Afternoon craft sessions offer writers a chance to learn from talk with faculty and visiting poets and writers about varied matters of craft including techniques, themes, and forms. Participants have the opportunity to sign up for four of these sessions at the time of enrollment. Each 90-minute Craft Session will be offered twice during the week.
Place Poetics: Landscape, Memory, and Journey
(with Kenzie Allen)
What are the place memories we carry with us, and where do our best stories live? How might our favorite landscapes offer new inspirations, and how might we invoke a deeper experience of place for our readers? In this craft lecture and generative writing session, we’ll look at poetry of place, including landscape- and eco-poetics, mapping and travel narratives, and site-specific writing and art, to chart new geographies across mediums and across time and space itself.
Both in-class and extracurricular prompts will be offered, and participants can expect to produce foundational material that can fuel several new poems or stories / essays / multimodal works, as well as developing new processes for their craft. Supplementary readings will include a packet of place-based poems, featuring work by Elizabeth Bishop, Carrie Fountain, Derrick Austin, Roberta Hill, Craig Santos Perez, and more.
Authorship Against Authority: Crafting Insurgencies
(with Sarah Aziza)
In what ways are our writing practices captive to disciplines of legitimacy and legibility? How do our craft choices reflect internalized hierarchies of acceptable experiences, languages, and points of view? Are established practices of “good writing” and “credibility” actually forms of silencing? What would we excavate, what would we liberate, if we rebelled against the tyrannies of “correctness” and “fact”?
Combining lecture, discussion, and prompts, we will consider how we might subvert ideas of “authority,” creating new, insurgent forms. We will ponder the ways silence may be enacted in the form of language, and what secrets our own silences might hold. We will return to the body, the intuitive, and the non-verbal as frontiers where we might discover our writing again, anew.
Participants will be encouraged to come to class with a draft or idea which feels stymied; together and privately, we will consider what mutinies our page might need.
Poems of Fire & Care
(with Chen Chen)
How can a political poem also be a love poem? How can a poem of fiery outrage be, at the same time, a poem of tenderness? In this generative session/craft discussion, we’ll take a look at several examples that manage to offer both warmth and ferocity while responding to recent/ongoing injustices. Among others, we’ll discuss work by Solmaz Sharif, Hala Alyan, Natalie Diaz, and Derrick Austin. We’ll also do some writing of our own (prompts will be provided). Participants can expect to draft two to three poems. And there will be time toward the end of the session for a Q&A and/or any (totally optional) sharing of work generated during our time together—just for listening and appreciation.
Doorways into Ekphrasis
(with Ama Codjoe)
Part lecture, part workshop, Doorways into Ekphrasis will explore the topic of ekphrastic writing: writing about art. Together we will engage in in-class reading and close looking. Workshop attendees will leave with a draft of a poem, and with prompts for further and future writing. Please come prepared to write longhand.
Writing Emotional Stakes: How to Make the Reader Cry
(with Lydi Conklin)
In this class we will discuss craft techniques to push the reader to feel something while reading your work. We will do some in class close readings of texts that demonstrate some important craft techniques for building emotional stakes and have a conversation about the craft elements and how to employ them in your own work. It will be a mix of discussion and lecture with hand-outs. We will not be doing in-class writing but you will walk away with craft techniques to try in your own work. This craft class is geared toward fiction and creative nonfiction work but may have some application in poetry as well.
The Telepathy of Objects: Writing with Family Archives
(with Carolina Ebeid)
VHS tapes, recipes, birth and immunization records, letters, heirlooms, passports, a shoebox of photographs, old laptops —these are among the tangible artifacts that make up the family archive. Amid the tangible, we recognize the intangible and ephemeral matter, such as oral histories, songs, missing records, objects lost in migration now only filed in memory. How do we open a creative space for these often undervalued inventories?
In this craft class we will consider several poetic texts and multimedia pieces that engage with familial materials . We will raise questions about the kind of research such documentary projects entail, the ethics of writing about kin, and how to work creatively with photographs / audio / objects / documents, and how to write into that empty gap of what’s missing from the archive. Please bring with you an object, photograph, and/or document as you will think and write alongside them.
Writing the Enemy: Literary Strategies of Revenge, Confrontation, and Satire
(with Jordy Rosenberg)
Famously, for the first decade of his career, Pier Paolo Pasolini – firmly convinced that only the working classes and the impoverished were worthy subjects of artistic attention – refused to depict the bourgeoisie in his films. When he finally did (in Teorema), it was only to inflict a relentless series of humiliations on a fictional bourgeois family until its members unravel – abject, exposed, and broken. Pasolini’s changing convictions, and Teorema’s gleefully destructive relationship to its characters, raise a series of broader questions for us in this workshop: how (and to what purposes) do we write enemies, and how do we understand this particular kind of literary praxis in a moment (like Pasolini’s, like our own) of robust reawakening of the arts as a front of struggle.
What have leftist writers done with their enemies in fiction? Named and exposed them; eroded their mythos and aura; satirized them; staged their dissolution; put them through humiliating tribulations (see above). What kinds of genres, stylistic conceits, and other structural elements have writers used in these efforts? We will explore a range of approaches, drawn from genre fiction (such as the burgeoning subgenre of trans horror), experimental literary fiction, and canonical realist works. Looking at touchpoints like Bolaño’s fascist-collaborator narrator, Grace Byron’s trans commune hijacked into cultish bloodbath, Emile Zola’s hellish, industrial-era mines, and John Keene’s fantasied first-contact fables, we will study traditional novelistic tools like POV and suspense/pacing, alongside innovative techniques like radical defamiliarization, flourish and excess, prose parataxis, and irreverent arrangements of temporality, to think about how we might develop, borrow, tweak and be inspired by these texts for our own work. We will also ask questions about how to experiment with limit and refusal in our writing as well. How poetically can a fascist character be permitted to think? Do we give beautiful words to terrible characters? Rich imaginations? Full interior lives? There are as many ways of approaching these questions as there are novels. Our class will consist of lecture, discussion, and a few prompts meant to open up places where writers may be stuck specifically around these questions
Writing Body and Desire
(with Mecca Jamilah Sullivan)
Desire can define our characters and transform them, pushing them into conflicts that ultimately change their worlds. But writing characters whose stories are driven by bodily longing can be a challenge. What strategies can we imagine for creating queer, plus-size, bad-ass characters, for example, or others whose desires for pleasure, food, or forbidden intimacies infuse their narrative voices and points-of-view? In crafting novels and short stories, how do we balance attention to the body with other structural demands of fiction? How do we effectively create characters whose bodies may know more about them then they do? This generative workshop explores techniques for expressing the body’s desires in fiction. Through a series of close readings and adaptable writing exercises, we will examine the challenges in pacing, structure, and point-of-view that can arise in writing the body, and develop specific techniques for tackling aspects of craft. Using the works of Audre Lorde, Dionne Brand, James Baldwin, and others as our guides, we’ll explore how these writers center bodily yearning in their storytelling, and what strategies we can create for writing desire in our own fiction.
Some of the stories we discuss may include themes or imagery that may be difficult for some readers. Engaging these works is optional. This course is for writers at all levels.
In-Betweening: Notes on Animation & Writing Across Genres
(with Joseph Earl Thomas)
Taking its guiding heuristics from the labor and poetics of animation, this lecture-based craft talk will consider what hand-drawn moving images (especially from Japan) can teach us about writing both beyond and within the limits of enclosure as it carves out new attitudes for the combined enterprise we sometimes culturally segregate as thinking, feeling, and seeing, in order to carve out less rigid notions of what can be said or experienced in the 21st Century with a greater emphasis on discernment. I will provide a handout for our session and leave plenty of time for Q & A towards the end. Reading will be provided ahead of time.
Self-Portrait, Selfie, and Snap Poems: Ekphrasis from Art Gallery to Social Media App
(with Lena Khalaf Tuffaha)
We read and write poems in an era where the self is at the center of our considerations and artistic representation. Self-Portraits are abundant in visual art and in poetry, and offer a rich landscape to explore, question, subvert, and re/define the self. The word “selfie” was officially added to the Merriam Webster dictionary in 2013 and the selfie now has its own museum! And from my teenagers, I was introduced to the culture of snaps—quick and often partial self-portraits, disappearing as soon as they are consumed. What can all these visual forms offer us as poets? What does it mean to write a self-portrait, selfie, or snap poem? We’ll explore the blurry boundaries between these forms and use them to generate our own poem drafts.
Clean Writing
(with Tony Tulathimutte)
This class is about the teachable elements of style: avoidance of cliche, precision, and concision. We’ll be discussing different types of cliche and how to spot them, the considerations going into word choice, the styling of grammar and punctuation, scalpel editing, and with any remaining time, we’ll talk a bit about personal style.