Note: Each CC&T (Craft, criticism & theory) class description includes a question based on the required/suggested reading; elective seminars do not.
Talking Back, Taking Back: Moments Of Reappropriation In Native Poetry
Faculty member: Mark Turcotte
Time: Saturday, December 31, 3:30–5:30 p.m.
Native American writers often encounter literary audiences and readers who arrive to their work armed with so many preconceived notions and ideas about “Indian-ness” that they feel compelled, even empowered, to question the ways in which these writers choose to represent themselves and their various cultures. In this session we will read some Native poetry and discuss the ways in which individual writers sometimes take on the task of re-appropriating cultural identity, ideas, and symbols in their work. Also, we will do some writing aimed at mimicking the process of reclaiming and undoing the ways in which any of us might have been ill-defined or misrepresented.
Required reading: handouts will be provided
Question: Participants should think about ways in which they have expressed identity in their own work.
The Fundamentals Of Food Writing: An Introduction
Faculty member: Randall Kenan
Time: Sunday, January 1, 1:15–3:15 p.m.
This class will give a brief overview of the world of food writing as it has come to develop over the last 30 years, and it will also review some of the key elements of superior food writing. We will survey the world of food writing—memoir, food essays, polemical essays, restaurant reviews, profile, general food reportage—paying close attention to good prose and the demands of form. We are not talking about the stuffy, effete language of precious sentences about obscure French delicacies. Good food writing is like the best food, robust and hearty; and primarily about the senses: taste, texture, smell, sight, sound. We will also examine a number of the issues nonfiction writing always confronts: tone, author persona, point of view, characterization. Class members will also receive a reading list of accomplished contemporary examples of excellent food writing.
Required Readings:
R. W. Apple, excerpts from Far-Flung and Well Fed: The Food Writing of R. W. Apple
Isak Dinesen, “Babette’s Feast,” from Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard
MFK Fisher, “Young Hunger” and “I was Really Hungry” from As They Were
Jonathan Gold, five reviews from The LA Weekly
Michael Pollan, “Out of the Kitchen,” The New York Times Magazine, August 2, 2009
Recommended Reading:
Bill Bufford, Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker,
and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany
MFK Fisher, The Art of Eating
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal
Assignment: A food memory exercise: please write a 500-word essay about either (1) your favorite food and why it is your favorite; or, (2) your worst meal and why it was the worst. The emphasis here is on memory, human interaction, and description. You will have an opportunity in class to revise and to share your essay with the class.
Special Tie-in Film: Auditors are encouraged to watch the movie Babette’s Feast (1987), written and directed by Gabriel Axel; the movie will be discussed during the class.
Higher Ground: How To Enrich Your CommunityAnd Make A Difference Through Your Art
Guest faculty member: M. L. Liebler
Time: Sunday, January 1, 3:30–4:45
This course will demonstrate and teach you specific ways to make your MFA degree work for you while creatively enriching and educating your community. I will show you how to more effectively use your talent and time to start community workshops and programs for children, teens, adults, seniors, and nontraditional populations (in abuse shelters, prisons, hospitals, etc.) where you live. As a literary arts activist and working writer for close to 40 years, I can share with you ideas, experiences, and methods on how to create programs in your community that will be both personally and financially rewarding for you. These positive programs can also create greater visibility for you as a writer. There are many advantages to taking this “road (often) not taken,” but let me help you see a new way to a future of success and fulfillment as an MFA program graduate, professional writer, and citizen.
Recommended reading: Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint by June Jordan
Inspiring Young Readers & Writers
Guest faculty members: Jen Cusack & Pat Keogh
Time: Monday, January 2, 1:15–2:15 p.m.
This seminar will describe the rich and rewarding landscape of writers working with children and young adults in schools and libraries. How would you design the perfect author visit? What are the ins and outs of working in the classroom, in after-school programs, or in public libraries? Who gets you in the door? How can you reach out to underserved children and their teachers? What online and other tools can you create to connect your books to the curriculum? The workshop leaders have brought hundreds of authors and illustrators into the lives of children, young adults, and their teachers. They will share their insights and take your questions about how best to connect to your amazing audience of young readers and writers—even if you haven’t yet published your first book.
Picture Book Techniques
Guest faculty member: Nina Crews
Time: Wednesday, January 4, 1:15–3:15 p.m.
Let’s look at the picture book. It may be read to a child under a year old, or by a third grader. The book may contain fifty words or five hundred. It may be about bedtime, slavery, talking trucks, or typing cows. What qualities do these books share? What are the strengths of the form? What are its limitations? How do the words support and inspire the pictures? The seven books listed below are a small sample of writing for young children reflective of a variety of styles and approaches. We will use them to discuss technical considerations such as page count and the role of the editor and illustrator. We will look at the aesthetic choices these authors have made that make young readers want to read these books again and again!
Required Reading (all of these books are in print and available in libraries):
**VERY IMPORTANT! READ THESE BOOKS ALOUD!!**
Jim Averbeck In A Blue Room
Donald Crews Freight Train
Doreen Cronin Click, Clack, Moo Cows That Type
Laurel Croza I Know Here
Barbara Joosse Roawr
Ezra Jack Keats Whistle for Willie
Chris Raschka Charlie Parker Played Be Bop
Question: How do these books speak to the interests and concerns of children?
Looking Back In Fiction
Faculty: Helen Elaine Lee
Time: Wednesday, January 4 from 1:15–3:15 p.m.
How do fiction writers evoke the act and process of remembering, and the effort to come to terms with past events? How do we handle looking back in fiction? How does the vantage point taken toward past events shape the narrator’s understanding of the meaning of those events? And how does the means of retrospection help to reveal character? Through choices regarding structure and tense, how do we raise thematic questions about how time unfolds, the relationship between past and present, the force of memory in our lives?
Required Reading: Margaret Laurence, The Diviners
Suggested reading: All of the following stories can be found in The Story and Its Writer, Ed. Ann Charters. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1995.
Isabel Allende, “And of Clay We Are Created”
James Baldwin, “Sonny's Blues”
Louise Erdrich, “The Red Convertible”
James Joyce, “Araby”
Bharati Mukherjee, “The Management of Grief”
Tillie Olsen, “I Stand Here Ironing”
Susan Sontag, “The Way We Live Now”
Question: What insights does The Diviners give you about your own integration of remembered events, their significance to your life story, and their ongoing influence; and how can you bring these insights to your fiction writing?
Seeing Anew: What Prose Writers Can Discover From Graphic Novelists About Crafting Stories
Faculty member: Laura Williams McCaffrey
Time: Wednesday, January 4, 3:30–5:30 p.m.
As we try to understand storytelling, we use a variety of concepts like the “journey” and the “dream.” These metaphors help us conceptualize the elements we need to tell our stories effectively. They might also provide us a lens through which we can look with an editorial eye. They help us see what dominates our stories and what our stories lack, while offering us words with which we can articulate craft options for revising our work.
At the most superficial glance, sequential art and prose might seem profoundly different mediums. However, like prose storytellers, graphic novelists use style to create the tone or mood of their work. They must choose from a variety of points-of-view, and they use their choice to render a central story. They must understand how to select scenes that will form this central story, and how to create pacing in their chosen scenes. They must decide what to depict within each scene sequence and what to leave out. They use all these elements to form coherent and compelling narratives. Writers of graphic novels use the same metaphors prose writers do to create and edit their stories, but they also have a visual vocabulary with which to conceptualize what they do and how it works. The goal of this class is to begin to familiarize ourselves with the graphic novelist’s visual vocabulary, and to use it as a lens through which we might look anew at our prose.
Our session will include presentation and close-reading discussion. Participants should also bring a scene or chapter of their current work-in-progress with them. No art skills are necessary, but a willingness to experiment is essential.
Required Reading: McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art.
Yang, Gene Luen. American Born Chinese.
Questions: As you read Understanding Comics, what aspects of storytelling did you see in a new ways? How might you apply your new understanding to your own storytelling?
What storytelling technique in Gene Luen Lang’s American Born Chinese most interested you as a prose writer and why?
Everything Matters: The Sentence (A Cross-Genre Class)
Faculty member: Sandra Scofield
Time: Thursday, January 5, 1:15–3:15 p.m.
Goals: Sharpen your knowledge of grammar. Develop a heightened sense of syntax and punctuation. Know your own work better. This is not a class in baby steps. It is for serious writers who strive to improve their writing.
Writer (Stop-Time) and writing teacher Frank Conroy said that if a manuscript is in trouble, the first place to look is at the sentence. If it isn’t right at that level, you can’t fix it on a grander scale. He was talking about sense, meaning.
But what is “right?” Felicitous, economical, apt; but more. Syntax is a way of perceiving as well as a way of telling. Here’s the good news: You can go way beyond avoiding errors. You can learn to write great sentences. Natural to some, varied and elegant syntax is learnable. Like most skills, it takes practice. We will do some.
Preparation:
1. Review the grammar of the sentence. Be sure you know well the four kinds of sentences and can recognize and write them. You’ll need to know the difference between a dependent and an independent clause. Please be sure you know what a dangling participle is. In fact, bring an egregious example. If it is from your own work, all the better. Know what a subject and a predicate are and what it means for them to "agree." Understand how pronouns refer to something.
2. Bring a writer’s sentence that you love. We will open the class with a litany: your round robin reading of your chosen models.
Required Readings:
1. A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation. Noah Lukeman. Please read all of it; it is invaluable information and advice. We will attend especially to Chapter 1, "The Period" and Chapter 7, "The Paragraph and Section Breaks." Do the following exercises and bring them with you:
a. Chapter 1. Any three, pp .41-43. b. Chapter 7. First three exercises, p. 179. Come prepared to talk about what you learned about your work. Write a one to two page self-evaluation based on the exercises to give to me.
2. “What We Talk About When We Talk About Flow” by David Jauss. Be prepared to describe at least one aspect of "flow" in prose. Available online from AWP’s The Chronicle archive, Oct-Nov 2003, or in Jauss’s excellent book, Alone With All That Could Happen: Rethinking Conventional Wisdom About the Craft of Writing, 2008; republished as On Writing Fiction, (2011).
Recommended: If you need a review of sentence structure, agreement of nouns and verbs, uses of pronouns, etc., get thee to a grammar book. Any off-the-shelf (library or bookstore) inexpensive handbook will do. If you want a lot more to chew on or if you are serious about style, I highly recommend Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style. (I will refer to her chapter on “Free Modifiers: Branching Sentences.”) This book would be the perfect follow-up to the class. Other recommended books are A Writer’s Reference by Diana Hacker and The Little, Brown Handbook.
Saying The Poem: Bringing The Fictionist’s Art Of Dialogue Into Poetry
Faculty member: Steven Huff
Time: Thursday, January 5, 1:15–3:15 p.m.
Most poets do not write fiction, and so they may struggle with some elements of narrative that fiction writers handle every day—such as dialogue. In this session we will talk about the main principles of writing invented dialogue; we will look at how dialogue has been used in a range of poems (we’ll even look at songs and ballads); and we will discuss the art of combining the fictionist’s eye for pithy, luminous dialogue that carries the narrative forward, with the poet’s ear for pitch and rhythm. We will also look at poems in which dialogue has been deftly paraphrased. We will turn to writing exercises in the second half. I will distribute handouts.
Required reading: handouts to be provided.
Assignment: Come to class with 1) two poems [by poets other than yourself] in which dialogue is an important element. Ask yourself how well that dialogue works in those poems; does it sound authentic in each case, and how would you change the dialogue if they were your poems? And 2) one poem of your own that may be revised to either add or improve dialogue.
The Demons That Keep You From Writing
Guest faculty member: Roland Merullo
Time: Friday, January 6, 3:15–4:15 p.m.
While a lot of emphasis is placed—and appropriately so—on the technical aspects of the craft of writing (things like pacing, plot, characterization, finding the right ending), anyone serious about the writing life needs to consider the emotional and psychological challenges involved. This talk will revolve around that part of the game: the cause and cure of writer’s block; dealing with rejection; deciding to whom you will show your work, and when and how to respond to their criticism/suggestions; and dealing with envy, procrastination, time management, the cultivation of mental focus, etc. During the ten years I taught in college I saw a large number of students who could write a good paragraph and who had an interesting story to tell, in various genres. But the number who could navigate the difficult interior waters of success and failure was much smaller. I found myself giving mini-lectures on aspects of the writing life that had nothing to do with craft. This turned into a talk I gave frequently at conferences and MFA programs. Then it turned into a small book, Demons of the Blank Page. I hope the talk stimulates some good discussion, comments and questions, and that it helps writers create a calm, settled interior environment—the place from which their work must come.
Sentimentality In Memoir
Faculty member: Amy Hoffman
Time: Friday, January 6, 4:30–6:30 p.m.
In an interview in The Writer’s Chronicle (September 2011), the poet and memoirist Mark Doty offers two definitions of “the sentimental”: “the writer feels more than the reader does”; and “false feeling: that the writer offers us an expected, conventional, or sweetened version of reality.” We’ve all done it: cliches, formulas, mixed or dead metaphors. Is it so wrong? Well, it’s quite possible that no one read Charles Dickens in quite the same way after Oscar Wilde quipped, about a beloved character in The Old Curiosity Shop, “One would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without dissolving into tears...of laughter.” In this class, we will take a closer look at what Doty has to say about sentimentality and examine a memoir by the short-story writer Alice Munro that (among many other things) examines what underlies the sentimental.
Required Reading:
Mark Doty interview (http://www.awpwriter.org/login/m/awpChron/articles/jcolson02.lasso#top)
“Dear Life: A Childhood Visitation,” by Alice Munro (http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=2011-09-19#)
Questions: How can we recognize sentimentality? What can we do about it during writing and revision?
Additional required assignment: Please bring to class a passage from your own writing in which you employ clichés or formulas.
Best Practices For Writers Using Social Media
Guest faculty member: Chrystal King
Time: Saturday, January 7, 1:15–2:30 p.m.
The Internet is an unavoidable reality for any writer looking to build readership and a viable career—and most of it is going to be DIY (Do It Yourself) and PFIY (Pay For It Yourself). Even if you have a solid book deal, much of the marketing and promotion is going to fall squarely on your shoulders. The stakes are high, and the options are virtually limitless. Digital marketer Crystal King will share the reasons why you should start building your online presence now, whether you are published or not. You’ll also learn about the most important considerations for building a social media platform including tools such as blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+ and more.