To write, one must read. To write well, one must read well. Which means: to read widely, to read with enthusiasm, to read for pleasure, to read with an eye for another’s craft. – Joyce Carol Oates
The writer studies literature, not the world. He lives in the world; he cannot miss it. – Annie Dillard
Here, I walk into class thinking, Really I have nothing to say to these people, the proper study of writing is reading, is well-managed awe, desire to make a thing, stamina for finishing, adoration of language, and so on… — Lia Purpura
Week 1 Creating a Writing Practice / Researching Your Lives, Finding Subjects / What is Creative Nonfiction?
Reading
- Jo Ann Beard: In the Current (handout)
- Joan Didion: Why I Write
- Stephen Elliot: Where I Slept
- [Optional: Virginia Woolf: Moments of Being ; Ann Lamott: Shitty First Drafts ; Donna Steiner: Exit; T Clutch Fleischmann: House With Door]
Writing
- Read Joan Didion’s essay, “Why I Write” and write a letter addressed to me in which you describe your relationship to writing. Here are some questions to guide you: What has been your experience as a writer? How have you come to writing? What writing experiences have shaped you, or what experiences in your life have influenced your writing (or your call to write)? What is important to you about writing? Even if you don’t consider yourself to be a “writer,” address the role of writing in your life to date. 1 page, single-spaced, typed (please email to me by Monday, 1/29)
- Bring 1 object & 1 photograph to class
- Bring a blank notebook to class, exclusively for this class. Within it, list 5 writing goals for the semester.
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Week 2 NONFICTION — Place, Home, & Family / Writing Landscape
Reading
- Eliot Sloan: The Green Room
- Gabrielle Hamilton: The Lamb Roast
- Jo Ann Beard: Cousins
- Annie Dillard: Total Eclipse
- Rebecca Solnit: The Blue of Distance
- [Optional:T Clutch Fleischmann: excerpt Time is the Thing a Body Moves Through]
Writing
- Reading Response
- Write a letter to your childhood self.
- Travelogue: Write a flash essay about a moment of travel, assembling a collage of the experience with as much sensory detail as possible.
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Week 3 NONFICTION — Writing Culture (Food/Art/Politics)
Reading
- David Wong Louie: Eat, Memory
- Jo-Ann Beard: The Fourth State of Matter
- Kiese Laymon: How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America
Writing
- Reading Response
- Write a flash essay on 1 topic of interest (art, food, politics, etc.) or a review (of artwork, film, meal, etc.)
- *ESSAY—Produce 1 essay that you will continue to revise during this unit. It must be a piece you care about and will remain invested in. It can be flash or long, memoir or journalistic, a meditation on a subject of interest, a story from memory — you have total freedom. You may revise writing exercises into longer pieces, or create something new. Use readings as models.
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Week 4 NONFICTION — Experimental Prose
Reading
- Jen Boully: The Body excerpt
- Hanif Abdurraquib: They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us excerpt
- Anne Carson: Short Talks
- [Optional: Carmen Machado: In the Dream House excerpt ; Ross Gay: Joy Is Such a Human Madness ; Maggie Nelson: Bluets excerpt ; Ira Sukrungruang, Summer Days, 1983 ; Jenny Price: 13 Ways of Seeing Nature in L.A. ; Donna Steiner: Elements of the Wind ; Lia Purpura: Being of Two Minds]
Writing
- Write your own series of “short talks” (à la Anne Carson)
- Take a piece of prose you’ve written this unit and scramble its style/structure into an alternative new form
- Reading Response—CANCELLED
WORKSHOPS & Peer Review Letter
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Week 5 NONFICTION
Reading
- podcast “Kiese Laymon on Revision as Love, and Love as Revision”
Writing
- Write down the most favorite line that you have written so far and bring to class
- 2-in-1 Exercise: Take 2 specific, disparate scenes from anything you’ve written this unit and link them within a single cohesive storyline.
- [Optional: Revision Exercises]
WORKSHOPS & Peer Review Letter
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Week 6 FICTION — the Real vs. the Fantastical / Microfictions
Reading
- Microfictions: Gordon Jackson: Billy’s Girl; Ron Carlson: Reading the Paper; David Ordan: Any Minute Mom Should Come Blasting Through the Door; Sandra Cisneros: Bread; Carmen Maria Machado: Mary When You Follow Her; George Saunders: Sticks; Aimee Bender: The Rememberer ; Dino Buzzati: The Falling Girl ]
- Judy Budnitz: Dog Days
- Story Openings (handout in class)
- [Optional: Aimee Bender: On the Making of Orchards; Lucy Corin: Miracles; Deb Olin Unferth: Likeable ; Haruki Murakami: The Second Bakery Attack ]
Writing
- Reading Response
- Conversion Exercises: 1) Take any brief clip you wrote for the NF unit and make it as fantastical as possible to convert it into a fictional story.; 2) Write a brief scene from memory (one already written in the NF unit or totally new) narrated in 3rd person POV
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Week 7 FICTION — Characters / Voice / POV / Dialogue
Reading
- Flannery O’Connor: Good Country People
- Toni Morrison: Recitatif
- Kate Braverman: Tall Tales From the Mekong Delta
- Amy Hempel: In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried
- Raymond Carver: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
- [Optional: Jamaica Kincaid: Girl; James Joyce: Eveline; Michael Ondaatje: 7 or 8 Things I Know About Her (A Stolen Biography) ; Ann Beattie: The Burning House]
Writing
- Reading Response
- Interview: Write a list of 100 short fragments about 1 character you are working on in your story (or could imagine inventing); the sentences don’t need to connect or follow in a logical way; the idea is for you to outrun your own ideas of this character; don’t be monotonous; ask everything you can of this character, everything you must know…not just physical attributes, but also what they typically eat for breakfast, what they dream about, what they keep in their pockets or under their bed, who they love or have loved, the rituals, habits, and nuances of their personality and lifestyle, the events that have shaped their lives so far, the futures they imagine, etc. Remember, these 100 characteristics will not all make it into your story, but you as the author need to know what they are in order to write the character as realistically and consistently as possible.
- *STORY—Produce 1 story that you will continue to revise during this unit. It must be a piece you care about and will remain invested in. It can be of any style or form—you have total freedom. You may revise writing exercises into longer pieces, or create something new. Use readings as models. BRING HARDCOPIES
- [Optional: Dialogue Exercise: Write a dialogue in which each of the two characters has a secret. Do not reveal the secret but make the reader intuit it.; Accident Exercise: Write the accounts of an accident from the perspectives of 5 people who are witness to it, all 1st POV. Use as many varied characters as possible. OR 1 Event 5 Ways: Take a simple event and describe it using the same characters and elements of setting in 5 radically different ways (change style, tone, sentence structure, voice, psychic distance, POV, form, etc.).]
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Week 8 FICTION — Experimental Forms
Reading
- Lydia Davis: Five Stories
- Donald Barthelme: The School / Rebecca
- Gabrielle Bell: excerpt Cecil and Jordan in New York (email)
- Charles Yu: Fable
- Margaret Atwood: Happy Endings
- Susan Minot: Lust
- T Kira Mahealani Madden: Judy in Her Good Robe
- Daniel Orozco: Orientation
Writing
- Reading Response
- Write a 1-sentence story (in. 250 words). Revisit Machado. (You may convert something you’ve written for an exercise in this unit into a 1-sentence story, if it makes sense for that story.)
- [Optional: 1) Write a 10-minute story told backwards from the end to the beginning; 2) Write a brief passage on some stock subject (a journey, landscape, sexual encounter) in the rhythm of a long novel, then in the rhythm of a short story.]
WORKSHOPS & Peer Review Letter
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Week 9 SPRING BREAK
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Week 10 FICTION
Writing
- [Optional: Revision Exercises]
- Following Hemingway’s 6-word story (which we’ll review in class), convert the major story you wrote for this unit into a 6-word story. Then explain why you need all those pages to tell your story.
WORKSHOPS & Peer Review Letter
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Fiction Portfolio Due Thursday, April 4th by 8pm
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Week 11 POETRY —Prose Poems / Narrative Poems / Lyric Poems
Reading
- Ezra Pound: In a Station of the Metro
- Prose Poems—Robert Hass: A Story about the Body ; Nicole Sealey: Even the Gods ; Cameron Awkward-Rich: Meditations in an Emergency ; Shira Erlichman: Ode to Lithium #600 ; Oliver Baez Bendorf: Outing, Iowa ; Harryette Mullen: Black Nikes ; Hala Alyan: Oklahoma ; Richard Jackson: Ten Things I Need to Know
- Narrative Poems—Elizabeth Bishop: The Fish
- Lyric Poems—open reading, find alternate links if these don’t open—Elizabeth Bishop: Casabianca; Natalie Diaz: My Brother My Wound; Max Ritvo: Poem to My Litter; Ocean Vuong: Self-Portrait as Exit Wounds/ Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong; Ada Limon: How to Triumph Like a Girl; Donika Kelly: Fourth Grade Autobiography; Mark Doty: Charlie Howard’s Descent; A Display of Mackerel; James Wright: A Blessing ; Lying in a Hammock; Franz Wright: On Earth ; Promise; Louise Gluck: The Wild Iris; Terrance Hayes: The Blue Terrance; Alex Dimitrov: The Years / Together and by Ourselves / Dark Matter / My Secret / Darling / Sunset on 14th Street / Poem Written in a Cab; Jenny George: Rehearsal / Death of a Child / Reprieve; Robin Coste Lewis: Summer; Oliver Baez Bendorf: Both/Both; Taneum Bambrick: Closeness; Gabrielle Calvocoressi: Hammond B3 Organ Cistern / Miss you. Would like to take a walk with you; Carl Phillips: Hymn / The Truth; Hieu Minh Nguyen: Staying Quiet; Hanif Abdurraquib: How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This; Jericho Brown: Bullet Points; Keetje Kuipers: Spa Days; Selfishness; Diane Seuss: I Could Do It. I Could Walk Into the Sea; Song in My Heart; F. Scott; Richard Siken: Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out / Detail of the Woods; Ross Gay: Love, I’m Done With You; Robert Hass: Meditation at Lagunitas; Kaveh Akbar: What Use Is Knowing Anything If No One Is Around; Tracy K. Smith: Wade in the Water; Richie Hoffman: Bright Walls; Li-Young Lee: The Cleaving; Sharon Olds: San Francisco; Sarah Ghazal Ali: Matrilineage [umbilicus]
- [Optional:On Poetry—Robert Frost: The Figure a Poem Makes; Audre Lorde: Poetry is Not a Luxury; AR Ammons: A Poem is a Walk]
Writing
- Reading Response
- Take 1 prose piece you’ve written and recast it with line-breaks two ways — as a 1) narrative poem (a poem that tells a story) AND 2) lyric poem (a poem that uses language to evoke). You are not required to adhere to any metrical or formal elements or structures — both poems should be free verse.
- Found Poem— Between-the-Lines Poem: Choose your favorite poem from the readings. Type out the poem, leaving triple-space between lines. Then, between the lines, fill in a new line of your own which is sparked by the original line. Eliminate all original poem lines at the end. The poem that remains is your own. Tinker with it and make it cohere.
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Week 12 POETRY — Forms
Reading
- Sonnet—Edna St. Vincent Millay: Sonnet XLIII; Gwendolyn Brooks: the rites for Cousin Vit; Kim Addonizio: First Poem For You (compare Shakespeare sonnet 55); Claude McKay: America; Robert Hayden: Those Winter Sundays; Adrienne Rich: excerpt from Twenty-One Love Poems; Marilyn Hacker: Untitled; Terrance Hayes: sel. American Sonnet For My Past & Future Assassin (I lock you / Probably twilight / Inside me) ; Danez Smith: The 17 Year-Old & the Gay Bar / Crown ; Dianne Seuss selected
- Sestina—Elizabeth Bishop: Sestina; Kim Addonizio: Sestina of the Alcoholic Daughter
- Villanelle—Elizabeth Bishop: One Art; Theodore Roethke: The Waking
- Pantoum—Randall Mann: Pantoum; Laure-Anne Bosselaar: Stillbirth; Peter Meinke: Atomic Pantoum
- Ghazal—Patricia Smith: Hip-Hop Ghazal; Jericho Brown: Hustle
- Ode—Pablo Neruda: Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market
- Elegy—Frank O’Hara: The Day Lady Died; Jericho Brown: Another Elegy; Danez Smith: not an elegy for Mike Brown; CJ Evans: Elegy in Limestone; Chen Chen: Elegy to Be Exhaled at Dusk
- Epistle—Keetje Kiupers: Spring Letter from the South; Elana Bell: Letter to Jerusalem; Kim Addonizio: Dear Reader; Donika Kelly: Dear —; Danez Smith: dear white america
- List—Richard Jackson: Things I Forgot to Put on My Reminder List; Morgan Parker: If You Are Over Staying Woke; Oliver Baez Bendorf: River I Dream About
- Ekphrastic—Larry Levis: Ocean Park #17, 1968: Homage to Diebenkorn; Peter Balakian: Warhol / Madison Ave / 9-11
- Haiku—Sonia Sanchez: Haiku [i count the morning]
- Other—Maggie Millner: excerpt from Couplets: A Love Story
Writing
- Reading Response
- Form Poem: Write 1 form poem of your choice. Research the guidelines of that form if you aren’t familiar with it, and read other poems in that form.
- Write a series of 3-5 HAIKUS around a single theme.
- *POEM (hardcopy)—Produce 1 poem that you will continue to revise during this unit. It must be a piece you care about and will remain invested in. It can be any style or form—you have total freedom. You may revise writing exercises, or create something new. Use readings as models.
- [Optional: 1) Write an ode or list poem or persona poem or epistle or ekphrastic poem; 2) Conversion Poem: Transform your form poem into free verse. This may mean minimally or drastically changing the poem.]
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Week 13 POETRY — Experimental Lyrics & Soundscapes
Reading
- “A Poem That’s Like a Perfect Date” (NYT): https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/04/11/books/frank-ohara-having-a-coke-poem.html
- Layli Long Soldier: excerpts from Whereas; Danez Smith: a note on the body / alternate names for black boys; Monica Youn: Drawing for Absolute Beginners; Rae Armantrout: Bees; Ocean Vuong: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous; Keith S. Wilson: Batter Bread, Mulatto Style (1935) / line dance for an american textbook / reportage on a theory / Who Is There To Eulogize The Tree; Hanif Abdurraquib: The Ghost of Marvin Gaye; Harryette Mullen: [up from slobbery] / [it’s rank it cranks you up]; Sarah Sloat: excerpts or this or this or this; Sarah Ghazal Ali: Matrilineage [umbilicus]
Writing
- Reading Response — CANCELLED
- Conversion Poem (Free—>Experimental): Transform 1 free verse poem you’ve written this unit into an experimental structure of your choice. Here you have full range and freedom to play with the idea of the poem. Remember, this should not entail a copy & paste with a few spacing adjustments, but should involve a reinterpretation of your original poem into a new format.
- Translation Poem: Translate a poem from a language you neither speak nor read. Do not consult with any translation sources. Your translation should come from the visual and musical quality and form in all of its unfamiliarity. Include original poem with your translation, and be prepared to discuss the choices you made with language. (No Requirement to Post)
- [Optional: 1) Write a serial or sequence poem. 2) Music Poem: Listen to various types of music (jazz, classical, blues, techno, etc.) and free-write to each. Consider how the rhythms of your writing respond to and mirror musical textures. 3) Pacing Exercise: Take one of your poems and rewrite it in two styles: as a fast poem, and as a slow poem.]
WORKSHOPS & Peer Review Letter
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Week 14 POETRY
Writing
- Final Poem: Take 1 failed poem of yours from this unit and extract 1 line from it that you like. Use this line as the 1st line of a new poem. (Include in Poetry Portfolio or bring hardcopy to class)
- Share a poem/poet you love, discovered outside of class this unit
- Bring a clean copy of your favorite poem — one that YOU have written this unit — to class (for an in-class exercise)
- Memorize 1 poem of your choice (to be presented orally)
- [Optional: Revision Exercises] // [Marianne Moore’s “Poetry”]
WORKSHOPS & Peer Review Letter
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Poetry Portfolio Due Friday, MAY 3rd
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Week 15 Final Project Presentations