2012-2013 Writing Courses

Our attention is ever more fragmented, pulled this way and that by one thing and another.  Times are tough, in every way imaginable. And yet, as the world rolls on, growing ever hotter and ever more dominated by machines and screens, it seems that humans still have a deep-seated need to sit around a fire, metaphorical  or actual, and tell stories.

In this course, I hope to guide you to doing that more skillfully, in your own voice, whatever that voice may be growing into. While my writing falls squarely into the Western realist tradition, I realize that that is not everyone’s goal (though those writing SF, fantasy or genre work would be advised to look elsewhere—I’m just not comfortable guiding writers in those areas). To the best of my ability, I will try to help you make your story it wants to be, not the story I want it to be.

You will spend a significant amount of time in this class reading and workshopping one another’s work in progress. There will sometimes be in-class exercises and you are expected to come to class prepared to comment thoughtfully on the work of fellow students. I also firmly believe that a person who doesn’t read ambitious, skillful fiction along with the occasional craft text has no business calling him or herself a writer. So we will be reading a number of published short stories, some craft essays,  and using Janet Burroway’s “Writing Fiction,” not as an iron-clad formula, but as useful resources to help you get to where you want to go.

I also hope that we’ll have some fun. Writing stories is (or should be, at least sometimes) a joyous answer to a heartfelt need. If ya gotta write, you might as well enjoy the journey—if not every step, than at least a few of them.

This is a radio writing and production course that uses facty-fiction as its guide. Fiction will be used to tell truths, and truths will be used to tell fiction. Throughout the semester, we’ll examine radio works that use fact as the inspiration for some of the best audio dramas, monologues, and mockumentaries aired in the past 100 years.  We’ll listen to and dissect works from well-known shows like The Moth Radio Hour and Selected Shorts to emerging shows like American Public Media's "The Truth."   We'll listen to works by: Orson Welles, Gregory Whitehead, Miranda July, Natalie Kestecher, Rick Moody and others.  We’ll also tune the ear to radio works from around the world: England, Australia, Germany, and Norway. You’ll discover how knitting with dog hair fooled a nation and hear the letter that President Nixon wrote if Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had crash-landed rather than land on the moon. We’ll also look at how fiction can illuminate truth—and discuss what happens when those lines blur. We'll listen to works by and we’ll tour WNYC New York Public Radio. We’ll also have organized performances throughout the semester for those who would like to participate. Students will learn how to write for radio, produce and mix pieces, and create a podcast. At the end of the semester, we’ll create and upload works to the Public Radio Exchange and have an open gallery show of the final conference projects at the UnionDocs Gallery in Brooklyn.

Long-form investigative journalism saved the environment in the 20th century by exposing the malfeasance, carelessness, and push for profit that led to smoggy cities, burning rivers, and chemically-laden food and land. What will it save us from in the 21st century? That remains to be seen and may well be a function of the quality of long-form investigative journalism, a form of nonfiction writing imperiled in the modern age as media outlets retract and cut both research budgets and manpower. Enter The Indian Point Project. This class will focus on a single, collective journalism project about Indian Point, the hulking local nuclear power plant that stands as the focus of environmental, political, economic, and national security concern. Working together and through mediums ranging from the written word to video, students will pull out all known and hidden threads of the Indian Point story in order to put the plant—and all it represents about the future—into proper perspective. We will interview most major figures in the Indian Point debate, both in class and out in the field. Together, we will make a field trip to Indian Point. Open.   

“all/the stuff they’ve always talked about/still makes a poem a surprise!”—Frank O’Hara

In this workshop, you will seek opportunities to surprise yourselves and one another. You’ll read books of (mostly) contemporary poetry, as well as essays on the art and other assorted prose—including an interview with Bill Murray. You’ll discuss and write about how poets use form, absurdity, humor, syntax, pattern variation, tone, defamiliarization, and other tools to surprising ends. You’ll hand in just one new poem per week, but you should be writing frequently enough to have a few from which to choose. Your creative work will be discussed in class and in conference; you will use what you discover from those conversations to revise poems for an end-of-semester portfolio. Together, we’ll also figure out ways to cultivate our ability to be surprised, not only in our reading and writing but in our experiences of the world.

In the work of the best critics, criticism is not secondary to creative writing, but becomes an original form of self-expression and engagement with the world. In this class, students will explore the arguments, strategies, and language of the critical essay, seeing how critics engage with both individual works of art and larger artistic, social and political questions. We will also look at the state of the critical essay today, and explore some of the functions of criticism in the arts. Among the writers we will read are T.S. Eliot, Susan Sontag, Cynthia Ozick, Ralph Ellison, and Lionel Trilling. Students will be asked to apply what they have learned to writing their own critical essays, which will be workshopped and discussed in class.

Here’s a confession: I don’t believe in the Muse. I believe in hard work, determination, and stubbornness. I believe in discipline and calluses on the hands. I believe in bleary-eyed exhaustion and getting dirty and sweaty. I believe in words. Putting together sentences. Those sentences forming a paragraph. That paragraph turning into the beginning of a story. The beginning of a story finding its end. Then tearing that all down and building it again. I believe in revision. And I believe in more revision. I believe that a story is a house. And for every story that you want to tell, I want to help you build it. We will set foundations, we will discover rooms, we will climb floors and find hiding places, we will decorate the walls and carry furniture and build roofs. This will be a nuts and bolts workshop on the art of writing short fiction. Throughout the semester you will write your own short stories and you will study an eclectic range of contemporary short fiction. You will learn to read as writers and develop the language to talk about fiction. Prepare to write. And to read. And to share. I don’t believe in the Muse. But I believe in support and practice and a home. Bring your imagination, your courage, and your pens. Open to all students, though a background in previous workshops is recommended.

This poetry workshop will explore ways in which poems can be models for ethical living. Specifically we will consider pluralism in form and content and pluralism as both means and end in the making of contemporary poetry. That is, we will analyze poems and consider in our own poems, when possible, ways in which aesthetics can enact the ethic of pluralism. Among other concerns, we will discuss polymodality, multi-voicing, parataxis and collage as the means by which we understand wider ethical and emotional constructs. We will spend a fair amount of time focusing on specific poems as well as sequences and whole collections from a variety of poets such as: Rukeyser, Hass, Levis, CD Wright, Flynn, Rankine among others. While we are writing “in conversation” with this material, we will also be investigating how this material may or may not be conversant with notions of sincerity and authenticity. The course could be summed up as a series of questions: Is one more real by embracing the other or is that all just noise? Is noise a kind of music or a distraction? Are we singular and intense or expansive and intimate? Are we veins or fields? Do we lack both when we lack one?

In this yearlong fiction-writing workshop, students will acquaint themselves with such basic elements of fiction as point of view, character, plot and structure, dialogue and exposition, detail and scene, as well as other more sophisticated concepts related to the craft and imaginative process of fiction. Principles such as counterpoint characterization, defamiliariazation, and the sublime, among others, are explored through lessons, writing exercises, and assigned readings, as well as authors’ works that students wish to share with the class. We attend readings and craft talks by the guest writers in our reading series. We form small groups to study more closely various aspects of fiction and to help each other draft their stories. We move on in the second semester to explore dream narratives, quest stories and the hero’s journey, the structures of jokes, and the gifts of graphic fiction. We study a democratically chosen novel and film and bring the inspiration and edification of different arts processes into the mix. The core of the course is the students’ own development as fiction writers. We have a lot of fun trying numerous exercises and approaches to stories. We work closely in conference on the writing, and each student will present at least one final developed story for the workshop discussion. Students are responsible for critiquing each other’s stories in writing, as well as participating thoughtfully and actively in the workshop discussion. 

Where do our stories come from? Do they come from what happens to us? From what we read in the newspapers? From what we make up in our heads? Or from all the above? The novelist John Berger once said that writers draw their material from three sources: experience, witness, and imagination. The goal of this mixed-genre workshop—which will focus on the short story, personal essay, and memoir—is for the emerging writer to find and develop his or her own subject matter. Students will be asked to explore the raw material of their lives, adding the mix of witness (what we have seen or been told) and what we invent. We begin with an assignment based on Joe Brainard’s book I Remember. Students make their own lists of memories of childhood and adolescence. We will turn these lists into anecdotes and scenes and eventually into stories. Students will also begin a list called “I Imagine”; and in this assignment, we will explore family lore, stories students have heard from others, or perhaps even stories drawn from newspaper accounts. We will look at writers who have delved into their own subject matter in both fiction and nonfiction, such as James Baldwin, Sandra Cisneros, Tim O’Brien, Virginia Woolf, Paul Auster, and Lorrie Moore, and discuss the various issues posed in each form. Students will be given assignments intended to evoke subject matter in both genres. For example, a piece of family lore might become a short essay or a work of fiction. Students will write short stories, essays, and memoir and learn to move freely from one genre to the next, attempting to reimagine their material in different forms. The emphasis will be on voice and narrative, both of which are essential for good fiction or nonfiction. We will also spend a good deal of time learning what it means to write a scene. This is a course for any student who wants to explore the material that will become the source of his or her stories.

This class will both investigate journalism as a social, cultural, and historical phenomenon and employ journalism as a practice by which to encounter the world. We will immerse ourselves in journalism’s intricacies and complexities, its strengths and faults, and come to understand it not only as a working trade and history’s first draft but also as a literary art in its own right—one with as many deep imperatives and as rich a tradition as poetry or fiction. We will survey the best (and a little bit of the worst) of short- and long-form journalism and, over the course of the year, craft everything from brief profiles to ambitious investigative pieces. How does a writer know which details to highlight and which to subordinate? What is the nature of good interviewing technique? How does one interview a willing source as opposed to a resistant one? When should one write concisely, and when is it appropriate to expatiate? What are the ways in which a journalist interacts with, and runs the danger of contaminating, his or her subject? We will ask and answer these and many other questions and spend significant time puzzling out the ways in which fundamental journalistic practice leaps from print to television to new media. Prominent journalists will be invited to talk to us and tell us what they do. Readings will range from H. L. Mencken, George Orwell, Janet Malcolm, Joseph Mitchell, and Truman Capote to Joseph Roth.

We will read a book each week, focusing on writers who utilize masks and personas to explore depths of honesty, thought, and feeling that might otherwise be off-limits—such as John Berryman’s Henry, Zbigniew Herbert’s Mr. Cogito, the heteronyms of Fernado Pessoa, and the expansive I in Whitman’s Song of Myself), all of which complicate the notion of the unified first person. Other poets to be read closely include Louise Gluck, Monica Youn, James Dickey, Terrance Hayes, Natasha Tretheway, and others. We will look at the different ways a character can be created and inhabited via syntax, diction, emotional crescendos and deflations, associative leaps, metaphors, and tonal shifts. We will also read individual poems by poets who use a more literal I, considering the similarities and differences between poems uttered in the voice of a distinct character and those spoken more directly and, hopefully, coming to a richer understanding of the possibilities of the first person. Class time will be split between discussing the reading and student work.

“Raid Kills Bugs Dead”

The subtitle of this class is a famous advertising slogan. It is also a curious rhetorical figure known as a pleonasm. This lecture will examine rhetoric traditionally conceived as the art of persuasion—an art that has encompassed a rich body of figures, from the profound (metaphor) to the quaint (pleonasm). It will also examine rhetoric broadly conceived as comprising not only the rules but also the structures of public speech, from the poem to the story to the essay to the sermon to the polemic to the political address to the ad campaign. Conference time will be devoted to workshopping, with an eye to the rhetorical achievements, stories, poems, and essays written by students in response to the themes of the class or to prompts based on current class discussion. The lecture itself will make a whirlwind tour through classical, biblical (as in the King James Bible), Elizabethan and Jacobean (paying careful attention to poems of seduction, poems of supplication to God, and texts of hellfire and damnation), Augustan and Romantic, and Modernist and contemporary (Joyce, Auden, Bukowski, Jamaica Kincaid, Mario Cuomo) examples of language made persuasive, interesting, or merely beautiful. Theorists accompanying us will range from Aristotle and Quintilian to Kenneth Burke and Marshall McLuhan, but we will spend most of our time closely reading rhetorically triumphant examples of literature to see how they work. We will look at masterpieces whose consequences are liberating and, briefly, at ones whose consequences are deplorable—hideous even. At some point, we will ask ourselves if there is or is not a difference between rhetoric and reality.

This is a course with writing at its center and the other arts, mainly but not exclusively visual, around it. It should let you see what you can put together that has been kept apart. We will read and look at all kinds of things—children’s books, mysteries, poetry, short stories, fairy tales, graphic novels, performance pieces—and think about the ways in which people have used writing and other arts to speak to each other. In conference work, people in these classes have combined text and pictures involving cartoons, quilts, T-shirts, texts with music behind them, and so on. There will be weekly assignments that specify what emotional territory you are in but not what you make of it. This yearlong course has more elaborate conference work than the semester course. This course is especially suited to students who would like to work with more than one art. .

The late novelist John Hawkes said that he began writing fiction with the assumption that its “true enemies” were “plot, character, setting, and theme.” This same quartet seems to dominate the conversation in writing workshops. We like to “vote” on a plot’s efficiency, a theme’s effectiveness, a character’s right to exist. If we’re not careful, we can descend to the language of a corporate focus group—a highly effective forum for marketing laundry detergents but maybe not for making art. This yearlong workshop will attempt, in its own small way, to see the fiction of both published masters and participating students through a wider lens. In the first semester, we will read across a wide range of styles and aesthetics and write in response to weekly prompts designed to encourage play. Issues of language, structure, and vision will be honored, right alongside Hawkes’ imagined enemies. In the second semester—provided all goes well—each student will workshop two stories. Our reading list will include several short and unorthodox novels (possibilities include Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson, Concrete by Thomas Bernhard, and Florida by Christine Schutt) and weekly short stories by writers both well-known and ignored. These may or may not include Robert Coover, Dawn Raffel, Joy Williams, Stanley Elkin, Rick Moody, Shelley Jackson, Donald Barthelme, Harlan Ellison, and Kelly Link. We will also regularly read essays that challenge us to think about what art is and why anyone would want to make it. I am looking for generous students interested in fiction-as-play. The model here is counterpoint; so it may help if you have already taken a fiction-writing workshop, though the course is offered (generously) to writers of all backgrounds.

All great stories are built with good sentences. In this workshop, students will create short stories or continue works-in-progress that will be read and discussed by their peers. Class sessions will focus on constructive criticism of the writer’s work, and students will be encouraged to ask the questions with which all writers grapple: What makes a good story? Have I developed my characters fully? And does my language convey the ideas that I want? We will talk about the writer’s craft in this class—how people tell stories to each other, how to find a plot, and how to make a sentence come to life. This workshop should be seen as a place where students can share their thoughts and ideas in order to then return to their pages and create a completed imaginary work. There will also be some short stories and essays on the art of writing that will set the tone and provide literary fodder for the class.

Successful fiction writing is a pleasure that requires work and an educated patience. Using as our basic text the stories that students themselves write, we will seek to show how each story, as it unfolds, provides clues—in its language, narrative tendencies, distribution of emphases, etc.—to the solution of its own creative problems. We will explore such questions as these: What are the story’s intentions? How close does the writer come to realizing them? What shifts in approach might better serve both intentions and materials? What is—or should be—in any given piece of work the interplay of theme, language, and form? We will look at the links between the answers to these questions and the writer’s evolving voice. Discussion and analysis of student work will be supplemented by consideration of published short stories by writers such as Tim O’Brien, Jhumpa Lahiri, ZZ Packer, Rick Moody, Junot Diaz, Katherine Anne Porter, James Thurber, and Truman Capote. Exercises—which can serve as springboards for longer works—will be assigned weekly. Designed to provide opportunities for free writing and to increase students’ facility with technique, the exercises will be based on the readings and on values and issues emerging from students’ work.

It’s something we talk about in workshop and admire in the literature we read, but how does one discover one’s voice in fiction? How is voice related to subject matter, form, and point of view? How does one go about creating a memorable voice on the page? Through writing exercises and weekly reading assignments, we’ll explore these and other questions. Readings will include several genres, including young-adult novels, graphic memoirs, short stories, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Authors we’ll read include George Saunders, Barry Yourgrau, Sherman Alexie, Aimee Bender, and Jacqueline Woodson. Students will get a chance to workshop stories at least twice during the semester; for conference, there will be additional reading. Come prepared to work hard, critique the writing of others with care and insight, and hone the elements of craft in your own fiction.

Art may come from the heart, but craft comes from the brain. Taking a craft orientation, the class identifies and isolates essential technical elements of fiction writing—the merits of various points of view, the balance of narrative and dialogue, the smooth integration of flashback into narrative, the uses of long or short sentences, tenses—and then rehearses them until the writer develops facility and confidence in their use. We accomplish this by daily writing in an assigned diary. In addition to assigned writing, the writer must (or attempt to) produce 40 pages of work each semester. The class reads short fiction or excerpts from longer works that illustrate the uses of these numerous techniques and pays special attention to James Joyce’s Ulysses, a toolbox of a novel that employs most of the techniques of fiction developed since its 17th-century beginnings. Each writer must choose and read a novel of literary or social value written by a woman, such as Wuthering Heights, Frankenstein, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Gone with the Wind. Conducted in a noncompetitive and cooperative way, the class brainstorms a plot and, with each writer taking a chapter, composes a class novel. Finally, the class explores the proper use of a writer’s secondary tool—the copy machine in the production of a simple publication, a ’zine—extending the process of fiction writing beyond the frustrating limbo of the finished manuscript. Fictional Techniques adopts a hammer-and-nails approach to writing prose fiction, going behind the curtain to where the scenery gets painted and the levers get yanked.

In this course, we will explore the uses of childhood and memory as springboards for short fiction. How do writers move from the kernel of experience to the making of fiction? How do writers use their own past to develop stories that are not the retelling of what happened but an opportunity to develop a fiction with its own integrity and truth? We will work from writing experiments and weekly reading of short fictions and novels.

This class is designed to let students explore fiction writing by trying a wide range of approaches. We’ll spend time each week discussing stories by a range of authors, and writing assignments will be linked to those models.  (These exercises are required at first and then become optional.) We’ll look at the elements of fiction—setting, character, time, plot, point of view—and less usual categories. The semester will end by reading a novel. In conference, students will be encouraged to work on longer, more complicated pieces—to grow their own notions of story.

This is a course with writing at its center and the other arts, mainly but not exclusively visual, around it. It should let you see what you can put together that has been kept apart. We will read and look at all kinds of things—children’s books, mysteries, poetry, short stories, fairy tales, graphic novels, performance pieces—and think about the ways in which people have used writing and other arts to speak to each other. In conference work, people in these classes have combined text and pictures involving cartoons, quilts, T-shirts, texts with music behind them, and so on. There will be weekly assignments that specify what emotional territory you are in but not what you make of it. This semester course has less elaborate conference work than the yearlong course.

Art may come from the heart, but craft comes from the brain. Taking a craft orientation, the class identifies and isolates essential technical elements of fiction writing—the merits of various points of view, the balance of narrative and dialogue, the smooth integration of flashback into narrative, the uses of long or short sentences, tenses—and then rehearses them until the writer develops facility and confidence in their use. We accomplish this by daily writing in an assigned diary. In addition to assigned writing, the writer must (or attempt to) produce 40 pages of work each semester. The class reads short fiction or excerpts from longer works that illustrate the uses of these numerous techniques and pays special attention to James Joyce’s Ulysses, a toolbox of a novel that employs most of the techniques of fiction developed since its 17th-century beginnings. Each writer must choose and read a novel of literary or social value written by a woman, such as Wuthering Heights, Frankenstein, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Gone with the Wind. Conducted in a noncompetitive and cooperative way, the class brainstorms a plot and, with each writer taking a chapter, composes a class novel. Finally, the class explores the proper use of a writer’s secondary tool—the copy machine in the production of a simple publication, a ’zine—extending the process of fiction writing beyond the frustrating limbo of the finished manuscript. Fictional Techniques adopts a hammer-and-nails approach to writing prose fiction, going behind the curtain to where the scenery gets painted and the levers get yanked.

Nabokov stated that there are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. We will consider all three, but it is with the art of enchantment that this workshop is most dedicated. We will walk through the process of writing a story: Where does the story come from? How do we know when we are ready to begin? How do we avoid succumbing to safe and unoriginal decisions and learn to recognize and trust our more mysterious and promising impulses? How do our characters guide the work? How do we come to know an ending, and how do we earn that ending? And finally, how do we create the enchantment necessary to involve, persuade, and move the reader in the ways that fiction is most capable? We will investigate the craft of fiction through readings and discussion and numerous exercises. Our objective for the semester is for you to write, revise, and workshop at least one fully developed story.

Dialogue is an essential element of craft. This course will consider how the inflections of speech and the timing of silences help to bring a work of fiction alive. Some writers depend heavily on dialogue; others, not. It gives us choices. With student writing serving as our basic text, and drawing also from a varied reading list, we will talk about what those choices are and how to make them—how they may or may not serve your story. Writers ranging from Salinger and Richard Yates to Jhumpa Lahiri and Katherine Anne Porter can offer us models. We will also look at dialogue’s links to other aspects of craft: Can it, for example, help to flesh a character or advance a story? How can we translate the immediacy of our own speech onto the page? How can we give it to our characters? We will also talk about the first-person narrator and the interior monologue, the dialogue with self, and the “rehearsal” conversation that characters can have with characters offstage or otherwise not there. We will consider the importance, too, of what remains unsaid: how the discrepancy between what a character says and what she or he feels or does (e.g., the hidden agenda, the secret, the lie) can give a story urgency. We will consider these issues as they relate to each student story. Finally, we will explore ways to make our own writing relaxed and conversational for our own dialogue with the reader—and each other. Short exercises will be assigned weekly. They will be based on the readings and on issues emerging from student work. They can also serve as springboards for longer stories.

You write. I read. We talk. Besides pursuing their individual work, students will collaborate on a novel. It will be finished in May and it will come out next year from Arcade Publishing.

Where do the stories come from that are featured in anthologies like Best American or the O. Henry Prize Stories? How does the fiction in the Paris Review compare to that of Prairie Schooner? How is Tin House fundamentally different from Ploughshares? And who gets published in literary journals to begin with? If questions like these are on your mind, this might be the workshop for you. Students will read various literary journals, both online and in print format, as a way not only of discovering the sources of mainstream fiction collections but also of discovering new voices. In terms of writing, this workshop will be held in a traditional format, wherein students deliver their work a week in advance of the workshop and write up formal critiques of the fiction of their fellow writers. There will be writing exercises in addition to weekly readings of journals and critical essays. Literary journals can be sources of great reading and inspiration; becoming familiar with them might help you figure out where your own fiction might one day find a home.

Characters are not disembodied spirits. They need a place to live. With student stories serving as our basic text, and also drawing from a varied reading list, we will explore the multiple uses of place in fiction and how it can serve to define characters, advance story, and illuminate theme. We will consider questions such as why does a story happen here rather than there—say, in Richard Yates’s suburbia, ZZ Packer’s Atlanta, Jose Donoso’s Buenos Aires or Chile, Nadine Gordimer’s South Africa, Katherine Anne Porter’s Texas, Junot Diaz’s inner city, or Denis Johnson’s highways and roads. Each region—its landscape, its history, its culture—has its own set of values and associations. Changes of scene—from country to country and even from room to room—can also reflect shifts in a character’s state of mind. What does it mean, for example, for a character to be—or to feel—“out of place” or “at home”? What does it mean for a character to know—or, as is often the case, not know—his or her place? What, then, does exile mean? Or homelessness? We will consider these and other issues as they relate to each student story. Short exercises will be assigned. Supplementary readings will include selected novels, short stories, and essays. Students will be expected to participate actively in class discussion. There will also be an opportunity to raise broader questions about the challenges of the writing experience and to share insights.

This course explores multimedia uses of oral history, with an emphasis on writing for oral history-based radio, television, and film documentaries. Students will learn basic techniques of oral history interviewing and will be responsible for conducting two oral history interviews that will serve as the basis for a major writing project and for an end-of-semester multimedia exhibit. Although this is primarily a writing workshop in which work will be discussed, we will also go on several field trips in order to conduct interviews locally. Readings will include Driss ben Hamed Charhadi, Joseph Mitchell, Donald A. Ritchie, Doris Lessing, Clarice Lispector, and Studs Terkel. Screenings will include Harlan County USA, Common Threads, Licensed to Kill, A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory, and Animal Love.

Long-form investigative journalism has opened many doors, perhaps most literally in America’s penal system where journalists have regularly revealed—and freed—the wrongfully convicted. This class will set out to expose the innocence (or confirm the guilt) of a man or woman convicted of a controversial murder or other serious felony. Working collectively and using all tools and traditions of investigative journalism, the class will attempt to pull out all known and unknown threads of the story to reveal the truth. Was our subject wrongfully accused, or are his or her claims of innocence an attempt to game the system? The class will interview police, prosecutors, and witnesses, as well as the friends and family of the victim and of the accused. The case file will be examined in depth. A long-form investigative piece will be produced, complete with multimedia accompaniment.

In this course, we will explore what it means to write for radio and other aural contexts. The course will involve deep listening, critical analysis, and discussion of narrative texts. We’ll listen to and compare a variety of works across radio genres and from around the world, from the personal narratives on This American Life to the more artistic, thematic pieces being aired internationally on the ABC and the BBC to the Prix Europa and the big-idea stories common to Radiolab and NPR’s Planet Money. All the while, we will be making radio of our own. As we workshop our pieces, we'll mic ourselves closely, examining what happens at the intersection of sound and the written word. What does it mean to give a literal voice to your writing? How will the words you’ve written on paper adapt as they move onto the air? And how is it best to give voice to someone else’s story? Also, sound can mean theatre. When is it ethical to instill drama into a story, and when is it overkill? The technical aspects involved in the course will include microphone techniques, interviewing skills, digital editing, and podcast creation. Our class will work collaboratively with the radio conference being held on campus this fall. Conference speakers will include writers, hosts, and producers from The New York Times, Radiolab, Third Coast International Audio Festival, and APM’s The Truth, who will discuss their works and process. An end-of-semester field trip to WNYC, New York Public Radio, will be planned.

This course is for students who want to break free of the conventions of the traditional essay and memoir and discover a broader range of narrative and stylistic possibilities available to nonfiction writers. During the first half of the semester, the class will read and discuss examples of formally innovative—or “experimental”—nonfiction that will serve as the inspiration for brief assignments. Completed assignments will also be read aloud and discussed each week. During the second half of the semester, students will workshop longer pieces that they will have written in consultation with the instructor as part of their conference work. While the primary goal of this course is to help students find new and inspiring ways of expressing themselves in writing, we will also attempt to answer, in an entirely nondogmatic fashion, three overlapping questions: Why would anyone want to write such unconventional stuff? What happens when you do? How can you tell when a nonfiction “experiment” has succeeded?

Desire drives any story worth telling. One of the most difficult forms of desire to represent in writing, in a way that is neither reductive nor stereotypical, is sexual desire. As William Gass said, “Anyone who attempts to render sexual experience directly must face the fact that the writings which comprise it are ludicrous without their subjective content.” That is, writing about sex and sexuality is an exploration of our humanity. To write about sex with clarity and accuracy is to engage topics of identity, the body, gender, family, politics, and, yes, the nature of love and longing. In this workshop, we will focus on reading and writing creative nonfiction that tackles life’s most fundamental and challenging subject in all its complexity, humor, eroticism, violence, pathology, vulnerability, awkwardness, and grace. The reading list will include, among others, James Salter, Mary Gaitskill, Rebecca Walker, Gay Talese, Jeanette Winterson, and Alison Bechdel.  

In this course, we will explore what it means to write for radio and other aural contexts. The course will involve deep listening, critical analysis, and discussion of narrative texts. We’ll listen to a variety of works across radio’s history—from The Futurists to Glenn Gould to This American Life, particularly taking a close look at emerging radio projects and sound art organizations such as free103point9, Third Coast International Audio Festival, East Village Radio, and Megapolis. Students also will learn how to create a broadcast or installation piece that will be premiered at UnionDocs gallery in Brooklyn. The technical aspects involved in the course include microphone techniques, interviewing skills, digital editing, and podcast creation. Guest lecturers will include writers, hosts, producers, and installation artists, who will discuss their works and show their range of writing and experiences in the field. An end-of-semester field trip to WNYC New York Public Radio will be planned.

There are memoirs that people write when they’ve had a great acting career or been president of a large country. We read these for their historic/cultural value—for our interest in the subject that is their lives. But there’s another kind of memoir that is trying to tell a whole other kind of truth. These are more personal stories of dysfunction, addiction, overcoming the odds. They take us on alcoholic journeys or into dungeons—into scary families and scarier souls. In this workshop, we attempt to uncover this kind of truth; but this isn’t a class in autobiography. What differentiates these stories from other tales of grief and woe is that they are, quite simply, well-told. It is one thing to have a story to tell. It is quite another to know how to tell it. In this workshop, we will read these memoirs and attempt to write one of our own. We’ll read Jonathan Ames, Mary Karr, Kathryn Harrison, Jeanette Taylor, and Nick Flynn, as well as others. The emphasis will be on how to tell our stories. We will work on scenes and scene development. The goal is for students to begin to write, or at least to contemplate, a memoir of their own.

Any writer who tries to capture the likeness of another—whether in biography, history, journalism, or art criticism—must face certain questions. What makes a good profile? What is the power dynamic between subject and writer? How does a subject’s place in the world determine the parameters of what may be written about him or her? To what extent is any portrait also a self-portrait? And how can the complexities of a personality be captured in several thousand—or even several hundred—words? In this course, we will tackle the various challenges of profile writing, such as choosing a good subject, interviewing, plotting, obtaining and telescoping biographical information, and defining the role of place in the portrait. Students will be expected to share their own work, identify in other writers’ characterizations what they admire or despise, and learn to read closely many masters of the genre: Joseph Mitchell, Tom Wolfe, Daphne Merkin, Janet Malcolm. We will also turn to shorter forms of writing—personal sketches, obituaries, brief reported pieces, fictional descriptions—to further illuminate what we mean when we talk about “identity” and “character.” The goal of this course is less to teach the art of profile writing than to make us all more alert to the subtleties of the form.

Persona poems are poems written in the voice of a character other than the author. We can view these constructed identities as masks, acts of ventriloquism, pageantry, or possibly an alternative route to uncover a speaker’s identity on the page. In discussing persona, we will encounter subjects such as gender, history, culture, age, nationality, and/or sexuality. We will examine poems ranging from classical to contemporary, local and global poets, recorded and live performances. By studying persona, we are led to the important discussion of “finding” one’s own voice. Would we know it if we heard it? Is it something that can be developed? Or is voice innate, a cadence that lives within? On a technical level, we will study style, diction, timbre, sound, rhythm, song, and dialect as tools to uncover voice with clarity and precision. Class work will comprise student writing and critique, poetic experiments, linguistic adventure, and wild meanderings in order to understand future possibilities for one’s own poems. Writing is produced and discussed each week, followed by revision portfolios several times during the semester. The act of revision provides the discipline needed to make real poems from raw material. We will also read a book of poetry each week. Students are expected to write and read consistently, to experiment, and to be passionate about creation. The class culminates in a chapbook and a public reading in Manhattan.

In this poetry workshop, we will learn the fundamentals of poetic craft thorough the lens of beauty. The class will be a lab, of sorts, where we will explore this topic while also making work using and contorting beauty. We will look at the work of poets whose work engages with beauty in some way, as well as read and discuss writings on beauty by philosophers, fiction writers, and nonfiction writers, along with examples of beauty in visual art, film, and fashion. In addition, we may watch films, or excerpts from film, and visit galleries and museums in New York City. Expect to write one poem per week for workshop; read and write brief responses to assigned weekly readings; work in small groups, as well as in the larger, workshop group; and engage in lively and engaging classroom discussions.

“all/the stuff they’ve always talked about/still makes a poem a surprise!”—Frank O’Hara

In this workshop, you will seek opportunities to surprise yourselves and one another. You’ll read books of (mostly) contemporary poetry, as well as essays on the art and other assorted prose—including an interview with Bill Murray. You’ll discuss and write about how poets use form, absurdity, humor, syntax, pattern variation, tone, defamiliarization, and other tools to surprising ends. You’ll hand in just one new poem per week, but you should be writing frequently enough to have a few from which to choose. Your creative work will be discussed in class and in conference; you will use what you discover from those conversations to revise poems for an end-of-semester portfolio. Together, we’ll also figure out ways to cultivate our ability to be surprised, not only in our reading and writing but in our experiences of the world.

How have poets in the past imagined the future of poetry? How have politics and technology radicalized poetic form throughout history? In the first half of the semester, we will closely read poets from the avant-garde tradition. We will investigate debates about experimental aesthetics in the 20th century and analyze how poems address technological and political issues, both in their thematic concerns and through formal strategies. We will begin with Dadaist and Futurist manifestos and read poems from various schools of poetry such as Negritude, Oulipo, Language School, and Conceptualists, as well as poets who fall in between those movements.  Poets we will focus on will include Gertrude Stein, Aime Cesaire, Raymond Queneau, David Antin, and Thersa Hak Kyung Cha. We will also read theorists such as Guy Debord and Nicholas Bourriaud and watch videos by Vito Acconci. In the second half of the semester, we will make our own projections on the future of poetry by reading contemporary poets such as Bhanu Khapil, Christian Hawkey, and Vanessa Place and by looking at videos and performances by contemporary artists such as Cynthia Hopkins and Paul Chan. We will investigate methods by which we can push the interactive possibilities of poetry by experimenting with interdisciplinary performance and docupoetics. In addition to reading and class discussion, students are required to write their own manifestos, complete poetic projects both on and off the page, and engage in one collaborative project.

In this reading and writing workshop, we will undertake three primary tasks: discuss close readings of poems and texts relevant to poetry and the creative process; find ways to generate new work of our own through exercises, models, and experiments; and, finally, workshop our own poems for revision purposes. Throughout this semester, we will explore the theme of poetic process, asking ourselves: How do we grow as artists? How can other arts and sciences inform our work? And what is the role of the unconscious in creativity and revision work? In-class readings will include a variety of contemporary poets (US and multicultural writers—Whitman, Neruda, Vallejo, Mort, etc.). This will be a class-community effort; rigorous and compassionate participation is required. There will be class readings. Conference work will be assigned individually, and a minimum of eight new (and revised) poems will be expected. Our classroom is reserved for risk taking, exploring, and mistake making. Please park preconceptions and egos outside.

“The known universe has one complete lover, and that is the greatest poet.”—Walt Whitman

This course, a semester-long variation on the theme of the traditional poetry workshop, will focus on acquiring the ways and means of Whitman’s complete lover via the study of great poetry. En route, we will read aloud, discuss particular topics (e.g., line breaks, punctuation, truth), and do various tuning and strengthening exercises. Conference time will be devoted to student work. Students will also be asked to compile an anthology and a chapbook collection of original poetry for class distribution, to memorize, and to participate in two class readings over the course of the term. The only prerequisites are a curiosity about all poetry, not just one’s own, and a commitment to undertake whatever labors are necessary to write better on the last day of class than on the first.

In this workshop, we will focus on the use of imagery to generate new writing and ways of conceiving the elegiac form. Through the device of ekphrastic writing, we will discuss traditional, as well as revolutionary, articulations of grief as it exists in its relationship to lyric poetry. We will try to reach new personal geographies within the realm of elegy by selecting and analyzing visual materials, such as paintings, sculpture, and primarily photography. We will pair literary and visual experiments in our search to grasp lyric poetry. Each student will select a visual artist and a poet to study throughout the course of the semester. Students will be expected to create original photographs, though no foundation or experience in photography is necessary or required. Please bring curiosity, intimacy, craft, and imagination each week. Students will also be expected to attend at least one poetry reading during the spring semester. A final folio of poetry and visual imagery will be submitted at the end of the semester. 

Contemporary poets face a dazzling range of stylistic options. This course is designed to help you develop not just your own ear and voice but your own sense of craft, intuition, technique, and experiment. We will focus primarily and profoundly humanistically on students’ own work, with the knowledge that a mistake in art can be fascinating and the demonstration of competence can be irrelevant. We will also look at poets from Anne Carson to Elizabeth Bishop to Basho. Students will be encouraged to orient themselves and find their own directions in the labyrinth of modern poetic practice. We’ll study prosody, metrics, the lyric and epic voices—but the emphasis will be on students’ own creative projects. Expect to write every week, read voraciously, and create a portfolio of six to 12 poems.

This is a reading/writing course. We will spend time every week reading poems that have already been published, so that we can see how they were made: music, syntax, line, sound, and image. We might spend time generating new work in class through exercises and experiments. And we will spend time looking closely at one another’s work, encouraging each other to take risks and to move even closer to the sources of our poems. Each writer in the class will meet with another class member once a week on a “poetry date.” Each writer will be responsible for reading the assigned work and for bringing to class one written offering each week. We will work hard, learn a great deal about poetry and about our own poems, and have a wonderful time.

Our attention is ever more fragmented, pulled this way and that by one thing and another.  Times are tough, in every way imaginable. And yet, as the world rolls on, growing ever hotter and ever more dominated by machines and screens, it seems that humans still have a deep-seated need to sit around a fire, metaphorical  or actual, and tell stories.

In this course, I hope to guide you to doing that more skillfully, in your own voice, whatever that voice may be growing into. While my writing falls squarely into the Western realist tradition, I realize that that is not everyone’s goal (though those writing SF, fantasy or genre work would be advised to look elsewhere—I’m just not comfortable guiding writers in those areas). To the best of my ability, I will try to help you make your story it wants to be, not the story I want it to be.

You will spend a significant amount of time in this class reading and workshopping one another’s work in progress. There will sometimes be in-class exercises and you are expected to come to class prepared to comment thoughtfully on the work of fellow students. I also firmly believe that a person who doesn’t read ambitious, skillful fiction along with the occasional craft text has no business calling him or herself a writer. So we will be reading a number of published short stories, some craft essays,  and using Janet Burroway’s “Writing Fiction,” not as an iron-clad formula, but as useful resources to help you get to where you want to go.

I also hope that we’ll have some fun. Writing stories is (or should be, at least sometimes) a joyous answer to a heartfelt need. If ya gotta write, you might as well enjoy the journey—if not every step, than at least a few of them.

This is a radio writing and production course that uses facty-fiction as its guide. Fiction will be used to tell truths, and truths will be used to tell fiction. Throughout the semester, we’ll examine radio works that use fact as the inspiration for some of the best audio dramas, monologues, and mockumentaries aired in the past 100 years.  We’ll listen to and dissect works from well-known shows like The Moth Radio Hour and Selected Shorts to emerging shows like American Public Media's "The Truth."   We'll listen to works by: Orson Welles, Gregory Whitehead, Miranda July, Natalie Kestecher, Rick Moody and others.  We’ll also tune the ear to radio works from around the world: England, Australia, Germany, and Norway. You’ll discover how knitting with dog hair fooled a nation and hear the letter that President Nixon wrote if Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had crash-landed rather than land on the moon. We’ll also look at how fiction can illuminate truth—and discuss what happens when those lines blur. We'll listen to works by and we’ll tour WNYC New York Public Radio. We’ll also have organized performances throughout the semester for those who would like to participate. Students will learn how to write for radio, produce and mix pieces, and create a podcast. At the end of the semester, we’ll create and upload works to the Public Radio Exchange and have an open gallery show of the final conference projects at the UnionDocs Gallery in Brooklyn.

Long-form investigative journalism saved the environment in the 20th century by exposing the malfeasance, carelessness, and push for profit that led to smoggy cities, burning rivers, and chemically-laden food and land. What will it save us from in the 21st century? That remains to be seen and may well be a function of the quality of long-form investigative journalism, a form of nonfiction writing imperiled in the modern age as media outlets retract and cut both research budgets and manpower. Enter The Indian Point Project. This class will focus on a single, collective journalism project about Indian Point, the hulking local nuclear power plant that stands as the focus of environmental, political, economic, and national security concern. Working together and through mediums ranging from the written word to video, students will pull out all known and hidden threads of the Indian Point story in order to put the plant—and all it represents about the future—into proper perspective. We will interview most major figures in the Indian Point debate, both in class and out in the field. Together, we will make a field trip to Indian Point. Open.   

“all/the stuff they’ve always talked about/still makes a poem a surprise!”—Frank O’Hara

In this workshop, you will seek opportunities to surprise yourselves and one another. You’ll read books of (mostly) contemporary poetry, as well as essays on the art and other assorted prose—including an interview with Bill Murray. You’ll discuss and write about how poets use form, absurdity, humor, syntax, pattern variation, tone, defamiliarization, and other tools to surprising ends. You’ll hand in just one new poem per week, but you should be writing frequently enough to have a few from which to choose. Your creative work will be discussed in class and in conference; you will use what you discover from those conversations to revise poems for an end-of-semester portfolio. Together, we’ll also figure out ways to cultivate our ability to be surprised, not only in our reading and writing but in our experiences of the world.

In the work of the best critics, criticism is not secondary to creative writing, but becomes an original form of self-expression and engagement with the world. In this class, students will explore the arguments, strategies, and language of the critical essay, seeing how critics engage with both individual works of art and larger artistic, social and political questions. We will also look at the state of the critical essay today, and explore some of the functions of criticism in the arts. Among the writers we will read are T.S. Eliot, Susan Sontag, Cynthia Ozick, Ralph Ellison, and Lionel Trilling. Students will be asked to apply what they have learned to writing their own critical essays, which will be workshopped and discussed in class.

Here’s a confession: I don’t believe in the Muse. I believe in hard work, determination, and stubbornness. I believe in discipline and calluses on the hands. I believe in bleary-eyed exhaustion and getting dirty and sweaty. I believe in words. Putting together sentences. Those sentences forming a paragraph. That paragraph turning into the beginning of a story. The beginning of a story finding its end. Then tearing that all down and building it again. I believe in revision. And I believe in more revision. I believe that a story is a house. And for every story that you want to tell, I want to help you build it. We will set foundations, we will discover rooms, we will climb floors and find hiding places, we will decorate the walls and carry furniture and build roofs. This will be a nuts and bolts workshop on the art of writing short fiction. Throughout the semester you will write your own short stories and you will study an eclectic range of contemporary short fiction. You will learn to read as writers and develop the language to talk about fiction. Prepare to write. And to read. And to share. I don’t believe in the Muse. But I believe in support and practice and a home. Bring your imagination, your courage, and your pens. Open to all students, though a background in previous workshops is recommended.

This poetry workshop will explore ways in which poems can be models for ethical living. Specifically we will consider pluralism in form and content and pluralism as both means and end in the making of contemporary poetry. That is, we will analyze poems and consider in our own poems, when possible, ways in which aesthetics can enact the ethic of pluralism. Among other concerns, we will discuss polymodality, multi-voicing, parataxis and collage as the means by which we understand wider ethical and emotional constructs. We will spend a fair amount of time focusing on specific poems as well as sequences and whole collections from a variety of poets such as: Rukeyser, Hass, Levis, CD Wright, Flynn, Rankine among others. While we are writing “in conversation” with this material, we will also be investigating how this material may or may not be conversant with notions of sincerity and authenticity. The course could be summed up as a series of questions: Is one more real by embracing the other or is that all just noise? Is noise a kind of music or a distraction? Are we singular and intense or expansive and intimate? Are we veins or fields? Do we lack both when we lack one?

In this yearlong fiction-writing workshop, students will acquaint themselves with such basic elements of fiction as point of view, character, plot and structure, dialogue and exposition, detail and scene, as well as other more sophisticated concepts related to the craft and imaginative process of fiction. Principles such as counterpoint characterization, defamiliariazation, and the sublime, among others, are explored through lessons, writing exercises, and assigned readings, as well as authors’ works that students wish to share with the class. We attend readings and craft talks by the guest writers in our reading series. We form small groups to study more closely various aspects of fiction and to help each other draft their stories. We move on in the second semester to explore dream narratives, quest stories and the hero’s journey, the structures of jokes, and the gifts of graphic fiction. We study a democratically chosen novel and film and bring the inspiration and edification of different arts processes into the mix. The core of the course is the students’ own development as fiction writers. We have a lot of fun trying numerous exercises and approaches to stories. We work closely in conference on the writing, and each student will present at least one final developed story for the workshop discussion. Students are responsible for critiquing each other’s stories in writing, as well as participating thoughtfully and actively in the workshop discussion. 

Where do our stories come from? Do they come from what happens to us? From what we read in the newspapers? From what we make up in our heads? Or from all the above? The novelist John Berger once said that writers draw their material from three sources: experience, witness, and imagination. The goal of this mixed-genre workshop—which will focus on the short story, personal essay, and memoir—is for the emerging writer to find and develop his or her own subject matter. Students will be asked to explore the raw material of their lives, adding the mix of witness (what we have seen or been told) and what we invent. We begin with an assignment based on Joe Brainard’s book I Remember. Students make their own lists of memories of childhood and adolescence. We will turn these lists into anecdotes and scenes and eventually into stories. Students will also begin a list called “I Imagine”; and in this assignment, we will explore family lore, stories students have heard from others, or perhaps even stories drawn from newspaper accounts. We will look at writers who have delved into their own subject matter in both fiction and nonfiction, such as James Baldwin, Sandra Cisneros, Tim O’Brien, Virginia Woolf, Paul Auster, and Lorrie Moore, and discuss the various issues posed in each form. Students will be given assignments intended to evoke subject matter in both genres. For example, a piece of family lore might become a short essay or a work of fiction. Students will write short stories, essays, and memoir and learn to move freely from one genre to the next, attempting to reimagine their material in different forms. The emphasis will be on voice and narrative, both of which are essential for good fiction or nonfiction. We will also spend a good deal of time learning what it means to write a scene. This is a course for any student who wants to explore the material that will become the source of his or her stories.

This class will both investigate journalism as a social, cultural, and historical phenomenon and employ journalism as a practice by which to encounter the world. We will immerse ourselves in journalism’s intricacies and complexities, its strengths and faults, and come to understand it not only as a working trade and history’s first draft but also as a literary art in its own right—one with as many deep imperatives and as rich a tradition as poetry or fiction. We will survey the best (and a little bit of the worst) of short- and long-form journalism and, over the course of the year, craft everything from brief profiles to ambitious investigative pieces. How does a writer know which details to highlight and which to subordinate? What is the nature of good interviewing technique? How does one interview a willing source as opposed to a resistant one? When should one write concisely, and when is it appropriate to expatiate? What are the ways in which a journalist interacts with, and runs the danger of contaminating, his or her subject? We will ask and answer these and many other questions and spend significant time puzzling out the ways in which fundamental journalistic practice leaps from print to television to new media. Prominent journalists will be invited to talk to us and tell us what they do. Readings will range from H. L. Mencken, George Orwell, Janet Malcolm, Joseph Mitchell, and Truman Capote to Joseph Roth.

We will read a book each week, focusing on writers who utilize masks and personas to explore depths of honesty, thought, and feeling that might otherwise be off-limits—such as John Berryman’s Henry, Zbigniew Herbert’s Mr. Cogito, the heteronyms of Fernado Pessoa, and the expansive I in Whitman’s Song of Myself), all of which complicate the notion of the unified first person. Other poets to be read closely include Louise Gluck, Monica Youn, James Dickey, Terrance Hayes, Natasha Tretheway, and others. We will look at the different ways a character can be created and inhabited via syntax, diction, emotional crescendos and deflations, associative leaps, metaphors, and tonal shifts. We will also read individual poems by poets who use a more literal I, considering the similarities and differences between poems uttered in the voice of a distinct character and those spoken more directly and, hopefully, coming to a richer understanding of the possibilities of the first person. Class time will be split between discussing the reading and student work.

“Raid Kills Bugs Dead”

The subtitle of this class is a famous advertising slogan. It is also a curious rhetorical figure known as a pleonasm. This lecture will examine rhetoric traditionally conceived as the art of persuasion—an art that has encompassed a rich body of figures, from the profound (metaphor) to the quaint (pleonasm). It will also examine rhetoric broadly conceived as comprising not only the rules but also the structures of public speech, from the poem to the story to the essay to the sermon to the polemic to the political address to the ad campaign. Conference time will be devoted to workshopping, with an eye to the rhetorical achievements, stories, poems, and essays written by students in response to the themes of the class or to prompts based on current class discussion. The lecture itself will make a whirlwind tour through classical, biblical (as in the King James Bible), Elizabethan and Jacobean (paying careful attention to poems of seduction, poems of supplication to God, and texts of hellfire and damnation), Augustan and Romantic, and Modernist and contemporary (Joyce, Auden, Bukowski, Jamaica Kincaid, Mario Cuomo) examples of language made persuasive, interesting, or merely beautiful. Theorists accompanying us will range from Aristotle and Quintilian to Kenneth Burke and Marshall McLuhan, but we will spend most of our time closely reading rhetorically triumphant examples of literature to see how they work. We will look at masterpieces whose consequences are liberating and, briefly, at ones whose consequences are deplorable—hideous even. At some point, we will ask ourselves if there is or is not a difference between rhetoric and reality.

This is a course with writing at its center and the other arts, mainly but not exclusively visual, around it. It should let you see what you can put together that has been kept apart. We will read and look at all kinds of things—children’s books, mysteries, poetry, short stories, fairy tales, graphic novels, performance pieces—and think about the ways in which people have used writing and other arts to speak to each other. In conference work, people in these classes have combined text and pictures involving cartoons, quilts, T-shirts, texts with music behind them, and so on. There will be weekly assignments that specify what emotional territory you are in but not what you make of it. This yearlong course has more elaborate conference work than the semester course. This course is especially suited to students who would like to work with more than one art. .

The late novelist John Hawkes said that he began writing fiction with the assumption that its “true enemies” were “plot, character, setting, and theme.” This same quartet seems to dominate the conversation in writing workshops. We like to “vote” on a plot’s efficiency, a theme’s effectiveness, a character’s right to exist. If we’re not careful, we can descend to the language of a corporate focus group—a highly effective forum for marketing laundry detergents but maybe not for making art. This yearlong workshop will attempt, in its own small way, to see the fiction of both published masters and participating students through a wider lens. In the first semester, we will read across a wide range of styles and aesthetics and write in response to weekly prompts designed to encourage play. Issues of language, structure, and vision will be honored, right alongside Hawkes’ imagined enemies. In the second semester—provided all goes well—each student will workshop two stories. Our reading list will include several short and unorthodox novels (possibilities include Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson, Concrete by Thomas Bernhard, and Florida by Christine Schutt) and weekly short stories by writers both well-known and ignored. These may or may not include Robert Coover, Dawn Raffel, Joy Williams, Stanley Elkin, Rick Moody, Shelley Jackson, Donald Barthelme, Harlan Ellison, and Kelly Link. We will also regularly read essays that challenge us to think about what art is and why anyone would want to make it. I am looking for generous students interested in fiction-as-play. The model here is counterpoint; so it may help if you have already taken a fiction-writing workshop, though the course is offered (generously) to writers of all backgrounds.

All great stories are built with good sentences. In this workshop, students will create short stories or continue works-in-progress that will be read and discussed by their peers. Class sessions will focus on constructive criticism of the writer’s work, and students will be encouraged to ask the questions with which all writers grapple: What makes a good story? Have I developed my characters fully? And does my language convey the ideas that I want? We will talk about the writer’s craft in this class—how people tell stories to each other, how to find a plot, and how to make a sentence come to life. This workshop should be seen as a place where students can share their thoughts and ideas in order to then return to their pages and create a completed imaginary work. There will also be some short stories and essays on the art of writing that will set the tone and provide literary fodder for the class.

Successful fiction writing is a pleasure that requires work and an educated patience. Using as our basic text the stories that students themselves write, we will seek to show how each story, as it unfolds, provides clues—in its language, narrative tendencies, distribution of emphases, etc.—to the solution of its own creative problems. We will explore such questions as these: What are the story’s intentions? How close does the writer come to realizing them? What shifts in approach might better serve both intentions and materials? What is—or should be—in any given piece of work the interplay of theme, language, and form? We will look at the links between the answers to these questions and the writer’s evolving voice. Discussion and analysis of student work will be supplemented by consideration of published short stories by writers such as Tim O’Brien, Jhumpa Lahiri, ZZ Packer, Rick Moody, Junot Diaz, Katherine Anne Porter, James Thurber, and Truman Capote. Exercises—which can serve as springboards for longer works—will be assigned weekly. Designed to provide opportunities for free writing and to increase students’ facility with technique, the exercises will be based on the readings and on values and issues emerging from students’ work.

It’s something we talk about in workshop and admire in the literature we read, but how does one discover one’s voice in fiction? How is voice related to subject matter, form, and point of view? How does one go about creating a memorable voice on the page? Through writing exercises and weekly reading assignments, we’ll explore these and other questions. Readings will include several genres, including young-adult novels, graphic memoirs, short stories, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Authors we’ll read include George Saunders, Barry Yourgrau, Sherman Alexie, Aimee Bender, and Jacqueline Woodson. Students will get a chance to workshop stories at least twice during the semester; for conference, there will be additional reading. Come prepared to work hard, critique the writing of others with care and insight, and hone the elements of craft in your own fiction.

Art may come from the heart, but craft comes from the brain. Taking a craft orientation, the class identifies and isolates essential technical elements of fiction writing—the merits of various points of view, the balance of narrative and dialogue, the smooth integration of flashback into narrative, the uses of long or short sentences, tenses—and then rehearses them until the writer develops facility and confidence in their use. We accomplish this by daily writing in an assigned diary. In addition to assigned writing, the writer must (or attempt to) produce 40 pages of work each semester. The class reads short fiction or excerpts from longer works that illustrate the uses of these numerous techniques and pays special attention to James Joyce’s Ulysses, a toolbox of a novel that employs most of the techniques of fiction developed since its 17th-century beginnings. Each writer must choose and read a novel of literary or social value written by a woman, such as Wuthering Heights, Frankenstein, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Gone with the Wind. Conducted in a noncompetitive and cooperative way, the class brainstorms a plot and, with each writer taking a chapter, composes a class novel. Finally, the class explores the proper use of a writer’s secondary tool—the copy machine in the production of a simple publication, a ’zine—extending the process of fiction writing beyond the frustrating limbo of the finished manuscript. Fictional Techniques adopts a hammer-and-nails approach to writing prose fiction, going behind the curtain to where the scenery gets painted and the levers get yanked.

In this course, we will explore the uses of childhood and memory as springboards for short fiction. How do writers move from the kernel of experience to the making of fiction? How do writers use their own past to develop stories that are not the retelling of what happened but an opportunity to develop a fiction with its own integrity and truth? We will work from writing experiments and weekly reading of short fictions and novels.

This class is designed to let students explore fiction writing by trying a wide range of approaches. We’ll spend time each week discussing stories by a range of authors, and writing assignments will be linked to those models.  (These exercises are required at first and then become optional.) We’ll look at the elements of fiction—setting, character, time, plot, point of view—and less usual categories. The semester will end by reading a novel. In conference, students will be encouraged to work on longer, more complicated pieces—to grow their own notions of story.

This is a course with writing at its center and the other arts, mainly but not exclusively visual, around it. It should let you see what you can put together that has been kept apart. We will read and look at all kinds of things—children’s books, mysteries, poetry, short stories, fairy tales, graphic novels, performance pieces—and think about the ways in which people have used writing and other arts to speak to each other. In conference work, people in these classes have combined text and pictures involving cartoons, quilts, T-shirts, texts with music behind them, and so on. There will be weekly assignments that specify what emotional territory you are in but not what you make of it. This semester course has less elaborate conference work than the yearlong course.

Art may come from the heart, but craft comes from the brain. Taking a craft orientation, the class identifies and isolates essential technical elements of fiction writing—the merits of various points of view, the balance of narrative and dialogue, the smooth integration of flashback into narrative, the uses of long or short sentences, tenses—and then rehearses them until the writer develops facility and confidence in their use. We accomplish this by daily writing in an assigned diary. In addition to assigned writing, the writer must (or attempt to) produce 40 pages of work each semester. The class reads short fiction or excerpts from longer works that illustrate the uses of these numerous techniques and pays special attention to James Joyce’s Ulysses, a toolbox of a novel that employs most of the techniques of fiction developed since its 17th-century beginnings. Each writer must choose and read a novel of literary or social value written by a woman, such as Wuthering Heights, Frankenstein, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Gone with the Wind. Conducted in a noncompetitive and cooperative way, the class brainstorms a plot and, with each writer taking a chapter, composes a class novel. Finally, the class explores the proper use of a writer’s secondary tool—the copy machine in the production of a simple publication, a ’zine—extending the process of fiction writing beyond the frustrating limbo of the finished manuscript. Fictional Techniques adopts a hammer-and-nails approach to writing prose fiction, going behind the curtain to where the scenery gets painted and the levers get yanked.

Nabokov stated that there are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. We will consider all three, but it is with the art of enchantment that this workshop is most dedicated. We will walk through the process of writing a story: Where does the story come from? How do we know when we are ready to begin? How do we avoid succumbing to safe and unoriginal decisions and learn to recognize and trust our more mysterious and promising impulses? How do our characters guide the work? How do we come to know an ending, and how do we earn that ending? And finally, how do we create the enchantment necessary to involve, persuade, and move the reader in the ways that fiction is most capable? We will investigate the craft of fiction through readings and discussion and numerous exercises. Our objective for the semester is for you to write, revise, and workshop at least one fully developed story.

Dialogue is an essential element of craft. This course will consider how the inflections of speech and the timing of silences help to bring a work of fiction alive. Some writers depend heavily on dialogue; others, not. It gives us choices. With student writing serving as our basic text, and drawing also from a varied reading list, we will talk about what those choices are and how to make them—how they may or may not serve your story. Writers ranging from Salinger and Richard Yates to Jhumpa Lahiri and Katherine Anne Porter can offer us models. We will also look at dialogue’s links to other aspects of craft: Can it, for example, help to flesh a character or advance a story? How can we translate the immediacy of our own speech onto the page? How can we give it to our characters? We will also talk about the first-person narrator and the interior monologue, the dialogue with self, and the “rehearsal” conversation that characters can have with characters offstage or otherwise not there. We will consider the importance, too, of what remains unsaid: how the discrepancy between what a character says and what she or he feels or does (e.g., the hidden agenda, the secret, the lie) can give a story urgency. We will consider these issues as they relate to each student story. Finally, we will explore ways to make our own writing relaxed and conversational for our own dialogue with the reader—and each other. Short exercises will be assigned weekly. They will be based on the readings and on issues emerging from student work. They can also serve as springboards for longer stories.

You write. I read. We talk. Besides pursuing their individual work, students will collaborate on a novel. It will be finished in May and it will come out next year from Arcade Publishing.

Where do the stories come from that are featured in anthologies like Best American or the O. Henry Prize Stories? How does the fiction in the Paris Review compare to that of Prairie Schooner? How is Tin House fundamentally different from Ploughshares? And who gets published in literary journals to begin with? If questions like these are on your mind, this might be the workshop for you. Students will read various literary journals, both online and in print format, as a way not only of discovering the sources of mainstream fiction collections but also of discovering new voices. In terms of writing, this workshop will be held in a traditional format, wherein students deliver their work a week in advance of the workshop and write up formal critiques of the fiction of their fellow writers. There will be writing exercises in addition to weekly readings of journals and critical essays. Literary journals can be sources of great reading and inspiration; becoming familiar with them might help you figure out where your own fiction might one day find a home.

Characters are not disembodied spirits. They need a place to live. With student stories serving as our basic text, and also drawing from a varied reading list, we will explore the multiple uses of place in fiction and how it can serve to define characters, advance story, and illuminate theme. We will consider questions such as why does a story happen here rather than there—say, in Richard Yates’s suburbia, ZZ Packer’s Atlanta, Jose Donoso’s Buenos Aires or Chile, Nadine Gordimer’s South Africa, Katherine Anne Porter’s Texas, Junot Diaz’s inner city, or Denis Johnson’s highways and roads. Each region—its landscape, its history, its culture—has its own set of values and associations. Changes of scene—from country to country and even from room to room—can also reflect shifts in a character’s state of mind. What does it mean, for example, for a character to be—or to feel—“out of place” or “at home”? What does it mean for a character to know—or, as is often the case, not know—his or her place? What, then, does exile mean? Or homelessness? We will consider these and other issues as they relate to each student story. Short exercises will be assigned. Supplementary readings will include selected novels, short stories, and essays. Students will be expected to participate actively in class discussion. There will also be an opportunity to raise broader questions about the challenges of the writing experience and to share insights.

This course explores multimedia uses of oral history, with an emphasis on writing for oral history-based radio, television, and film documentaries. Students will learn basic techniques of oral history interviewing and will be responsible for conducting two oral history interviews that will serve as the basis for a major writing project and for an end-of-semester multimedia exhibit. Although this is primarily a writing workshop in which work will be discussed, we will also go on several field trips in order to conduct interviews locally. Readings will include Driss ben Hamed Charhadi, Joseph Mitchell, Donald A. Ritchie, Doris Lessing, Clarice Lispector, and Studs Terkel. Screenings will include Harlan County USA, Common Threads, Licensed to Kill, A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory, and Animal Love.

Long-form investigative journalism has opened many doors, perhaps most literally in America’s penal system where journalists have regularly revealed—and freed—the wrongfully convicted. This class will set out to expose the innocence (or confirm the guilt) of a man or woman convicted of a controversial murder or other serious felony. Working collectively and using all tools and traditions of investigative journalism, the class will attempt to pull out all known and unknown threads of the story to reveal the truth. Was our subject wrongfully accused, or are his or her claims of innocence an attempt to game the system? The class will interview police, prosecutors, and witnesses, as well as the friends and family of the victim and of the accused. The case file will be examined in depth. A long-form investigative piece will be produced, complete with multimedia accompaniment.

In this course, we will explore what it means to write for radio and other aural contexts. The course will involve deep listening, critical analysis, and discussion of narrative texts. We’ll listen to and compare a variety of works across radio genres and from around the world, from the personal narratives on This American Life to the more artistic, thematic pieces being aired internationally on the ABC and the BBC to the Prix Europa and the big-idea stories common to Radiolab and NPR’s Planet Money. All the while, we will be making radio of our own. As we workshop our pieces, we'll mic ourselves closely, examining what happens at the intersection of sound and the written word. What does it mean to give a literal voice to your writing? How will the words you’ve written on paper adapt as they move onto the air? And how is it best to give voice to someone else’s story? Also, sound can mean theatre. When is it ethical to instill drama into a story, and when is it overkill? The technical aspects involved in the course will include microphone techniques, interviewing skills, digital editing, and podcast creation. Our class will work collaboratively with the radio conference being held on campus this fall. Conference speakers will include writers, hosts, and producers from The New York Times, Radiolab, Third Coast International Audio Festival, and APM’s The Truth, who will discuss their works and process. An end-of-semester field trip to WNYC, New York Public Radio, will be planned.

This course is for students who want to break free of the conventions of the traditional essay and memoir and discover a broader range of narrative and stylistic possibilities available to nonfiction writers. During the first half of the semester, the class will read and discuss examples of formally innovative—or “experimental”—nonfiction that will serve as the inspiration for brief assignments. Completed assignments will also be read aloud and discussed each week. During the second half of the semester, students will workshop longer pieces that they will have written in consultation with the instructor as part of their conference work. While the primary goal of this course is to help students find new and inspiring ways of expressing themselves in writing, we will also attempt to answer, in an entirely nondogmatic fashion, three overlapping questions: Why would anyone want to write such unconventional stuff? What happens when you do? How can you tell when a nonfiction “experiment” has succeeded?

Desire drives any story worth telling. One of the most difficult forms of desire to represent in writing, in a way that is neither reductive nor stereotypical, is sexual desire. As William Gass said, “Anyone who attempts to render sexual experience directly must face the fact that the writings which comprise it are ludicrous without their subjective content.” That is, writing about sex and sexuality is an exploration of our humanity. To write about sex with clarity and accuracy is to engage topics of identity, the body, gender, family, politics, and, yes, the nature of love and longing. In this workshop, we will focus on reading and writing creative nonfiction that tackles life’s most fundamental and challenging subject in all its complexity, humor, eroticism, violence, pathology, vulnerability, awkwardness, and grace. The reading list will include, among others, James Salter, Mary Gaitskill, Rebecca Walker, Gay Talese, Jeanette Winterson, and Alison Bechdel.  

In this course, we will explore what it means to write for radio and other aural contexts. The course will involve deep listening, critical analysis, and discussion of narrative texts. We’ll listen to a variety of works across radio’s history—from The Futurists to Glenn Gould to This American Life, particularly taking a close look at emerging radio projects and sound art organizations such as free103point9, Third Coast International Audio Festival, East Village Radio, and Megapolis. Students also will learn how to create a broadcast or installation piece that will be premiered at UnionDocs gallery in Brooklyn. The technical aspects involved in the course include microphone techniques, interviewing skills, digital editing, and podcast creation. Guest lecturers will include writers, hosts, producers, and installation artists, who will discuss their works and show their range of writing and experiences in the field. An end-of-semester field trip to WNYC New York Public Radio will be planned.

There are memoirs that people write when they’ve had a great acting career or been president of a large country. We read these for their historic/cultural value—for our interest in the subject that is their lives. But there’s another kind of memoir that is trying to tell a whole other kind of truth. These are more personal stories of dysfunction, addiction, overcoming the odds. They take us on alcoholic journeys or into dungeons—into scary families and scarier souls. In this workshop, we attempt to uncover this kind of truth; but this isn’t a class in autobiography. What differentiates these stories from other tales of grief and woe is that they are, quite simply, well-told. It is one thing to have a story to tell. It is quite another to know how to tell it. In this workshop, we will read these memoirs and attempt to write one of our own. We’ll read Jonathan Ames, Mary Karr, Kathryn Harrison, Jeanette Taylor, and Nick Flynn, as well as others. The emphasis will be on how to tell our stories. We will work on scenes and scene development. The goal is for students to begin to write, or at least to contemplate, a memoir of their own.

Any writer who tries to capture the likeness of another—whether in biography, history, journalism, or art criticism—must face certain questions. What makes a good profile? What is the power dynamic between subject and writer? How does a subject’s place in the world determine the parameters of what may be written about him or her? To what extent is any portrait also a self-portrait? And how can the complexities of a personality be captured in several thousand—or even several hundred—words? In this course, we will tackle the various challenges of profile writing, such as choosing a good subject, interviewing, plotting, obtaining and telescoping biographical information, and defining the role of place in the portrait. Students will be expected to share their own work, identify in other writers’ characterizations what they admire or despise, and learn to read closely many masters of the genre: Joseph Mitchell, Tom Wolfe, Daphne Merkin, Janet Malcolm. We will also turn to shorter forms of writing—personal sketches, obituaries, brief reported pieces, fictional descriptions—to further illuminate what we mean when we talk about “identity” and “character.” The goal of this course is less to teach the art of profile writing than to make us all more alert to the subtleties of the form.

Persona poems are poems written in the voice of a character other than the author. We can view these constructed identities as masks, acts of ventriloquism, pageantry, or possibly an alternative route to uncover a speaker’s identity on the page. In discussing persona, we will encounter subjects such as gender, history, culture, age, nationality, and/or sexuality. We will examine poems ranging from classical to contemporary, local and global poets, recorded and live performances. By studying persona, we are led to the important discussion of “finding” one’s own voice. Would we know it if we heard it? Is it something that can be developed? Or is voice innate, a cadence that lives within? On a technical level, we will study style, diction, timbre, sound, rhythm, song, and dialect as tools to uncover voice with clarity and precision. Class work will comprise student writing and critique, poetic experiments, linguistic adventure, and wild meanderings in order to understand future possibilities for one’s own poems. Writing is produced and discussed each week, followed by revision portfolios several times during the semester. The act of revision provides the discipline needed to make real poems from raw material. We will also read a book of poetry each week. Students are expected to write and read consistently, to experiment, and to be passionate about creation. The class culminates in a chapbook and a public reading in Manhattan.

In this poetry workshop, we will learn the fundamentals of poetic craft thorough the lens of beauty. The class will be a lab, of sorts, where we will explore this topic while also making work using and contorting beauty. We will look at the work of poets whose work engages with beauty in some way, as well as read and discuss writings on beauty by philosophers, fiction writers, and nonfiction writers, along with examples of beauty in visual art, film, and fashion. In addition, we may watch films, or excerpts from film, and visit galleries and museums in New York City. Expect to write one poem per week for workshop; read and write brief responses to assigned weekly readings; work in small groups, as well as in the larger, workshop group; and engage in lively and engaging classroom discussions.

“all/the stuff they’ve always talked about/still makes a poem a surprise!”—Frank O’Hara

In this workshop, you will seek opportunities to surprise yourselves and one another. You’ll read books of (mostly) contemporary poetry, as well as essays on the art and other assorted prose—including an interview with Bill Murray. You’ll discuss and write about how poets use form, absurdity, humor, syntax, pattern variation, tone, defamiliarization, and other tools to surprising ends. You’ll hand in just one new poem per week, but you should be writing frequently enough to have a few from which to choose. Your creative work will be discussed in class and in conference; you will use what you discover from those conversations to revise poems for an end-of-semester portfolio. Together, we’ll also figure out ways to cultivate our ability to be surprised, not only in our reading and writing but in our experiences of the world.

How have poets in the past imagined the future of poetry? How have politics and technology radicalized poetic form throughout history? In the first half of the semester, we will closely read poets from the avant-garde tradition. We will investigate debates about experimental aesthetics in the 20th century and analyze how poems address technological and political issues, both in their thematic concerns and through formal strategies. We will begin with Dadaist and Futurist manifestos and read poems from various schools of poetry such as Negritude, Oulipo, Language School, and Conceptualists, as well as poets who fall in between those movements.  Poets we will focus on will include Gertrude Stein, Aime Cesaire, Raymond Queneau, David Antin, and Thersa Hak Kyung Cha. We will also read theorists such as Guy Debord and Nicholas Bourriaud and watch videos by Vito Acconci. In the second half of the semester, we will make our own projections on the future of poetry by reading contemporary poets such as Bhanu Khapil, Christian Hawkey, and Vanessa Place and by looking at videos and performances by contemporary artists such as Cynthia Hopkins and Paul Chan. We will investigate methods by which we can push the interactive possibilities of poetry by experimenting with interdisciplinary performance and docupoetics. In addition to reading and class discussion, students are required to write their own manifestos, complete poetic projects both on and off the page, and engage in one collaborative project.

In this reading and writing workshop, we will undertake three primary tasks: discuss close readings of poems and texts relevant to poetry and the creative process; find ways to generate new work of our own through exercises, models, and experiments; and, finally, workshop our own poems for revision purposes. Throughout this semester, we will explore the theme of poetic process, asking ourselves: How do we grow as artists? How can other arts and sciences inform our work? And what is the role of the unconscious in creativity and revision work? In-class readings will include a variety of contemporary poets (US and multicultural writers—Whitman, Neruda, Vallejo, Mort, etc.). This will be a class-community effort; rigorous and compassionate participation is required. There will be class readings. Conference work will be assigned individually, and a minimum of eight new (and revised) poems will be expected. Our classroom is reserved for risk taking, exploring, and mistake making. Please park preconceptions and egos outside.

“The known universe has one complete lover, and that is the greatest poet.”—Walt Whitman

This course, a semester-long variation on the theme of the traditional poetry workshop, will focus on acquiring the ways and means of Whitman’s complete lover via the study of great poetry. En route, we will read aloud, discuss particular topics (e.g., line breaks, punctuation, truth), and do various tuning and strengthening exercises. Conference time will be devoted to student work. Students will also be asked to compile an anthology and a chapbook collection of original poetry for class distribution, to memorize, and to participate in two class readings over the course of the term. The only prerequisites are a curiosity about all poetry, not just one’s own, and a commitment to undertake whatever labors are necessary to write better on the last day of class than on the first.

In this workshop, we will focus on the use of imagery to generate new writing and ways of conceiving the elegiac form. Through the device of ekphrastic writing, we will discuss traditional, as well as revolutionary, articulations of grief as it exists in its relationship to lyric poetry. We will try to reach new personal geographies within the realm of elegy by selecting and analyzing visual materials, such as paintings, sculpture, and primarily photography. We will pair literary and visual experiments in our search to grasp lyric poetry. Each student will select a visual artist and a poet to study throughout the course of the semester. Students will be expected to create original photographs, though no foundation or experience in photography is necessary or required. Please bring curiosity, intimacy, craft, and imagination each week. Students will also be expected to attend at least one poetry reading during the spring semester. A final folio of poetry and visual imagery will be submitted at the end of the semester. 

Contemporary poets face a dazzling range of stylistic options. This course is designed to help you develop not just your own ear and voice but your own sense of craft, intuition, technique, and experiment. We will focus primarily and profoundly humanistically on students’ own work, with the knowledge that a mistake in art can be fascinating and the demonstration of competence can be irrelevant. We will also look at poets from Anne Carson to Elizabeth Bishop to Basho. Students will be encouraged to orient themselves and find their own directions in the labyrinth of modern poetic practice. We’ll study prosody, metrics, the lyric and epic voices—but the emphasis will be on students’ own creative projects. Expect to write every week, read voraciously, and create a portfolio of six to 12 poems.

This is a reading/writing course. We will spend time every week reading poems that have already been published, so that we can see how they were made: music, syntax, line, sound, and image. We might spend time generating new work in class through exercises and experiments. And we will spend time looking closely at one another’s work, encouraging each other to take risks and to move even closer to the sources of our poems. Each writer in the class will meet with another class member once a week on a “poetry date.” Each writer will be responsible for reading the assigned work and for bringing to class one written offering each week. We will work hard, learn a great deal about poetry and about our own poems, and have a wonderful time.