Conference Class Descriptions
Rikki Ducornet Class Description
Our passwords are rigor and imagination, and our emblems the crystal and the flame—lucent and mutable. Revelation and subversion—these, too, will guide us. Writing is a process of revelation for both the reader and the writer, and our purpose will be to seize permission to write about anything (and to do it well!), and to subvert received ideas—about the world, the self, the nature of art. In conference and in class, we will discuss ways of heightening the text, opening it up, polishing it by the moon, dissolving boundaries. We will consider the ways in which our writing might be informed and extended by other disciplines and vehicles—hypertext, for example. Or an unusually constructed book.
Please send fifteen pages of text to be discussed one-on-one and shared with the class. I would be eager to see these early. And bring fourteen copies with you to workshop. I will be referring to Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium and The Uses of Literature, as well as Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space and my own essay, “The Deep Zoo” (online at Fantastic Metropolis). And you might take a look at some hypertexts. For example: World of Awe and Patchwork Girl. Other things of interest: the new magazine Encyclopedia, the anthology: The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases, Michael Martone’s The Blue Guide to Indiana, and Gilgamesh as filmed by The Brothers Quay. All these are unusual vehicles for fiction.
Camille Dungy Class Description
In this course, we’ll test the limits and expand the possibilities of nature writing. We’ll explore how we write about our connection to (or disconnection from) the landscape that surrounds us and think about how poems and stories about the natural world can also engage social, political, and historic concerns. By engaging with work of writers from a variety of social, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds we’ll stretch the scope of who can and will write about nature. Through readings and creative assignments, you’ll discover new ways to incorporate animals, landscape, the environment, or other manifestations of the natural world into your work. Whether it’s loved or reviled, cherished or practically dismissed, the natural world will be central to all of the texts we’ll read and write. Authors we will read include Lucille Clifton, Carl Phillips, Rita Dove, Rigoberto Gonzáles, Ellen Bryant Voigt, and Tayari Jones.
Brian Evenson Class Description
Every new work of fiction enters into an already existent field of writing, but, as T.S. Eliot suggests, it can change that field, making us reconsider what’s come before. We’re particularly interested in thinking about how current fiction draws on and disrupts earlier traditions. We’ll look at fairy tales and contemporary writers who respond to fairy tales, stories and poems that appropriate or borrow from previous works, stories that steal and deform a genre of fiction to make something new. We’ll also do a lot of writing of our own, re-working and re-thinking themes and plots from previous works and figuring out how to continue to make it new while still acknowledging the interesting writers that have come before us.
Thomas Glave Class Description
Who exactly is the “other” to us, and why? And when, and how? And what does “other” mean to us as writers? Does/Must our writing language shift in crafting a character distinctly different from ourselves? How do we truly, imaginatively, bravely enter the skin, mind, heart of another whom we think of, have thought of, as an “other”? In this course, you’ll write either one nonfiction or fiction work, in either first, second, or third person, centering on a situation with characters (fiction) or real people (nonfiction) who differ from you (1) racially, and (2) in at least three of the following ways: gender, sexuality, religion, class, national origin, or religion.
Recommended reading (any of these might be helpful):
FICTION:
Nadine Gordimer, "Some are Born to Sweet Delight" (in Jump and Other Stories)
Lawrence Chua, Gold by the Inch
Toni Morrison, Sula
Rosario Ferre, The Youngest Doll
James Baldwin, "Going to Meet the Man" (in Going to Meet the Man)
Junot Diaz, Drown
Thomas Glave, "--And Love Them?" (in Whose Song? and Other Stories)
NON FICTION:
Andre Aciman, Letters of Transit
Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary
Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls
Carole Maso, Break Every Rule
Thomas Glave, "Fire and Ink: Toward a Quest for Language, History, and a Moral Imagination" (in Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent)
Barbara Sjoholm Class Description
A traveler’s tale, a natural history essay, a historical narrative, a spiritual journey, even a gastronomical adventure––all these forms can be used to record events of a life. This class will take a multi-genre approach to memoir, by emphasizing the variety of forms over the more traditional personal memoir. Exercises to generate new writing will combine with critique of individual works-in-progress that students may bring to the workshop. Bring no more than 10 pages. We’ll also discuss how selected authors use aspects of memoir to explore, interrogate, and celebrate their place in the world.
Arthur Sze Class Description
We will begin by asking each participant to select one pre-existing poem and will discuss how to revise, polish, and re-envision, if necessary; but we will also use these poems as a springboard to discuss larger issues. I will give an ekphrastic assignment based on a Joseph Cornell assemblage. We will look closely at the poems written and will discuss the possibilities of a poetic sequence as well as incorporate classic Chinese poetics. The workshop will be flexible to participant interests, and the majority of pre-existing work (eight pages of poetry, maximum length) will be discussed at individual conferences.
Suggested reading list:
Consider Joseph Cornell's assemblages
19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei by Eliot Weinberger
