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Course Description

Summary

Creative writing is a method not just of expression, but of deep attention: thus we will begin our journey to the blank page by looking, with wonder and precision, at pages filled by such masters of craft as Cathy Park Hong, Robyn Schiff, Nathaniel Mackey, Ben Lerner, Miranda July, Mariana Enriquez, and Souvankham Thammavongsa. Our reading assignments, which will span poetry and prose of various aesthetic stripes (from “dirty” realist poetry to absurdist parable), will introduce a wide variety of topics and questions that will aid our own creative writing throughout the term. Such topics and questions will include: (A) What narrative strategies might we employ to enact a sense of individual pleasure? Or of collective dread?; (B) How can we be architects of surprise for a reader when we ourselves often know “how the story ends”?; (C) What is enjambment in poetry and can we leverage sentence structure to mimic it in prose?; (D) What is a sonnet and how do various practitioners of it accommodate and complicate the form to different effect?; (E) As a unit of perception and experience, how does the poetic line differ from the sentence? And how do they interact over the course of a stanza or an entire poem?; and (F) What is “vantage” and how does it relate to “point of view”? How might these terms apply not just to a story but also a poem in narrative or monologue form? All of these questions, and others, will only fuel us as we respond creatively to our readings through in-class discussion, in-class craft exercises, occasional workshops, and take-home writing prompts. This is a generative course; therefore, participants will turn in an original piece of writing every week, whether that be a vignette or a villanelle.