writing About Communities

Wed., 2pm-4pm

Wendy S. Walters (NF)

Climate and Time: Writing in Catastrophe

Wed., 2pm-4pm

Matthew Salesses (FI)

Theory for Writers

Wed., 3pm-5pm

Emily Skillings (PO)

Forms of Attention: Sem. for 1

Year Poets

Wed., 4:15pm-6:15pm

Brigid Hughes (CG)

Editing and the Writer

Wed., 5:10pm-7:10pm

——THURSDAY——

Lis Harris (NF)

Family Matters

Thu., 10am-12pm

Susan Bernofsky (TR)

Translation Workshop

Thu., 10am-12:30pm

Shane McCrae (PO)

How to Read and Write (Meter)

Thu., 10am-12pm

Nicholas Christopher (CG)

Travellers’ Tales: Novelists & Poets on the

Road

Thu., 10am-12pm

Ben Marcus (FI)

The Future of the Short Story

Thu., 1:10pm-3:10pm

Alice Quinn (PO)

The Beauty and Power of the Sentence in

Prose and Poetry

Thu., 2:10pm-4:10pm

Michael Moore (TR)

Translation Workshop

Thu., 4:15pmm-6:45pm

——FRIDAY——

Anelise Chen (FI)

The Scandal of Particularity: Paying

Attention with Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at

Tinker Creek

Fri., 10am-12pm

Lincoln Michel (FI)

Architecture of the Unreal: Constructing

Speculative Fiction

Fri., 10am-12pm

LECTURES

---MONDAY---

Jay Deshpande (PO)

Turning, Leaping, Digressing: A Poet’s Taxonomy of Moves

Mon., 10am-12pm

Joshua Cohen (FI)

Story, Plot, Narrative

Mon., 1:10pm-3:10pm

---THURSDAY---

Benjamin Taylor (NF)

Reaping the Whirlwind

Thu., 4:15pm-6:15pm

MASTER CLASSES

——MONDAY——

Sarah Rothenberg

Music and the Writer’s Imagination

(1.5 points)

Mon., 10am-12pm

Oct. 23 – Dec. 4

Susie Luo

Surprise Me If You Can (1.5 points)

Mon., 11am-1pm

Oct. 2 – Nov. 13

——TUESDAY——

Jack Lowery

Living Subjects: A Dilemma (1.5 points)

Tue., 6:30pm-8:30pm

Sep. 12 – Oct. 17

Salvatore Scibona

Mating: A Novel by Norman Rush (1.5 points)

Tue., 6:30pm-8:30pm

Oct. 24 – Dec. 5

——WEDNESDAY——

Leonard Schwartz

Mythography: Writing and the Mythopoetic

(1.5 points)

Wed., 10am-12pm

Sep. 6 – Sep. 22

(Also Fridays)

Mychal Denzel Smith

The Personal Essay and its Discontents (1.5

points)

Wed., 10am-12pm

Sep. 27 – Nov. 1

Matthew Burgess

Serious Play: Teaching Imaginative Writing to

Young People (1.5 points)

Wed., 4:15pm-6:15pm

Sep. 13 – Oct. 18

Evan James

Experiments in Process - Nonfiction (1.5 points)

Wed., 4:15pm-6:15pm

Sep. 13 – Oct. 18

Matvei Yankelevich

Creative (Mis)translation (1 point)

Wed., 4:15pm-6:15pm

Oct. 4 – Oct. 25

Dinitia Smith

Fiction and Memory (1.5 points)

Wed., 4:15pm-6:15pm

Oct. 25 – Dec. 6

Edwin Torres

Room to Roam: Writing the Voice of the Body

(1.5 points)

Wed., 4:15pm-6:15pm

Oct. 25 – Dec. 6

James Wood

Fictional Technique in Novellas and Short

Stories (1 point)

Wed., 4:15pm-6:15pm

Nov. 1 – Nov. 29

——THURSDAY——

Lilly Dancyger

Hybrid Memoir (1.5 points)

Thu., 12:05pm-2:05pm

Oct. 26 – Dec. 7

——FRIDAY——

Leonard Schwartz

Mythography: Writing and the Mythopoetic

(1.5 points)

Fri., 1:10pm-3:10pm

Sep. 6 – Sep. 22

(Also Wednesdays)

Dennard Dayle

Black Comedy (1.5 points)

Fri., 1:10pm-3:10pm

Oct. 27 – Dec. 8

Amy Grace Loyd

The Editing Cycle (1.5 points)

Fri., 1:10pm-3:10pm

Oct. 27 – Dec. 8

SEMINARS

Keri Bertino

The Writer as Teacher

(CROSS-GENRE) Mon., 4:15pm-7:15pm

This class, for students with an interest in teaching creative writing in any setting, takes as a starting

point two foundational questions of writing pedagogy: “Can writing be taught?” and “Is it possible

to teach English so that people stop killing each other?” Together, we’ll develop more (and more-

nuanced) inquiries in response to these questions, and seek to answer them through our exploration

of the theories, practices, and contexts of teaching creative writing. Primary topics include

fundamentals of both general and writing pedagogy (including process, creativity, and growth

mindset), assignment and course design, creating classroom communities, responding to student

writing, the workshop, and exploration of varied sites of creative writing both in-person and online.

We’ll also take up broader questions of the role of the artist and teacher in communities, issues of

professionalization, and the ways that practices of teaching and writing inform and fortify one

another.

James Cañón

Link ’Em Up! Bridging the Boundary Between Short Stories and

Novels

(FICTION) Wed., 2pm-4pm

Is it a collection of short stories? Is it a novel? Actually, it’s both! This seminar will focus on highly

acclaimed short story cycles, or collections of linked stories, or novels-in-stories, or composite

novels — call them by whatever name you like — those books made up of individual narratives that

stand alone as short stories, with all the intensity that the form entails, but are connected so the

book achieves an aggregate, novelistic force, a collection that adds up to something even more

compelling than the power of its component parts. We’ll look at works by Gloria Naylor, Sherwood

Anderson, Julia Álvarez, Daniyal Mueenuddin, and Sherman Alexie, among others. We’ll explore

organizing around place, character, theme, and event. We’ll look at using repetition of landscape and

objects to maximize emotional impact. We’ll delve into long and short timeframes — how one

approaches writing a multi-generational linked cycle versus a cycle of stories that occurs in a day.

We’ll focus on the importance of plot: how throughlines and lines of tension function in both

individual stories and through a linked collection. Lastly, we’ll consider connection and

disconnection in relation to broader questions of identity and community.

Anelise Chen

The Scandal of Particularity: Paying Attention with Annie

Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

(CROSS-GENRE) Fri., 10am-12pm

Annie Dillard was only in her twenties when she began writing what would become the nature

writing classic Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. Over several seasons, she

took her notebook to the creek and paid close attention to the muskrats, water bugs, and birds,

focusing on the miraculous minutiae of the material world, and compiled what Thoreau might have

called “a meteorological journal of the mind.” With a child’s capacity for awe, Dillard captured what

she found to be holy and singular about nature, and reveled in the “scandal of particularity” that so

bedeviled theologians. “Why, we might as well ask, not a plane tree, instead of a bo?” Dillard

wonders. “I never saw a tree that was no tree in particular.” Since its publication, Pilgrim has inspired

generations of writers who return to it for its commitment to specificity and its joyous prose. What

does the moon look like? Like “a smudge of chalk,” or “softly frayed, like the heel of a sock.” What

do you call the shedding of leaves in fall? “A striptease.” What does cold air do? “Bites [one’s] nose

like pepper.” (And so on.)

In this cross-genre seminar, we will read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and use the book as a guiding text to

hone our own faculties of attention, observational writing skills, and descriptive ability. We will work

and rework our descriptions so that no tree is just a tree, and no sunset is just a sunset. The output

of this course will not be stories, essays, or poems, but rather, lists of descriptions of oranges, the

texture of bark, weather, and a repertoire of new vocabulary words for describing colors and

materials. Weekly exercises will prompt us to become nature writers in the city: we will stalk pigeons,

inventory trash and weeds, study maps of buried streams, and examine a drop of puddle water

through a microscope. We will dissect Dillard’s prose to see how she puts her words together to

achieve various effects. We will compile lists of active verbs and make our sentences somersault and

sing. Though taking inspiration from Pilgrim and based in the natural world, the exercises in this class

are meant to carry over into other kinds of writing; paying close attention is an asset no matter what

the subject matter. Field trips will include a walk in Riverside Park, a visit to the Greenpoint Sewage

Plant, and an optional day-trip to the Beinecke Library to see the Annie Dillard papers.

Nicholas Christopher

Travellers’ Tales: Novelists & Poets on the Road

(CROSS-GENRE) Thu., 10am-12pm

Travel writings by novelists and poets reflect how their worldly journeys fed into and often mirrored

their artistic lives. We will examine how the geography of the imagination meshes vitally with the

geography of the world at large, discussing the respective writers’ fiction and/or poetry in

conjunction with their travel books. The reading list is international and thematically varied, as is the

approach each writer took to “travel.” We will explore what exactly that meant to them, and which

of many narrative approaches they chose: memoir, diary, travelogue, adventure story, spiritual quest,

personal journey, cultural/historical essay, or some combination thereof. The styles are eclectic, as

exemplified by the two writers who alternated between prose and poetry in a single text.

Each week there will be a short student presentation. A single paper will be required at the end of

the term: a formal proposal (including a brief sample chapter or introduction) for a travel book—

informed by all the varieties we have explored—the student might want to write.

Readings:

In Patagonia, Bruce Chatwin

Tell My Horse, Zora Neale Hurston

Running in the Family, Michael Ondaatje

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (selections), Rebecca West

The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Bashô

The Voices of Marrakesh, Elias Canetti

The Coldest Winter, Paula Fox

My Journey to Lhasa, Alexandra David-Neel

The Colossus of Maroussi, Henry Miller

Etruscan Places, D.H. Lawrence

Journey to the Land of the Flies, Aldo Buzzi

American Diary, Italo Calvino

Mani, Patrick Leigh Fermor

The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen

Chloé Cooper Jones

Integrations

(NONFICTION) Wed., 10am-12pm

This course will focus on the ways nonfiction writing can be enriched and elevated through the

integration of and engagement with various forms of visual art, literature, poetry, theory, and

philosophy. Together, we will explore how to incorporate these diverse sources into nonfiction

writing to create compelling, thought-provoking works.

Engagement in the work of others can push us to explore realms of thought, form, and aesthetic

opportunities that we would not arrive at alone. However, it can also be a way of protecting,

deferring, of obfuscating the writer-self. This class will look closely at the challenges and pitfalls of

such integrations and interrogate their effectiveness in our own work. We will also study the

demands of different forms—essays, criticism, memoir, arts writing, etc.—and how integrations

serve each form in different ways.

Through a combination of readings, discussions, and writing exercises, students will learn how to

use the art of others to enrich their own writing. This course will also address ethical concerns when

integrating other people’s works and how to give proper credit. We will read a wide-range writers

including Plato, Aristotle, Rigoberta Menchú, James Baldwin, Leslie Jamison, Maggie Nelson, Ben

Lerner, Zadie Smith, Geoff Dyer, Erich Auerbach, Rachel Aviv, Patti Smith, Emmanuel Carrère,

Annie Ernaux, Merve Emre, Vivian Gornick, and others.

Jaquira Díaz

Speculative Nonfiction: Speculation, Invention, and Innovation

(NONFICTION) Mon., 4:15pm-6:15pm

Most often, creative nonfiction deals with truth and reality. But there is room in nonfiction for

speculation, imagination, experimentation, and invention. We’ll discuss work that moves beyond

narration, reportage, and interrogation toward speculation: work that builds upon and expands the

nascent genre of Speculative Nonfiction in innovative ways, work that imagines what else might be

possible, considering alternate histories and realities, sometimes working with metaphor rather than

the literal, considering the use of the fictional in creative nonfiction, and suggesting new ways of

seeing and thinking about truth in the essay and other nonfiction forms. We’ll explore the poetics of

haunting, writing the mystical and the “Otherworldly,” and other speculative possibilities. Readings

may include Sofia Samatar, Carmen Maria Machado, Maxine Hong Kingston, Saidiya Hartman,

Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Kathryn Nuernberger, Jo Ann Beard, etc.

This is a graduate craft and critical reading course, and together we’ll focus on reading, discussion of

works of speculative nonfiction, and generating new work. We will examine speculative memoir,

essay, cultural criticism, and other speculative forms, with a particular focus on craft, but we’ll also

be discussing questions of ethics and research. Students are expected to read all assigned materials

and actively engage in critical discussions every class meeting, think critically and creatively about

how to contribute to a larger conversation about craft, and think about how to incorporate

invention, innovation, and speculation into their own work.

Timothy Donnelly

Nonsense

(POETRY) Tue., 1:10pm-3:10pm

Almost everywhere there is happiness there is pleasure in nonsense

—Nietzsche

And if logic can’t prevail, perhaps hilarity can, as an attribute of a revolutionary practice of everyday life,

dismantling control and reforming connectivity.

—Lyn Hejinian

In this seminar we will use the word “nonsense” as an umbrella term for a wide array of artistic

practices that challenge normative modes of meaning making or seek to defy common-sense

reasoning. Readings will range from Aristophanes’ comedy The Birds, both for its fantastical

“collision and collusion of signifiers” (Gregory Dobrov) as well as for its depiction of birdsong, to

William Benton’s concrete poetry collection Birds (1972), in which each poem is presented as “a

visual event.” We will start with a review of the fundamentals of semiotics to remember how sense

is made in the first place, with specific emphasis on the Saussurean model and such key rhetorical

tropes as irony, metonymy, synecdoche, and especially metaphor—which Lacan says “occurs at the

precise point at which sense emerges from nonsense.” In addition to our appreciation of the various

aesthetic motives (and pleasures) of subverting sense, we will likewise embrace Susan Stewart’s

definition of nonsense not as meaninglessness but as the antipode (or even antidote) to common

sense as well as the politics of writing as “a constant disruption of the means of semantic

production.” (Fred Moten) We will consider the place of nonsense in the thought of Nietzsche,

Bergson, Wittgenstein, and especially Cixous, whose concept of l’écriture feminine promises to “erase

the divisions between speech and text, between order and chaos, between sense and nonsense,” as

well as in the early work of Deleuze, whose study Logic and Sense draws a crucial distinction between

the playful “nonsense of the surface” of Lewis Carroll and the terrifying “nonsense of depth” of

Antonin Artaud.

In addition to those mentioned above, specific texts and topics are likely to include Ludwig Tieck’s

Puss in Boots as a precursor to the Theatre of the Absurd; Victorian champions of nonsense such as

Carroll himself and Edward Lear, as well as the latter’s echo in the Modernist, feminist work of

Stevie Smith; Arthur Rimbaud’s “disordering of all the senses” and the studious hallucinations of his

prose poetry (in John Ashbery’s translation); the relationship between nonsense and melancholy;

William James’s “stream of consciousness” and the empire of Gertrude Stein; Alfred Jarry, his

parodic ’pataphysics, and its influence on Dada, Surrealism, and the OuLiPo, with an emphasis on

the short fiction of Leonora Carrington and Georges Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in

Paris; Federico García Lorca’s theory of the duende as “a mysterious force that everyone feels and

no philosopher has explained”; the possibilities of the baroque and its “excess of signification” and

“madness of vision” (Nadir Lahiji), including the “extravagant verbiage” (Rita Dove) of Melvin B.

Tolson’s Harlem Gallery; Langston Hughes’ Montage of a Dream Deferred and the “nonsense of bebop”;

nonsense as a way of “figuring the unfigurable” (JA Mitchell); disproportion as a measure of

fatal/futile desire in Wilde’s Salomé, Ferenc Juhász’s “The Boy Changed into a Stag Clamors at the

Gate of Secrets,” and elsewhere; “the overabundance of the signifier” (Byung-Chul Han) as a

characteristic of ritual; Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in tandem with Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus”;

certain practices associated with Language poetry, including homophonic translations of David

Melnick’s Men in Aida and others; Lyn Hejinian’s The Unfollowing and its potent “rejection of the logic

of mortality and of capitalism”; Harryette Mullen’s “ruses of the lunatic muse”; Roland Barthes’s The

Pleasure of the Text; and a look at what Flarf was, and why. Each student will submit six short writing

assignments as well as provide a brief presentation on one of the topics of our study at some point

during the semester.

Monica Ferrell

Word and Image: Reading and Writing Poetry for Prose Writers

(CROSS-GENRE) Tue, 10am-12pm

Open to Fiction and Nonfiction students only. This is a workshop-format course in the reading

and writing of poetry for students of fiction and creative nonfiction. With a focus on contemporary

poetry, we will discuss various approaches to how to read a poem, and examine a range of aesthetics

including modernism, formalism, confessional writing, the New York School, and hybridity. We will

also discuss free and formal verse, the prose poem, and the lyric essay. Topics explored will include

music and sound, word choice, imagery, line-break and stanza-break, repetition, syntax, silence and

the unsaid, and poetic closure. We will attempt to write a new poem each week, as we consider work

by such authors as Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, John Ashbery, Mark Strand, Claudia Rankine, Inger

Christensen, Terrance Hayes, Aditi Machado, Cynthia Cruz, and Jericho Brown.

B.K. Fischer

The Comma Sutra: Grammar, Syntax, and Praxis

(CROSS-GENRE) Tue., 4:15pm-6:15pm

This course aims to convince the skeptic that even if Gertrude Stein was mistaken in saying “I really

do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences,” grammar is at

least the second most fulfilling human pursuit. Fundamental to our exploration will be a study of

grammatical terminology and principles as an anatomy lab for language—a method for exposing its

inner workings, mechanisms, and connective tissues to understand more fully its capacities and

effects. This technical scrutiny will give rise to discussion of a variety of topics relevant to creative

practice in poetry and prose, including patterns of syntax, point of view, polysemy, closure,

disjunction, the non sequitur, parataxis and hypotaxis, deixis, the subjunctive, vernaculars, and code-

switching. Our analysis of grammar will dovetail with theoretical perspectives beyond subject and

predicate, drawing insights from linguistics, cultural studies, feminist theory, race theory, ethics,

activist politics, aesthetics, and media studies. We will dissect and revel in sentences by Virginia

Woolf, Claudia Rankine, Henry James, Nathaniel Mackey, Marilynne Robinson, Emily Dickinson,

Teju Cole, Jorie Graham, Taiye Selasi, Layli Long Soldier, and Vampire Weekend, among many

other writers, and read essays by Nietzsche, M. NourbeSe Philip, Cecilia Vicuña, Gloria Anzaldúa,

Hélène Cixous, Giorgio Agamben, Lyn Hejinian, and others. Taking the form of a sutra—texts

threaded together to build a working manual—the course will focus in every class on how

grammatical ideas are vital to writing praxis. Participants will write seven one-page responses to

extend the seminar’s conversation, one of which must include graphic or visual (or any non-

linguistic) elements, and a final paper of approximately five pages.

Ruth Franklin

Contemporary Politics and the Novel

(FICTION) Wed., 10am-12pm

Jane Eyre is a document of British imperialism. Heart of Darkness depicts Africans as savages. To Kill a

Mockingbird embodies the white savior complex. Lolita glorifies pedophilia and rape. If you follow

contemporary literary culture, you’ve heard critiques like these—and you may not know quite what

to make of them. Is it possible to appreciate a work of art while finding aspects of it politically or

morally offensive? Should socially retrograde novels be cast aside to make way for a more diverse

and inclusive literary canon? Is it mistaken to judge classics by contemporary standards? In this class,

we’ll reread these novels and others, taking into account their position at the crossroads of politics

and literature while thinking through these essential questions. Content warning: materials used in

this class, unavoidably, will contain racial and ethnic slurs.

Rivka Galchen

Science in Literature, Science as Literature

(CROSS-GENRE, FICTION) Tue., 10am-12pm

In this course we'll look at the ways the at the possibilities of scientific language and ideas in

literature. The texts we will look at will range from scientific treatises to science fiction; poems,

essays and stories about nature; stories with 'mad' or 'heroic' scientists as characters; and writing that

might at first appear unrelated to scientific thinking, including folk tales and detective fiction.

Students will also be responsible for four short creative assignments related to the reading, as well as

a brief in-class presentation.

Alan Gilbert

Avant-Garde Writing and Movements

(CROSS-GENRE) Tue, 4:15pm-6:15pm

With an emphasis on poetry, but also including nonfiction, fiction, and hybrid texts, this seminar will

chart the history of twentieth-century avant-garde literature. We will begin briefly with the origins of

the avant-garde in the nineteenth century with Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Emily

Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Lautréamont, and then examine various avant-garde, experimental,

and non-mainstream literary movements and aesthetics, including Symbolism, Imagism, Futurism,

Dadaism, Surrealism, Harlem Renaissance, Négritude, Black Arts Movement, Black Mountain

School, Beats, New York School, feminism, cross-cultural poetics, spoken word, rap, Language

poetry, concrete poetry, and more. We will end by focusing on recent trends such as Flarf,

Conceptual writing, and digital work. Along the way, we will pause to talk more extensively about

important figures in this history such as Gertrude Stein, William Burroughs, Amiri Baraka, Édouard

Glissant, and Adrienne Rich, as well as read the work of a few younger writers. We will also

reference parallel developments in twentieth-century avant-garde art, film, and performance.

Lis Harris

Family Matters

(NONFICTION) Thu., 10am-12pm

This course is an exploration of a wide spectrum of literary approaches to writing about the people

who gave you life and then made it glorious or a living hell—and about those who huddled

alongside in the primal pack. We will closely examine some of the aesthetic, ethical, and research

issues that arise from writing about family as well as the novelistic, meditative, and lyric strategies

that can expand this subject’s breadth and depth. Authors—of nonfiction and fiction—whose work

we will read include Mary McCarthy (Memories of a Catholic Girlhood), Philip Roth (Patrimony), William

Maxwell (So Long, See You Tomorrow), Colette (My Mother’s House; Sido), Tobias Wolff (This Boy’s Life),

Paula Fox (Borrowed Finery), Per Petterson (Out Stealing Horses), Michael Ondaatje (Running In the

Family), Vladimir Nabokov (Speak, Memory), and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (Random Family).

Susan Hartman

Writing About Communities

(NONFICTION) Wed., 2pm-4pm

In this class, students will learn feature writing techniques—how to interview, report on and

structure a story--as they explore a small community outside campus. New York City can be seen as

a galaxy of tiny communities: a group of domino players, a butcher shop, a street vendor who

repairs watches. We will discuss: How do you gain access to a closely-knit community? How do you

establish trust? How do you ask difficult questions? And how do you report during a pandemic?

We will look at selected readings by veteran journalists and authors. Our definition of community

will be broad: We will read about communities shaped by danger, by altruism, and by loneliness.

Students will learn how to find a sharp focus--an invisible thread--for their own reported piece. By

the last class, students will have completed a draft of a feature story. (Word length depends on

scope; 1200 word max.)

Brigid Hughes

Editing and the Writer

(CROSS-GENRE) Wed., 5:10pm-7:10pm

This course will examine the past, present, and future of literary magazines, from the perspectives of

both the editor and the writer. We will analyze specific issues by magazines such as The Paris Review,

Granta, Monkey Business, Noon, Evergreen Review, Callaloo, Triquarterly, and others. We will discuss the

elements that distinguish a magazine, including unifying themes, layout and design, and criteria for

the selection process. The editorial relationships between known editors and writers will also be

examined. Assignments will include exercises in editing, graphics selection, and assessing work from

various sources. By the end of the seminar, you will develop a mission statement and create a sample

issue. This seminar is designed for writers who are interested in the editorial side of publishing, and

how editor-writer relationships would shape their work.

Leslie Jamison

Archive Fever

(NONFICTION) Tue., 1:10pm-3:10pm

Archives are records of minds and bodies and secrets. They are full of surprises: the cigarette burns

marking John Berryman’s 12-step inventories; the jam-sticky fingerprints of Marilynne Robinson’s

toddler son in her composition books, where novel fragments live alongside grocery lists; the

instructions to Jean Rhys’s caregivers to put more ice cubes in her evening tumblers of whiskey, the

postcards sent from 19th-century sanitarium patients to beloveds living elsewhere. In this course, we

will be exploring the allure of the archives—their enchantments, their tyrannies, their obfuscations,

their practicalities, their labyrinthine passageways—and thinking about how creative work can

incorporate archival research in surprising and dynamic ways. Archives are necessarily incomplete,

and their gaps are just as resonant as their records; speaking histories of power and silencing.

In addition to reading critical and creative work that draws from archival research, we will be visiting

a number of archives across New York City, including the Morgan Library, the New York Public

Library, the Schomburg Center, the Fales Library at NYU, and the New York Academy of Medicine,

as well as our own Rare Books and Manuscripts Library here at Columbia. Over the course of the

semester, each student will produce a piece of creative writing that draws on sustained engagement

with a particular set of archival materials. Our readings will range across genres--creative nonfiction,

fiction, poetry—including Kiki Petrosino, M. NourbeSe Philip, Karen Green, Maggie Nelson,

Saidiya Hartman, Arlette Farge, and Mark Nowak.

Note: Because many of our classes will occur off-site, it will not be feasible for students to

take courses that end immediately before this seminar begins, or begin right after it ends.

Please schedule accordingly. Thank you!

Katrine Øgaard Jensen

Supernatural Poetics

(CROSS-GENRE, TRANSLATION) Wed., 2pm-4pm

The term Supernatural derives from the Medieval Latin supernaturalis ("above or beyond nature,

divine"), from the Latin super "above" and natura, "nature." This seminar will explore how poets and

writers from around the world have imagined alternate realities and worlds, linguistic inventions, and

new poetic expressions inspired by ideas beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature. We

will discuss what these works might tell us about the cultural and political contexts in which they

were conceived, as well as what the transcendent imaginings of supernatural literature might teach us

about writing into the unknown. In parallel and addition, we will in this seminar explore

supernatural modes of translation and creation, from CAConrad’s crystal-translation of Shakespeare

to Don Mee Choi’s trance-lations and Yeats’s conversations with ghosts, as well as Paul Legault’s

conversations with Yeats’s ghost translated into poems. No prior experience with translation or

divination is required for this seminar.

Topics will include angelic encounters and the language of angels, demonology and depictions of the

underworld, cryptozoology and imaginary beings, occult writing and translation practices, the

afterlife, xenopoetics, myth and muses, prophesies/poetic visions, and ghosts as apparitions of

identity, collective memory, and witness.

Course reading will include work by Kim Hyesoon, Don Mee Choi, Reza Negarestani, Tanella Boni,

Gabriel García Márquez, Alejandra Pizarnik, Eva Kristina Olsson, Johannes Göransson, Alice

Notley, Jorge Luis Borges, Mariana Enríquez, Victor LaValle, W. B. Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke,

CAConrad, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Bruno K. Öijer, and others.

Nalini Jones

Place in Fiction

(FICTION) Wed., 10am-12pm

Eudora Welty wrote that "Place is one of the lesser angels that watch over the racing hand of

fiction." Through readings from around the world, this course will explore how a sense of place

contributes to characterization, plotting, and what Welty calls "feeling." Students will experiment

with different ways to funnel the smells, sounds, and sights of a place into language, and to address

the challenge of creating whole worlds--real, reenvisioned, or imagined--in which their characters

may struggle or thrive.

Binnie Kirshenbaum

The Word, The Sentence, and The Paragraph

(FICTION) Tue., 4:15pm-6:15pm

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God

John; King James Bible; 1:1

(This quotation is based solely on its content. The source is irrelevant to the seminar.)

In this craft seminar we will begin by considering words in isolation and devoid of context. What

makes one stand-alone word evocative, lively, vivid, visual, and fresh? Conversely, why are some

words dull, flat, hackneyed, and lazy? We’ll look at the differences between words with Latinate

roots and those with Germanic roots, and how English is enriched by incorporating words from

other languages. Can we invent new words? We’ll discover words that we’d never heretofore

encountered, and that reading the dictionary is both enlightening and fun.

When a sentence successfully conveys meaning and intent, isn’t that the whole of it? No, not if we

want to write memorable sentences that are, unto themselves, works of art. Good sentences sharpen

detail and imagery, reveal character, enhance the narrative voice, and pop off the page. How do

metaphors and similes clarify meaning, create beauty, and heighten comic and tragic effects? How

does the rearrangement of syntax disrupt monotony, as well as bring order to events as they unfold?

Can we break the rules of conventional grammar and style? Do our sentences make music?

Which of our sentences is best suited to open a paragraph, and which of them might end it with a

punch? Have we essentially said the same thing twice, and if so, how do we decide which of the two

(or more) should be eliminated, and which should we keep? Or is the repetition of words and

sentences within a paragraph a deliberate stylistic choice, or is it the byproduct of not paying close

attention? Do the sentences contained in a paragraph move smoothly from one to the next? We will

also assess the flow of dialogue. Does it sound authentic without being authentic? Does it move the

story forward and /or illuminate character?

These questions, among others, will be addressed in class discussion and put into practice with in-

class exercises and homework to be shared with the group.

Books required are Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (9th Edition Preferred) and Roget’s International

Thesaurus (7th Edition Preferred).

Gideon Lewis-Kraus

Reporting Non-News

(NONFICTION) Mon., 1:10-3:10pm

This seminar looks at information-gathering for writers, with particular emphasis on non-news—

that is, information that cannot exclusively or interestingly be gathered inside one’s house, via email,

or over the telephone. It examines attitudes about and practices of reporting in light of the

assumption that what people say and do explicitly is not necessarily of greater relevance than how

they said or did it, what they were wearing at the time, what the weather was like that day, and how

the listener happened to feel about what was said or done. The class will dwell on actual

information-gathering skills—which approaches tend to yield greater or lesser quantities of the

varieties of useful information—but will (for the most part) reject the following ideas: that reporting

and writing are distinct rather than interrelated elements of the process; that reportorial skills are

innate, or are trade secrets, or can be dismissed as “mere” practical techniques of no use to the pure

of heart; and that reporting for memoir or first-person rumination or fiction is somehow different in

kind from reporting more traditional magazine stories. Readings will in turn be drawn from

contemporary feature journalism, sociology, fiction, and possibly poetry, and may or may not

include such writers as Grace Paley, Larissa MacFarquhar, Howard S. Becker, Janet Malcolm, Jia

Tolentino, Ben Lerner, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Anne Carson, Katherine Boo, Rachel Kaadzi

Ghansah, Kenneth Tynan, Elif Batuman, Rachel Aviv, and Tracy Kidder.

Ben Marcus

The Future of the Short Story

(FICTION) Thu., 1:10pm-3:10pm

In this seminar, we will explore the potential of the short story, focusing on deepening our practice

and testing our individual artistic ambition. Our readings will mostly consist of works published in

the last twenty years, designed to reveal the vast range and possibility of the form. In addition to a

few influential stories that have left their mark on many practicing writers, we will read some lesser-

known stories that might have something to show us still. Our aim is to scrutinize techniques such

as voice, point of view, character, plot, setting, time, and conflict, among other integral components

of a story, and wonder how they might be brought to bear in our own work. We will try to

understand how each story was made, leaving room for mystery and uncertainty, while systematically

adding to our writerly toolkits. Through this process, we hope to improve our command of the

short story form and progress towards realizing our unique literary visions.

Among the writers we will read: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Carmen Maria Machado, Ted Chiang,

Kelly Link, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Charles Yu, Ottessa Moshfegh, Lydia Davis, Bryan

Washington, Miranda July, Ling Ma, and Kazuo Ishiguro.

Shane McCrae

How to Read and Write (Meter)

(POETRY) Thu., 10am-12pm

Besides wanting to know more about poetry, I started studying meter as an undergraduate for two

reasons, and I will now confess to you what those were: 1. If I ever found myself, via time machine,

act of God, or witch’s/wizard’s spell, forced to live my life in the 18th century, or the 17th century,

etc., in England, I would still like to be a poet, and so I needed to understand meter; 2. I wanted

Auden—whose poetry I didn’t much read at the time, and anyway he was dead—I wanted Auden to

respect me. And yet, my decision to study meter has been one the best and most important

decisions I have ever made for my writing, second only to my decision to read everything I possibly

could. Studying meter opened the poems I was writing and reading, and introduced me to a freedom

I didn’t know I was missing. And studying meter can do the same for you. In this seminar we will

learn how to recognize and write in meter through studying handbooks on meter and poems in

meter, and we will write our own rad and fun metrical poems.

Erroll McDonald

William Faulkner and World Fiction

(FICTION) Mon., 4:15pm-6:15pm

Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez unabashedly claims William Faulkner as “my master,”

says that “Faulkner is present in all the novels of Latin America,” and mischievously insists that “The

Hamlet is the best South American novel ever written.” Since the 1950s, other major writers from

around the world have similarly trumpeted the crucial influence of Faulkner on their writing. Why?

What about Faulkner excited their imagination and inspired their work, allowing them to achieve

their own singularities? This course aims to elucidate not only Faulkner’s formal inventions and

literary techniques but his social and moral concerns, so as to examine how they inform such writers

as Patrick Chamoiseau (Martinique), Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Colombia), Antonio Lobo Antunes

(Portugal), Toni Morrison (United States), Juan Rulfo (Mexico), and Kateb Yacine (Algeria).

Among the works we will read are: Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, As I Lay Dying, Light in August,

Sanctuary, and The Sound and the Fury; Chamoiseau’s Solibo Magnificent; Garcia Marquez’s The Autumn of

the Patriarch; Lobo Antunes’s Act of the Damned; Morrison’s Beloved; Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo; and Yacine’s

Nedjma. The course will conclude with a reading of selections from Faulkner, Mississippi, meditations

upon the writer by Martinican poet and critic Edouard Glissant.

The course requirements are: a short (three-to-five-page) piece of literary criticism on a clearly

defined topic to be determined in consultation with the instructor—this essay will be orally

presented to the class—and a twelve-to-fifteen-page final exercise in imitation of any writer covered

during the semester.

Lincoln Michel

Architecture of the Unreal: Constructing Speculative Fiction

(FICTION) Fri., 10am-12pm

How do we build the impossible? What scaffolding supports the surreal? This seminar will examine

the forms, effects, and structures of speculative fiction. We’ll look at the shapes of fairy tales with

Angela Carter and Donald Barthelme. We’ll study how SF worlds are built (and destroyed) with

Octavia Butler, Italo Calvino, and Ursula K. Le Guin. We’ll examine the psychological effects of

terror and the uncanny with Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, and Shirley Jackson. After investigating

the forms of the fantastic and the futuristic, we’ll use our blueprints to create our own works in

class.

Tentative reading list includes:

The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino

Fifteen Dogs by André Alexis

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin

As well as essays or short fiction from Kelly Link, Tzvetan Todorov, Kate Bernheimer, Brian

Evenson, Ann Radcliffe, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Samuel Delany, and others.

Alice Quinn

The Beauty and Power of the Sentence in Prose and Poetry

(POETRY) Thu., 2:10pm-4:10pm

The variety and splendor of the sentence in English is a wonder to behold.

The sentence is a prime vessel of the flow and shape of thought and a bedrock element of the

poetry and prose honored and enjoyed in our language.

In this class we will explore the syntactic glory of sentence structure and composition in the work of

a variety of great writers: George Herbert and James Baldwin, Emily Dickinson and Henry James,

Ralph Waldo Emerson and Virginia Woolf, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, Lucille

Clifton, Janet Malcolm, and a number of superb younger writers.

Our guests— who will explore with us the work of authors whose sentences they love— include

Vidyan Ravinthiran, a distinguished poet and scholar of prose structure who teaches at Harvard, Jo

Ann Beard, author of several celebrated collections of memoir and hybrid memoir/story including

The Boys of My Youth and Festival Days, and award-winning poet Atsuro Riley, author of the

collections Romey’s Order and Heard-Hoard.

There will be ample opportunity for everyone in the seminar to embark on new work— essay,

poem, or story— reflecting the influence of the writers we discuss and our in-depth exploration of

the beauty and power of the sentence in prose and poetry.

Matthew Salesses

Theory for Writers

(FICTION, CROSS-GENRE) Wed., 3pm-5pm

Literature—in addition to language, philosophy, politics, culture, nature, religion, life—is all about

desire. How do we “read” and “write” desire more productively? This course will require close

reading of theory and may serve as an introduction to theory as it concerns a life of making art, of

making something out of desire. We will read fewer books more slowly, with one final, creative

assignment. Possible authors include Anne Carson, Byung-chul Han, Alain de Botton, Audre Lorde,

Jonathan Lear, Plato.

Emily Skillings

Forms of Attention

(POETRY) Wed., 4:15pm-6:15pm

First-year Poetry students are strongly encouraged to take this class.

Poetry is a soul inaugurating a form. — Pierre-Jean Jouve

“Attention,” wrote philosopher Simone Weil, “is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” In this

course—which is highly encouraged for all first-year poets—we will examine how attention informs

how (and what) we notice, as well as the forms we create and inhabit. Poets will use the semester to

develop their own private and shared practices, turning their attention toward poems, texts, and

other artworks that will provoke their own constantly shifting poetics.

Some topics we might explore: neurodiversity and form; reading as writing; the leap; hacking writer’s

block; strange images; silence; the margin; benefits of inattention, digression, and distraction;

somatics; the notebook; the unspeakable; rituals and routines; beginnings and endings; ekphrasis;

stanza and line; the epistolary mode; the sonnet; creative revision; hybrid forms.

Enrolled students will write and revise a small portfolio of poems in response to weekly prompts

and complete a longer self-guided project of 5-10 pages. Working in small groups/pairings will be an

integral part of class participation. This is the only class in which first-year poets will meet with

their entire cohort.

Lynn Steger Strong

Unhinged Narrators

(FICTION) Tue., 10am-12pm

In the Lydia Davis short story “Fear” an unnamed woman runs out of her house every night,

“overcoat flapping wildly” and screams “Emergency, Emergency,” until someone from the

neighborhood comes to calm her fears. The end of the story reads thusly, “We know she is making

it up; nothing has really happened to her. But we understand, because there is hardly one of us who

has not been moved at some time to do just what she has done, and every time, it has taken all our

strength, and even the strength of our friends and families too, to quiet us.” In this class, we will

look at books with narrators who run wildly out of their houses in their nightclothes, who scream

and yell and break things, obsessives, those who have been institutionalized or committed heinous

acts. We will examine the particular privilege of literature to be able to not pathologize, but, perhaps,

instead, to explore the ways that those that might at first seem to suffer from pathologies might also

teach us about the pathologies of the wider world. We will look at the particular craft of portraying

narrators that might feel alienating or off-putting, narrators who, were we perhaps to meet them on

the street, might make us want to run away. We will explore and discuss the tools through which

these same narrators, in the particular space of fiction, might instead become accessible and

engaging to us, might in fact teach us about ourselves.

Jeremy Tiang

Tracing the Uncanny in Translated Southeast Asian Literature

(TRANSLATION) Tue., 4:15pm-6:15pm

Relatively under-explored in the Anglophone world, the literature of Southeast Asia is a rich tapestry

that draws from a multitude of traditions. This seminar takes in readings from across the region,

putting them in conversation with each other with a particular focus on the use of the uncanny.

How are these writers using the supernatural and surreal to push against societal norms, and what

political messages are being smuggled into the narratives under this guise? We will also look at

translation strategies that might be employed with books such as these, for which many Western

readers lack context.

Lara Vapnyar

Building a Scene

(FICTION) Wed., 10am-12pm

Individual scenes are important building blocks of any prose narrative, yet the craft of designing a

scene is often neglected by aspiring writers. In this class we will study all the aspects of designing a

successful scene: setting, inner plot, inner structure, spotlight on the characters, P.O.V.,

choreography of physical movement, and dialogue. We will study how to write sex scenes, death

scenes, party scenes, battle scenes, and nature scenes. The readings will include Tolstoy, Ferrante,

Bolaño, Proulx, Munro, Waters, and Wallace.

Wendy S. Walters

Climate and Time: Writing in Catastrophe

(NONFICTION) Wed., 2pm-4pm

The goal of this research seminar is to support the pursuit of topics related to climate change

through readings, research, and writing. We will also confront some of the emotional challenges

associated with doing work on the environment, especially in these particularly dynamic times. Over

the course of the semester, students will create a research portfolio on a climate-related topic and

practice integrating climate-related issues into works that are not explicitly climate focused. One key

theme we will explore in concert with climate issues is the concept of time and how it should be

framed in our narratives. Time factors into how we recognize the present era, and it also informs

our sense of urgency where there is crisis. As the climate crisis continues to unfold, we face new

conflicts with time: ice is melting faster than expected, sea levels rising faster than expected, fires

happening more frequently than expected, marine level die-offs happening faster than expected, etc.

The urgency with which the facts are now being revealed keeps changing the timelines we must

confront, and yet, if we do not understand time—beyond our biological relationship to it—we may

miss the opportunity to engage in meaningful work. By studying texts engaged in observational

practice in the fields of geology, botany, geography, climate studies, animal studies, and

anthropology alongside literary works, we will forge a creative practice that integrates current

research with established arguments and/or new narratives. All genres welcome. Some of the texts

we will cover include: Something New Under the Sun by Alexandra Kleeman; Rising: Dispatches from the

New American Shore by Lauren Rush; The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli; The Sixth Extinction by

Elizabeth Kolbert; The Yellow House by Sarah Broom; and In Search of the Canary Tree: The Story of a

Scientist, a Cypress, and a Changing World by Lauren Oakes.

LITERARY TRANSLATION WORKSHOPS

Literary Translation Workshop

Susan Bernofsky Thu., 10am-12:30pm

Michael Moore Thu., 4:15pm-6:45pm

Yasmine Seale Mon., 4:15pm-6:45pm

These workshops are open to students translating from all languages at all levels, from novice to

experienced, and within or across all genres: fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. They are designed to

introduce or help refine the tools necessary to be an active and engaged translator as well as a

rigorous reader of translated literary works, to hone your editing skills across literary genres, and to

demonstrate how the art and craft of literary translation can expand your practice as a writer. We will

have lively discussions about the role of the translator today, with special attention to translation

practice as it intersects with questions of race, migration, and national scripts of

exclusion/belonging.

Participants may come with a project already in mind, or may work with the instructor and the

group to select projects early on that will be workshopped over the course of the term. The focus

will be on close examinations of nuances of style and voice, linguistic play, and methods of

representing linguistic and literary innovation in English while actively considering the nature and

sociopolitical context of “the original.”

Fluency in a language other than English is not required. A good reading knowledge of a second

language is desirable, but students with basic second-language skills who are interested in

understanding translation processes and how translation can enhance the craft of writing are also

encouraged to register—and to continue improving their second-language skills. Ideally, we will have

a group that is committed to examining translation as a tool to dig deeper as a writer, and where

notions of expertise and/or mastery are secondary to the willingness to explore and experiment.

Readings in translation theory and methodology will be assigned throughout the term based on the

different languages and interests students bring to class and the nature of the projects in the group.

LECTURES

Joshua Cohen

Story, Plot, Narrative

(FICTION) Mon., 1:10pm-3:10pm

What are you trying to tell the reader? This is a story. How are you going to tell it? This is plot. And

who is doing the telling? This is narrative. At least -- those will be our working definitions for this

class, which will explore the many +1 ways a book can be written through reading some of the

classic prose of the last one hundred or so years. No effort will be spared to make these books speak

to your own work, and to your own concerns about, for example, personhood (first and third),

POV, tense, and pace, with the ultimate hope of relating the medium of words to the medium in

which we all write and read (and live and die), which is time.

Jay Deshpande

Turning, Leaping, Digressing: A Poet’s Taxonomy of Moves

(POETRY) Mon., 10am-12pm

In workshop and in conversation, we often describe a poem by its form (sonnet, terza rima,

tetrameter, etc.), but things get murkier when it comes to a poem’s rhetorical movement. That’s

because we lack a shared language for the choices that fall between form and content: the space of

poetic structure. This course is for anyone who’s ever looked at a poem and had no idea what’s

going on in it; in short, all of us. As we encounter different varieties of turn, leap, and argumentative

structure, we will develop a vocabulary that we can apply to almost any poem.

The semester will begin with broader theories about pattern and organization, followed by a close-

up scrutiny of syntax and sentence structure. From there, we will begin a week-by-week exploration

of rhetorical tactics that will make you a better reader and a more self-aware editor of your own

work. Students will complete exercises and write poems to identify and practice the strategies we’ve

explored; the midterm and the final portfolio will provide opportunities to implement the full

spectrum of techniques. Along the way we’ll read and analyze a wide range of poems from across

the lyric tradition, including work by Rae Armantrout, John Keats, Jorie Graham, Tarfia Faizullah,

Jack Gilbert, Louise Glück, Marwa Helal, Stanley Kunitz, Srikanth Reddy, Rainer Maria Rilke,

Morgan Parker, Alice Notley, and many, many more.

Benjamin Taylor

Reaping the Whirlwind

(NONFICTION) Thu., 4:15pm-6:15pm

Writers starting out today inherit the world of their grandparents and great-grandparents -- the

fearsome, bewildering twentieth century. In this course we read some of the most powerful and

lasting twentieth-century works (along with one nineteenth-century book, which will be our

introduction and the forecourt to much that follows, Frederick Douglass's My Bondage and My

Freedom). Our itinerary runs from the great question of race, our nation's defining crucible; on to the

battlefields of World War One; thence to the Spanish Civil War; from there to Stalin's purges and

slave-labor camps; on to World War Two and its darkest aspect, the industrialized murder of

Europe's Jews; and thence finally to America's long conflict in Vietnam. Our readings are as follows:

My Bondage and My Freedom (Frederick Douglass) (to be completed for the first class session)

Black Boy (Richard Wright)

Good-bye to All That (Robert Graves)

Homage to Catalonia (George Orwell)

Journey into the Whirlwind (Eugenia Ginzburg)

Everything Flows (Vasily Grossman)

Family Lexicon (Natalia Ginzburg)

The Plague (Albert Camus

Into that Darkness (Gitta Sereny)

The Drowned and the Saved (Primo Levi

The Quiet American (Graham Greene)

The Things They Carried (Tim O'Brien)

SPECIAL PROJECTS WORKSHOP

Thom Donovan Tue., 6:30pm-9:30pm

This six-point workshop is designed to provide students with the opportunity and instructional

support to develop significant text-based works outside the constraints of genre-specific workshops.

While existing Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry workshops offer some flexibility in the kinds of work

that students are allowed to submit within their genre, the Special Projects Workshop will

accommodate new kinds and categories of work by offering an environment with no predetermined

generic boundaries or expectations. These projects might include, but are not limited to, verse essays

and other cross-genre projects, prose or verse sequences, conceptual projects, works in hybrid

forms, procedural and experimental texts, text-based art objects, or any number of other projects

that might be best supported, for whatever reason (including special research or production needs),

by a balance of vibrant group critique, intensive one-on-one mentorship, and self-guided research

and composition.

Unlike most traditional workshops, the Special Projects Workshop will assist students in developing

and refining project proposals for their work; these proposals will include a detailed project

description that features a rationale, a production schedule, and a bibliography of related reading,

viewing, or listening (if applicable). The workshop will ideally bring together students from all three

concentrations and facilitate a level of cross-generic conversation—from conception through

execution and reception—traditionally not possible within the context of genre-specific workshops.

Students enrolled in a Special Projects Workshop will meet as a group six times throughout the term

(four meetings at the start of the term, two at the end) with three or more conferences with the

instructor and/or in smaller, focused groups paced out in between. To be considered for the class,

students must submit to the department an application no more than three pages in length

consisting of the components mentioned above. The application will also be expected to address

why the proposed work would be best achieved in the context of a Special Projects Workshop

rather than in that of a traditional genre-specific workshop.

MASTER CLASSES

Matthew Burgess

Serious Play: Teaching Imaginative Writing to Young People

6 sessions, 1.5 points – Wednesday, 4:15pm-6:15pm – Sep. 13 to Oct. 18

This master class is designed for writers of all genres who are interested in sharing their love of

writing with young people. Children understand that writing is a magical power, and they take

pleasure in learning how to do it. But by the time they turn up in high school or college-level

composition classes, many have decided that writing is a painful, if necessary, chore. One of the aims

of the writer-teacher is to reverse this trend by creating classroom environments in which students

(re)discover the creative, expressive, and intellectual potential of language. The point is not to follow

rules, avoid mistakes, and fill pages with sentences that hold little or no personal meaning. On the

contrary, writing is an act of the mind and the imagination, and it can draw us out of ourselves in

ways that are surprising, challenging, and fun. In addition to exploring pedagogical theories, we will

examine concrete strategies for designing and leading imaginative writing workshops with students.

Play is a central theme, one we will regard as a “serious” pedagogical tool and guiding principal, and

class meetings will involve frequent low-stakes, in-class writing experiments. One of the goals for

this six-week course is that all participants will feel equipped and excited to adapt what they’ve

learned and apply it in a variety of educational contexts.

Lilly Dancyger

Hybrid Memoir

6 sessions, 1.5 points – Thursday, 12:05pm-2:05pm – Oct. 26 to Dec. 7

The journalistic memoir, the true-crime memoir, the braided essay: some of the most compelling

personal narratives go beyond the author’s own experience, blurring the lines between memoir and

other forms of nonfiction to tell a larger, deeper story.

In this master class, we’ll examine essay- and book-length works of contemporary creative

nonfiction that weave personal narrative with something else—including reportage, history,

criticism, folktales, and true crime. We’ll discuss different techniques for incorporating the external

into the personal, including the personal-critical essay, personal reportage, putting a personal story

into a larger cultural context, and research as metaphor; and students will compose an essay or a

chapter of a larger work that incorporates an external researched and/or critical element.

Dennard Dayle

Black Comedy

6 sessions, 1.5 points – Friday, 1:10pm-3:10pm – Oct. 27 to Dec. 8

“Sparse title. Does it mean nihilistic humor, or satire by black people?” Both. This master class will

tap into comic writing from the American empire’s bleakest perspective (likely third, but this is the

hard sell). Each week we’ll look at a different work, discuss what makes it funny (or not), and look

for ways to apply their techniques, structures, and gimmicks to our own work. Discussions will be

supplemented with in-class exercises applying said tools.

Evan James

Experiments in Process - Nonfiction

6 sessions, 1.5 points – Wednesday, 4:15pm-6:15pm – Sep. 13 to Oct. 18

In this class we will take a hands-on approach to trying out a variety of methods for gathering and

shaping the raw material of nonfiction. Making use of a “process notebook,” we’ll experiment with

techniques used by practitioners of the personal essay, the memoir, the literary diary, “notes,” and

more. We’ll learn from Lynda Barry, Joe Brainard, Anais Nin, Sei Shonagon, Kathleen Collins, Ross

Gay, and Carolina Maria de Jesus, among others, examining how these writers transform process-

oriented experiments in observation, inquiry, and remembrance into distinctive and fully realized

works – works that occasionally trouble the distinction, too, between informality and “polish.”

Weekly prompts will focus on cultivating and sustaining a writing practice – largely generative,

though with some forays into revision – by using tools and strategies drawn from or suggested by

these models.

Jack Lowery

Living Subjects: A Dilemma

6 sessions, 1.5 points – Tuesday, 6:30pm-8:30pm – Sep. 12 to Oct. 17

Most nonfiction writers who know their subjects intimately – whether it be their own friends and

family, or a person they’ve developed a relationship with through extensive reporting – would prefer

to ignore the question of how their writing will affect their subject and their relationship to them. In

this masterclass, we will study how different writers have confronted the dilemma of writing about

living people with whom they have (or had) a relationship – subjects who will, in all likelihood, read

what has been written about them. What considerations do our living subjects deserve? How do we

write the truth, as we see it, while also acknowledging our own subjectivity, differences of

perspective, and differences in memory? What accommodations, if any, do we make when rendering

our living subjects on the page? All of these questions are complicated by the particulars of the

relationship at hand. Do those with a platform, power, or who will have a chance to respond

publicly deserve to be written about differently than those who don’t have this access or

opportunity? How do we write about a living subject who has caused harm, either to us or to others,

or who we have harmed? How do we write about a living subject whose identity and experiences

differ from our own, especially when that subject has a marginalized identity that we don’t share?

And what does it look like to do all of this ethically? To better understand these questions, we will

study examples of both nonfiction writers who have written about living people with whom they

already have a relationship, and instances in which the writer, as a reporter, has come to develop a

profound and lasting relationship with their subject. The ultimate goal of the course is not to

develop a rote or standardized course of action, but to embrace these questions as generative fodder

for writing, rather than seeing this dilemma as a barrier or hurdle.

Amy Grace Loyd

The Editing Cycle

6 sessions, 1.5 points – Friday, 1:10pm-3:10pm – Oct. 27 to Dec. 8

“We edit to let the fire show through the smoke”—Arthur Plotnik

Editing and rewriting are an essential and unavoidable part of the writing process. This course will

examine the various stages of editing involved in completing, submitting, and publishing your work.

Special attention will be paid to the challenges of editing fiction and creative nonfiction in which

understanding the author’s intentions for a given piece (that is, its particular voice and style, the way

in which a work breaks or conforms to grammatical and craft-based rules, and with what

consistency, etc.) is paramount as part of clarifying and communicating those intentions to a reader.

Students will be asked to bring in a short piece or part of a longer piece to share and submit to

editing. We’ll cover some basics of writing and editing and look at published pieces (excerpts and

finished pieces) of fiction and creative nonfiction and how these were edited for a given

publication’s audience and whether they succeeded and/or failed to gain or persuade a reader, to let

the fire show through the smoke.

We’ll also discuss the realities of collaborating with professionals editing for a range of

venues/audiences and how these variables impact their expectations of your work from a work-in-

progress to a publishable product.

Susie Luo

Surprise Me If You Can

6 sessions, 1.5 points – Monday, 11am-1pm – Oct. 2 to Nov. 13

When we read, we want to be surprised. We crave stories that have twists and turns. But what's the

difference between those surprises that are compelling and pull us closer to the page, and those that

make us feel tricked and prompt us to disengage?

This course will focus on how to make our writing surprise the reader in an emotionally fulfilling

way–one that feels seamless and, in hindsight, inevitable. We will explore these surprises in terms of

plot, structure, character, and even parse out examples on a line-by-line level. The readings will

mostly be short stories from a wide range of writers, including Ha Jin, George Harrar, and Chitra

Banerjee Divakaruni. The final assignment will be a 10-12 page short story that employs surprises in

a refreshing way that makes the story itself pop.

Sarah Rothenberg

Music and the Writer’s Imagination

6 sessions, 1.5 points – Monday, 10am-12pm – Oct. 23 to Dec. 4

When and why do writers evoke music? How can an attentive musical ear strengthen your writing?

This course offers writers a chance to focus on the expressive power of music and to explore

musical form from a writerly perspective. With an emphasis on purely instrumental music –music

without words--we tackle the challenges of listening and observing, developing creative approaches

to capturing and using musical experience. Marcel Proust on the elusive experience of listening

gives us a place to begin. Genres of fiction, poetry and nonfiction merge in excerpted readings of

key works in which music serves as inspiration: Thomas Mann and Beethoven; Proust’s fictional

Vinteuil Sonata; James Baldwin’s blues; Milan Kundera on the art of the novel; poetry of Anna

Akhmatova and Rilke. Music of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Satie, Debussy, Charlie Parker and

others.

I lead much of this class from the piano; live performances interweave with discussion. Students

will have weekly assignments of at-home listening, as well as short readings and/or writing, with

some writings shared in class.

Leonard Schwartz

Mythography: Writing and the Mythopoetic

6 sessions, 1.5 points – Wednesday, 10am-12pm, & Friday, 1:10pm-3:10pm – Sep. 6 to Sep. 22

The poet Robert Duncan refers to the idea of "The Truth and Life of Myth" in his book Fictive

Certainties. For Duncan myth itself is seen as a particular way of thinking and feeling in language that

encompasses both narrative and visual image, story and certain auras of light. In “fictive certainties”,

how are these impulses united in a primary way? What is mythopoetic thinking and how does one

catch its wave? How can "the truth and life of myth" (as opposed to mere allusion) be drawn from

for our own writing, be it in poetry, fiction or creative nonfiction? How write from the black of the

page? Certainly the desire to write myth is a dubious proposal, but one can draw from the structure

of myth for one's own imaginative work. Readings will include Roberto Calasso's The Marriage of

Cadmus and Harmony, Sappho’s If Not Winter and Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette, as well as

excerpts from Ezra Pound, H.D., and Robert Duncan. Although much of the reading is in poetry,

the writing and thinking done here should also be of utility to all writing students.

Salvatore Scibona

Mating: A Novel by Norman Rush

6 sessions, 1.5 points – Tuesday, 6:30pm-8:30pm – Oct. 24 to Dec. 5

Norman Rush’s first novel, set in Botswana and published in 1992 when he was fifty-eight, is about

an intellectual love affair. Dense with sesquipedalian vocabulary yet fluid as speech, Mating manages

to be simultaneously a great romance, an adventure story, a novel of ideas, and a work of high style.

It was acclaimed in its time and won the National Book Award but has maintained its urgency for

new generations of readers ever since. A 2023 Times article about its ongoing allure asked, “Is True

Love Possible? Readers are Turning to this 1990s Novel for Answers.” Its other preoccupations

include Marxism, post-colonial African politics, the Cold War, rural development, matriarchy,

utopianism, and lust, but little fails to interest the remarkable nameless woman who narrates it. The

class will be a close reading of all this long novel contains and a study of the formal and stylistic

choices that hold it together and keep it moving. Students will write one brief critical or creative

piece in response.

Dinitia Smith

Fiction and Memory

6 sessions, 1.5 points – Wednesday, 4:15pm-6:15pm – Oct. 25 to Dec. 6

This course will examine the ways in which memory is incorporated into fictional narratives. The

boundary between the fictive and the remembered is amorphous; all fiction, it has been argued, is in

some way autobiographical. The writer takes fragments of his or her own life, slivers of dreams, bits

of experience, merging them into a whole to create an imagined work.

The course will include readings which tease the boundaries between fact and fiction, excerpts from

Proust, the short stories of Edward P. Jones, Alice Munro, Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf and

others. The emphasis will be on craft. Weekly prompts for short pieces will focus on how memories

are assimilated into stories, why the senses such as taste, smell, images of place, memories of music,

evolve into fiction, and perhaps will inspire students in their own writing.

Mychal Denzel Smith

The Personal Essay and its Discontents

6 sessions, 1.5 points – Wednesday, 10am-12pm – Sep. 27 to Nov. 1

The self is the first source of inspiration for many essayists, and a site of critique for those who see

the personal essay as a lesser literary form. “The personal essay is a genre that is difficult to define

but easy to denounce,” writes Merve Emre, as the personal essay is often derided for falling victim

to solipsism, a lack of ideas, and attention to the mundane trivialities of an individual experience at

the expense of thinking about the societal collective. Yet, the personal essay persists, either in spite

or because of its critics, with generation after generation of writers taking up the challenge to imbue

the personal essay with the kind of rigor and artistic merit that its critics argue is inherently absent.

In this six-week course, we will read across the spectrum of personal essay styles, as well as engage

critiques of the form, to explore questions regarding the personal essay’s purpose, its limitations and

possibilities, the market forces that help shape the idea of what constitutes a personal essay, and

whether the personal can be a representative stand-in for anything beyond the individual experience.

Edwin Torres

Room to Roam: Writing the Voice of the Body

6 sessions, 1.5 points – Wednesday, 4:15pm-6:15pm – Oct. 25 to Dec. 6

Where are we located in our writer's world, and how does alignment affirm new openings? As

creatures of awareness, writers are receptive beings that embody transition. Part of allowing the

creative process its room to roam, is to encourage that search into amazement — to align our

natural tri-lingual voice, our speaking-seeing-hearing voice, with the human complexities that define us.

These six weeks will be structured as a creative laboratory, integrating poetry with movement, sound,

and visual art, to expand our communication by exercising the languages inside us. Tectonic

fractures, Arvo Part, Anne Hamilton, and realm-building are some of the practices we'll cover. Work

will be created, discarded, renewed to explore the sensory edges that embody transformative writing,

where the creative process can begin.

James Wood

Fictional Technique in Novellas and Short Stories

4 sessions, 1 point – Wednesday, 4:15pm-6:15pm – Nov. 1 to Nov. 29

In this class we will examine fictional technique in four short texts by Saul Bellow, Muriel Spark,

Akhil Sharma, and Lydia Davis. We shall be examining characterization, realism, style, and form, and

reflecting on a century of fictional experiment.

Texts:

Saul Bellow, Collected Stories

Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Akhil Sharma, Family Life

Lydia Davis, Collected Stories

Matvei Yankelevich

Creative (Mis)translation

4 sessions, 1 point – Wednesday, 4:15pm-6:15pm – Oct. 4 to Oct. 25

Leave fidelity, originality, and translatability at the door, as we enter a world where literature is

turned upside-down. Here the chaste vow to the respect the inviolable authority of the author and

the sacred belief in the hierarchical order of original and translation will be hung out to dry. Here we

go out of bounds and offsides to explore the generative possibilities of bad translation, scandalous

paraphrase, treacherous imitation, and further misdeeds of the translator’s pen. We’ll examine

inspired approaches of transgressive translation practices that destabilize “original” texts and

conquer canonic works to question the limits imposed by “the task of the translator.” Through

radical rewritings and abject deviations, we will recuperate volition and agency in the encounter with

the original.

Texts we’ll use for inspiration may include homophonic translations from the Zukofskys’ Catullus to

Melnick’s Iliad; the bad-boy Baudelaire in David Cameron’s Flowers of Bad and Brandon Brown’s

Flowering Mall; Sawako Nakayasu’s “collaboration” with Chika Sagawa; the limit-case of translation in

Pierre Menard’s Quixote; Christian Hawkey’s seances with Trakl; and Mónica de la Torre’s

“repetitions.” Come prepared to play and experiment toward the creation of derivative works.

This course is for writers of all concentrations and descriptions.

Knowledge of a foreign language is not required.