Advanced Writing Courses (WRTNG-UG)

Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, and James Baldwin were 20th century writers perhaps best known for their fiction – Mrs. Dalloway, Animal Farm, and Go Tell It On the Mountain readily call to mind their respective authors. Yet, each of these figures was also a master of the essay, and in their numerous works they address pressing issues in the tumultuous times in which they lived: the cause of women’s rights and feminism in the case of Woolf; British imperialism, violence, and war in Orwell’s; and the question of American politics and particularly race in the work of Baldwin. In this course, we will explore the modern essay through the works of these three writers to understand both the breadth and depth of their ideas, and, most importantly, the ways they stretched and innovated the form of the essay itself. As this is a writing course, we will focus intently on studying their works as models for students’ own writing. At the same time we will delve into the subjects that they took up in their work, we will use their essays as spurs for student essays. There will be a workshop component to this course so that students share their essays in progress. Readings may include, among many others, essays such as Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”; Orwell’s “Such, Such Were the Joys . . . “ and “Shooting an Elephant,” Baldwin’s “The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American” and “Fifth Avenue, Uptown: a Letter from Harlem.”

Editors and literary agents often find that a great variety of creative writing submissions (including novels, short story collections, memoirs and works of narrative nonfiction) require a relatively limited stock of editorial tools. Learning to identify the most common writing troubles and to use tools to relieve those troubles can lift a manuscript from the rejection pile to the acceptance pile and, later, from lackluster publication to strong word of mouth and review attention. This class will focus on two kinds of frequent manuscript problems: 1) the bold--identifying and troubleshooting the bigger conceptual and structural problems, including the young writer"s frequent habit of not being bold at all, and 2) the basics--sweating the small stuff by learning and using the tricks of an editor's trade. Readings will include works by writers such as Susan Minot, Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, Claire Keegan and others (models of successful basics and boldness), and student writings. Students will be expected to learn a common list of writing troubles and a common list of editorial tools; to read and edit work by their fellow students; to bring in one piece of their own fiction, memoir or narrative nonfiction, and to edit that piece of work in response to feedback.

The most ambitious of the postwar American journalism to appear in magazines like The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, and The New York Review of Books gave rise to a new and distinctly indigenous documentary literature, with its own possibilities and poetics. In this class we explore how this body of work redrew the formal boundaries of longform reporting, the profile, the essay, personal history and cultural criticism. We consider the emergence of the narrator as a character, the uses of rhetoric, approaches to the sentence, tone, rhythm, and structure, as well as questions of veracity and credibility. Students try their hand at these forms while responding to readings that include Ian Frazier, Joseph Mitchell, Joan Didion, David Foster Wallace, Margo Jefferson, Janet Malcolm, George W.S. Trow, Hilton Als, Wells Tower, Susan Sontag, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., John Jeremiah Sullivan, and Richard Rodriguez.

"I can never get enough of knowing about other people's lives," said William Maxwell. People love to read biography in many forms: fat books, short obituaries, newspaper feature stories, and magazine profiles. This class will explore the writing of short biography, how you can capture the spirit and shape of a person's life in a few hundred words. We will read a variety of writers, from Sigrid Nunez and Oliver Sacks to Janet Malcolm, Henry Louis Gates, "and Lawrence Weschler, to discover tools and methods. Students will write (and rewrite) four assignments, ranging from short personal snapshots to detailed book reviews to an interview-derived essay. We will discuss research techniques and ethical issues.

This writing seminar will train students to become critical viewers of performance and translate their "looking" into descriptive and analytical prose. Students will be introduced to a variety of critical strategies and approaches—from formalist to ethnographic to various forms of sociological and cultural criticism—to develop their interpretive skills. These analyses will help students discover how various performance mediums are constituted, how they "work," and how they create meaning for viewers. In addition to a writing course, this seminar is an introduction to the history of American performance criticism with an emphasis on New York City and the avant-garde. Assignments will include cultural reviews, interviews, artists’ profiles, performance documentations, and critical and/or theoretical analyses. Occasional visits by guest writers will be arranged. Some of the authors, essayists, and artists whose works we may read include: Edwin Denby, Susan Sontag; Margo Jefferson; Deborah Jowitt; Anna Deavere Smith; Homi Bhabha; Coco Fusco; and Wesley Morris. Please note that while music and film comprise a part of the world of performance art, those genres are not the focus of this course.

Effective music criticism—criticism that places a song or album within the appropriate social, political, personal, and aesthetic contexts—can be as enthralling and moving as the music it engages. In this course, we will explore different ways of writing about music, from the record review to the personal essay. We’ll consider the evolving tradition of pop music criticism (How is the critic’s role changing?) and the mysterious practice of translating sound into ideas (How do we train ourselves to be better and more thoughtful listeners?). Through close reading, class discussion, and (most importantly) workshop sessions, we’ll contemplate the mysterious circuitry that causes people to embrace (or require) music—from Bob Dylan to Megan Thee Stallion—and how best to explore that connection on the page. Readings will include Jia Tolentino, Hua Hsu, Greg Tate, Hanif Abdurraqib, Lindsay Zoladz, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Jon Caramanica, and others.

In an era where criticism has been (mostly) democratized and art is often judged exclusively by the amount of chatter it incites, the role of the professional critic is changing, and fast – these days, even reviews are subject to reviews. In this advanced writing workshop, we’ll explore the best, most effective ways for writers to engage critically with pop culture. Should critical writing be personal or objective? Is it more important to contextualize or describe? Given the overwhelming deluge of options facing media consumers, how can critics direct and guide the conversation? Students submit four original pieces of criticism for workshop; readings may include works by Doreen St. Felix, A.O. Scott, Hanif Abdurraqib, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Caity Weaver, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Rachel Syme, Jia Tolentino, and others.

A close look at the work of three nonacademic cultural critics from our time: Rebecca Solnit, Greg Tate, and Jia Tolentino. All have stretched and shaped the current notion of what critics do. Their criticism, aimed at a readership outside universities, sometimes on a specific beat (Solnit on feminism, Tate on Black music, Tolentino on the Internet) and sometimes not, can be subjective, political, experimental, or journalistic; it begins with the format of the essay and can move toward reporting, memoir, music-making, and cartography. All three critics have two overlapping preoccupations, which the critic Parul Sehgal has described as “the ethics of living and the ethics of looking.” The ethics of living means ways of helping others achieve their dignity and human rights. The ethics of looking means uncovering history, power relationships, desire, anxiety, and other implications in the basic and profound act of looking—at musical performances, visual art, film and photography, humans in transit or under duress, and oneself. We will read books and selected essays by each critic, as well as other documents (films, lectures, interviews); we will write criticism inspired by or in response to each critic’s work, imagining it as an open system and an ongoing experiment.

Cultural criticism, first, is an impulse: taking the full measure of what's before you. Then it is a method: looking at what's underneath the subject, how it connects with what else you know, questioning assumptions and received wisdom. But it is not a form or style. In this course you'll focus on the ways that general-audience criticism can go (and has long gone) beyond the classical review or argumentative-essay model, and toward other modes: philosophy; memoir; journalism; poetry; biography or eulogy of a person, thing, place, or idea; interrogative or satirical exercise. Readings may be critical works about images, technology, music, dance, buildings, race, nostalgia, narrative, or criticism itself, by authors including Oscar Wilde, Namwali Serpell, Margaret Fuller, Teju Cole, Susan Sontag, Anne Carson, Edwin Denby, Walter Benjamin, Wayne Koestenbaum, Amiri Baraka, Svetlana Boym, Roland Barthes, Jia Tolentino, Amit Chaudhuri, and Saidiya Hartman. Written work consists of essays of varying length responding to syllabus readings and on topics of your own devising.

Humans have always listened. But listening—to music or to anything else—has often been rendered as a passive activity, as the opposite of asserting, doing, achieving. It can’t be quantified. It doesn’t leave an immediate record. It can look like wasted time. There are no Grammy awards or Pulitzer Prizes for listening. (There should be. Perhaps there will be.) This is a seminar in reading about listening and writing about it—as personal essay, philosophy, or criticism. Primarily, though not exclusively, this class is about listening to music—dance music, hip-hop, rock and roll, jazz, opera, or anything else. We will think, read, and write about about listening as physical experience of sound, and as trance-state; listening as surveillance; listening with headphones vs. collective listening; two definitions of “social listening” (listening from a particular social identity, and social media-monitoring); deep-listening exercises developed by Pauline Oliveros and other composers; listening to DJs, algorithms, and streaming media; and recent thoughts about the importance of listening in nature, politics, education, and civil society. We will also draw from outside experience, and so this class may require attendance in a sound-walk and a musical performance in which there is a particular emphasis on sound.

Writing about movies is more than just issuing thumbs-up, thumbs-down judgments. In this class you will learn how to discuss a film's content, style, and meaning in ways that can interest even people who disagree with you. You will explore some of the many different ways there are to write about cinema, expanding your command of words by reading such critics as James Agee, Pauline Kael, James Baldwin, Molly Haskell, and others. Students will write (and rewrite) five papers ranging from brief movie reviews to a final eight-to-ten page essay.

This advanced writing seminar aims to train students to become critical viewers of and writers about dance of various kinds, including social and popular dance, concert dance, dance-theater, and musical-theater dance. How do we make sense of this non-verbal, ephemeral art form? And how do we communicate this in analytical and persuasive writing? How is writing itself akin to a choreographic endeavor? To pursue these questions, we will consider how space, time, and rhythm are employed in performance, and how the histories of styles might be brought to bear on our understandings of them. Readings will include works by Edwin Denby, Martha Graham, Arlene Croce, Marcia Siegel, Joan Acocella, Deborah Jowitt, Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, Thomas DeFrantz, Wendy Perron, Susan Foster, and others. We will also study the writing in some of the major dance journals in the field among them Dance Research Journal and Dance Chronicle, as well as online journals including Arts Journal, Dance Tabs, and Dance Insider. The work of the course consists of essay writing, attendance at dance concerts, and visits by guest critics.

In this course, students will create writing that traverses identities, borders and cultures, as well as genres, as they explore and deepen their understanding of issues of form, craft and ethics. The class will read and discuss a variety of texts that center around various modes of culture crossing, such as travel and study abroad; third culture and diaspora identities; immigration and escape, and historical and/or political clashes and conflicts. Through an ongoing examination of structural and craft issues in the exemplary texts, students will make creative decisions to help write three main assignments dealing with themes of Memory, Identity and Conflict. We'll use our discussions of Memory to help focus on expository and reflective rhetorical strategies, Identity as a way to experiment with point of view and character development, and Conflict as a method for exploring structure and dramatic tension. In order to write cross-culturally about personal experiences, students will be encouraged to create texts along the spectrum between creative nonfiction and autobiographical fiction. Theoretical essays will help inform how we ethically position ourselves as writers observing cultures not (necessarily) our own in order to inform audiences and to challenge our own prejudices. Through it all, we'll consider how formal experiments across genres may help illuminate experiences and confront perceptions. Authors to be read include Gloria Anzaldua, Victoria Chang, Edwidge Danticat, Randa Jarrar, Kiese Laymon, Salman Rushdie, Amy Tan, Ocean Vuong, and Isabel Wilkerson.

Tzvetan Todorov defines the fantastic as a "subgenre of literary works characterized by the ambiguous presentation of supernatural forces." Donald Antrim, on the other hand, regards the fantastic not as a genre, but as a condition shared between author and reader: “a potential state” in which “everything is vivid, yet nothing is clearly defined,” where “the fantastical and the real are equally questionable, equally challenged by one another.” Frankenstein’s monster comes to life. Alice goes down the rabbit hole. How can [an] author make these events seem not only uncannily plausible, but even expectable—the sudden eruption of some carefully encrypted logic operating beneath our conscious awareness? How do we ground the fantastic in enough realism to sustain the reader’s suspension of disbelief? This class will explore the fantastic as the strangest and most explicit demonstration of what literary technique can achieve in any genre. We will focus on various kinds of world-making, from magical realms to dystopias to refracted versions of “realism.” Special attention will be devoted to how writers use altered states of consciousness like trauma, intoxication, and psychosis to create a hallucinatory space between the supernatural and the deeply improbable. Readings will also span a wide spectrum of cultures and historical periods, from canonical works like Frankenstein to Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities to contemporary novels like Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, Joy Williams’ The Changeling, and Donald Antrim’s The Hundred Brothers. Assignments will include several creative writing prompts and longer pieces of original fiction for workshop.

Some of the strongest nonfiction writing out there—whether cultural criticism, the reported personal essay, an historical nonfiction narrative, or piece of long-form investigative journalism—grew from the flimsiest of tendrils: a hunch, a spark, an enthusiasm. In this advanced creative nonfiction writing course, you’ll learn how to hack your own unique brain into an idea-generating machine, and pair each idea with the genre that best suits it. Course readings will include essays by great practitioners past and present, among them James Baldwin, Eula Biss, Barbara Ehrenreich, Darryl Pinckney, Richard Rodriguez, Rebecca Solnit, Alice Walker, Ellen Willis, and Virginia Woolf. We will analyze these works to figure out how each idea was brought to fruition, and learn tricks of the trade that will in turn fuel your idea-generator. The class will be a combination of class discussions, lectures, and workshops.

In this course, we’ll examine nonfiction from times of conflict and crisis to help us write essays and critiques in which we witness, report, advocate, question, and/or desire change in our own era. To provide inspiration, we’ll read essays on 9/11 and its aftermath, Occupy Wall Street, LGBTQ Rights, Black Lives Matter, the 2016 election, #MeToo, COVID-19, climate change, and other issues. We'll read authors such as Michelle Alexander, Gloria Anzaldua, James Baldwin, Ta-Nehesi Coates, Edwidge Danticat, Joan Didion, Carolyn Forche, Kiese Laymon, Audre Lorde, and George Orwell, to study their use of formal tools such as narration, observation, analysis, reflection, and argument in exploring avenues of change in the world around them. How do writers bring a personal voice to writing a political essay? And how do reporters balance opinion and research to show the need for change? These questions are considered as you write 1) an essay centered on an issue that you care about, and 2) a report that you write from observation about a social or political movement. Finally, writing an argument or advocacy piece on a public debate allows you to incorporate many of the lessons from the semester. Revision is part of our process, guided by peer reviews.

The personal essay is a flexible genre that often incorporates rumination, memoir, narrative, portrait, anecdote, diatribe, scholarship, fantasy and moral philosophy. The title of Montaigne’s Essais (“attempts"), published in 1580, suggests the tentative and exploratory nature of this form as well as its freedom. The hallmark of the personal essay is its intimacy—the sharing of the writer’s observations and reflections with a reader, establishing a dialogue on subjects that range from the mundane to autobiographical and political meditations to reflections on abstract concepts and moral dilemmas. Style, shape, and intellectual depth lend the personal essay its drama, charm, and its ability to provoke thought. In this course, we will read and write personal essays, and, in the process, explore how writers create “persona,” “tone,” and “voice.” We will also consider concepts such as “the self,” “personal and collective identity and identification," "subjectivity" and “sincerity.” Readings may include essays by Seneca, Michel de Montaigne, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Jorge Louis Borges, Natalia Ginsburg, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Alice Walker, Jamaica Kincaid, Maxine Hong Kingston, Adrienne Rich, and Hanif Kureishi.

The autobiographical essay is a wide-ranging form, encompassing personal experiences of all kinds, from the memory of a person or place to a recollection of a beloved pastime or major event. Oftentimes, the personal connects to larger issues of cultural or historical importance, but whatever the purpose or theme, the autobiographical essay speaks to us about what it means to be human. From the outset students in this course are treated like writers. They will decide on the subject they write about and the approach they take. No subject is too trivial and no approach off limits—it is possible to write about anything in this form that is sturdy and elastic, can narrate and describe, make a point and accommodate much else besides. The test of an autobiographical essay is its ability to engage the reader and communicate the nature of lived experience. Students will workshop their essays in class, will comment on the essays of their classmates and will meet with the instructor in conference at least two times over the semester. Short writing assignments over the course of the semester will focus on specific elements of craft. Readings will be chosen from essays, memoirs, diaries and letters by Joan Didion, Maxine Hong Kingston, Vladimir Nabokov, Annie Dillard, James Baldwin, Elizabeth Bishop, Patti Smith, Mary Karr, Siri Hustvedt, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Rebecca Solnit, Salman Rushdie, Valeria Luiselli, Zadie Smith and Joe Brainard among others.

Children's literature contains an astonishing breadth of genres and voices. In Writing for Children, we'll be covering familiar tropes, such as orphans, time travel, ghosts, magic, dystopias, and the wilderness, reading everything from classics such as Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House on the Prairie" to "From the Mixed up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler" to contemporary works, including Louise Erdrich's "The Birchbark House." Along the way, we will also explore the complexities of race, class, and feminism in children's literature, as well as its changing role in the canon and marketplace. Students will workshop their own writing, and are invited to include novels-in-progress. The class will also include visits from leading children's authors, agents, and critics in the field.

This course focuses on how we can write in authentic, informed and engaging ways about childhood. Children find many ways to articulate the events of their lives and the feelings and understandings associated with these events. In talking to peers, siblings, adults and themselves; through dramatic play; through artwork and writing; and, sometimes, through discussions at school or in other programs, children can begin to engage in the lifelong struggle to understand themselves and the world. By the time, however, we are old enough to think self-consciously and abstractly about childhood, we are no longer children. Many writers, artists, photographers, filmmakers, scientists, psychologists, sociologists and educators have tried to capture the experience of childhood in their work, yet each has struggled, whether self-consciously or not, with their adult perspective and with the limits of their own identity, culture, time period, discipline or art. How then do we truly understand and document what it means to be a child when our vision is so enormously influenced by the lens of adulthood? By examining, discussing and writing about works from many disciplines, students will develop their own voices and refine their skills in being able to articulate what it means to experience childhood. Students will write weekly in a variety of forms, from short response papers and observations to longer critical and personal essays, as well as creative works.

Young adult fiction has become a rich literary classification covering all genres, from fantasy to literary fiction to magical realism. The one unifying theme across all YA is a sense of hope in the conclusion-for the protagonist, her community, or even mankind. This class offers specific units which introduce sub-genres of YA through assigned readings and discussion. We will also workshop students' corresponding YA novel excerpts. We will pay close attention to voice and dialogue, as well as study and practice the importance of world building. We will also discuss the importance of representation and the increased visibility of diverse characters in young adult fiction. Assigned readings will focus on young adult literature from the last twenty years and be broken up into sub-genres including fantasy and science fiction (Dread Nation By Justina Ireland and Extraordinary Means By Robin Schneider), literary fiction (Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz and The Sun Is Also A Star By Nicola Yoon), and historical fiction (The Cure For Dreaming By Cat Winters and The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton).

Young adult fiction has been experiencing a boom in LGBT representation in the last ten years, expanding not only into all genres (science fiction, magical realism, historical fiction), but also across racial and socioeconomic lines. Special attention will be paid in this course to intersectionality and how themes of coming out, defining or redefining your gender identity, and navigating the LGBT landscape is affected by race, gender, and class. In addition to reading and analyzing contemporary YA texts we will also workshop students' corresponding YA chapters and short stories. The workshop will focus on developing voice and crafting realistic dialogue, as well as the importance of world-building. Assigned readings will focus on both classic YA LGBT literature including Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden and Boy Meets Boy By David Levithan, as well as recent additions to the cannon including The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue By Mackenzi Lee, Everything Leads to You By Nina Lacour, They Both Die in the End By Adam Silvera and If I Was Your Girl Meredith Russo.

In this course--which includes 20 hours of volunteer work--we will interrogate the relationship between adult literacy and inequitable power systems, structural racism, and other larger institutionalized inequities using the framework of Critical Race Theory (CRT). In essence, CRT examines how racial inequalities are enshrined into law and used to further disenfranchise racialized groups while benefiting non-racialized groups. This course focuses on adult literacy as a human rights struggle with explicit connections to race and class and how those have historically impacted (and continue to impact) adult literacy policy, students, and practice. From Paulo Freire's "reading the word in order to read the world," to teaching African Americans to be proficient readers in order to pass citizenship tests during the civil rights movement, adult literacy in this country (and the world) has been closely linked to power and access. We will also unpack what Jean Anyon refers to as the hidden curriculum of schooling and the ways in which the legacies of these inequities continue to haunt primarily poor people of color.

In this class, students will develop their own writerly voice in relationship to the public, political, and academic discourses of armed conflict, law, human rights and diplomacy. By exploring and experimenting in genres of writing like the op-ed, the NGO advocacy report and the parable we address the legal questions that increasingly frame our debates about warfare and develop a critical awareness of the strengths, limits and blind spots of the law-and-war discourse. The questions this class will investigate include: How does law justify and coordinate the use of lethal force? What makes a “just war” and how does it differ from “holy war” and “humanitarian intervention”? What has the UN Charter’s proscription of aggressive war meant in practice and theory? Do battlefield “rules of engagement” have the potential to cleanse war of “war crimes” or do such rules undermine the ability to fight to victory–or is neither the case? The syllabus will include not only conventional academic writing from several fields (theology, economics, law, history) but also military field reports, soldierly and diplomatic memoirs and newspaper war reporting.

The past two decades have seen television transform itself from a much-belittled outgrowth of the film industry, the “boob tube” of yore, into the most consistently exciting and rewarding source for intellectually rigorous, emotionally compelling popular culture in American life. Television has largely supplanted film as the go-to source for engrossing, adult narratives, and for boundary-pushing storytelling. This course will offer students the opportunity to burnish their writing skills while studying the evolution of the television drama since 1990. Over the course of the semester, students will watch groundbreaking series like The Sopranos, The Wire, and Friday Night Lights, and write about the variety of narrative and aesthetic styles endemic to Golden Age television, grappling with questions of gender, sexuality, race, and American identity central to many of these shows. In working on our writing, we will look at everything from recaps to reviews to narrative histories in order to grasp the wide range of quality writing on television. Writing assignments will ask students to analyze the antihero figure exemplified by the likes of Tony Soprano, as well as series like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend that sought to break out of that now-familiar mold. Written work will allow students to try their hand at close analysis of television episodes, along with broader overviews of the arc of a series’ entire run. Readings will include essays by Emily Nussbaum, Alan Sepinwall, Brett Martin, Clive James, Margaret Talbot, Jonathan Abrams, Margaret Atwood, James Poniewozik, Willa Paskin, and others.

Writing about comedy is a treacherous affair, and one that raises numerous intractable questions: What is comedy? What path has it carved out for itself over the past century? And how do we write about it? This advanced writing course will survey the story of American comedy in all its multifarious formats—the sitcom, the film comedy, the stand-up act, the variety show— while also serving as a workshop for cultural criticism that goes deeper than the recap. Utilizing a combination of reading, viewing, live performances, and workshopping, this course will sharpen students’ skills as writers by exposing them to the wide range of American comedy from Charlie Chaplin to “Key & Peele,” with units on African-American comedy, women in comedy, political comedy, and self-aware comedy, among others. In this course, we will wrestle with the complexities of writing about comedy, including, but not limited to, the question of whether being funny about what’s funny is a faux pas or a necessity. Writing assignments will offer students the opportunity to learn about the craft of cultural criticism by attending a stand-up show and writing a review, writing about a work of comedy that makes you uncomfortable, and other prompts. Readings will include essays by Clive James, Emily Nussbaum, James Agee, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Wesley Morris, Roxane Gay, and others.

This course introduces students to writing for the world of Late-Night Television. Every talk show host has a unique voice and style. Work may include learning how to write opening monologues for The Daily Show, sketches for classics like Saturday Night Live, Inside Amy Schumer and I Think You Should Leave. We’ll also go back to the early days of television and look at the kind of sketches and general comedy done back then. We’ll watch shows such as Sid Caesar, Laugh In, Hee-Haw and Carol Burnett and compare them to the shows of today.

This course is for students who have taken Writing for Television Parts 1 and 2, or similar courses, Students will come into the class with a solid premise and a compelling (though not necessarily likable) lead character. This advanced course will build on the basics to provide a solid understanding of how to create a commercial comedy pilot. The emphasis will be on writing an entertaining story with funny lines and believable characters. And since comic characters can have depth, students are encouraged to write a comedy/drama (dramedy), along the lines of The End of The F---ing the World, Abbott Elementary, The Righteous Gemstones, Bad Sisters and Sex Education to name a few. The class structure will emulate a Writers Room, focusing on collaboration through which students help each other to dig deeper, write funnier, and leave the class as better writers.

A story must, first and foremost, capture and maintain audience attention. Though stories are most often conveyed in words—written or spoken—words are not the immutable elements by which audience attention is captured and sustained. A survey of successful stories that function quite effectively without words—wordless comics (Spy vs. Spy), wordless animations (Heider-Simmel), and wordless novels (Lynd Ward)—confirms this. At an abstract level, we can generalize and note that attention is compelled by generating information gaps and an awareness of those unknowns in the minds of audiences. The goal of this course is to identify and pass along these age-old techniques that storytellers have used over the millennia. We will read and watch stories from Homer, Shakespeare, Ward, Woolf, O’Connor, Bombal, Hempel, Winterson, Simpson, Miyazaki, the Coen Brothers, Saunders, and others. Writing assignments include a group script, and three individual creative submissions in whatever story mode you choose.

How do fiction writers imagine the creative process, life and world of an artist? How do we write about the artistic process? What, if any, parallels may exist between writing and the creative process of a painter, composer, musician, dancer or actor? This course will explore these questions as students read and write fiction focused on artists working in different artistic mediums. We will read fictional portraits of artists both real and imagined, paying attention to the particulars of language associated with each art form and how the writers have incorporated elements of the art form into their work. Writing workshop will include a critique of the writing and story development as well as a critique of how well the world of the artist has been built within the bounds of the fictional realm. We will also delve into research—artist interviews, online performances and exhibitions—using the art and performance worlds of New York City as a resource, culminating in a final research portfolio and presentation to be submitted alongside the final work of fiction. Readings may include works by Baldwin, Bernhard, Bolaño, Hustvedt, Maugham, McCann, Ondaatje, Rushdie and Woolf. Readings will also include essays by artists, artist interviews and profiles, and art and performance criticism.

How does language make us see? From petroglyphs to internet memes, there are many points of intersection between written and visual modes of communication. This multigenre creative writing workshop begins with a close examination of literary images. Then, through writing assignments and engagement with readings, students identify and practice techniques by which writers have rendered the visual in language; explore ekphrasis (that is, literary descriptions of and responses to works of art); and delve into some of the traditions in which text and image are combined, including concrete poetry, artist books, and graphic novels. The course concludes with a look at description as deception. At the heart of this course are fundamental questions of representation. What besides visual content do literary images offer? What are the mechanics of description, and what ethical questions can description pose for writers? Readings include works by Virginia Woolf, Chika Sagawa, Renee Gladman, Marjane Satrapi, Italo Calvino, Robin Coste Lewis, and Chris Marker among others.

How do you reconcile authority with invention? In this course, we will look at this question through the lens of historical fiction, reading it alongside works of history, memoir, biography, and autobiography to discuss how history is equally discovered and created. Over the semester, students will craft and write their own works of historical fiction, digging into archives to conduct historical research and using primary and secondary sources as the basis for creating their own vision of the past. Throughout, we will study how novelists and historians make choices and, given the same primary materials, written entirely different versions of the “truth”. In the readings, we will study how Laura Ingalls Wilder took a lifetime on welfare and turned it into the story of a pioneer; read the only novel about African American cowboy and former slave Britt Johnson alongside a history of Quanah Parker, the last chief of the Comanches; and study the lesbian pulp fiction of M.E. Kerr alongside her memoir about her relationship with Patricia Highsmith. Students may enlarge on class readings and research for their writing, or choose their own historical fiction project to pursue.

This workshop is dedicated to the oft-repeated observation that all writing is re-writing. Each writer focuses their efforts on only one or two short stories, rather than starting many new stories and abandoning them in favor of yet another new beginning. Students take each of their stories through a number of drafts and revise them in response to (though not necessarily in accord with) questions and comments raised by other members of the workshop. The objective is to learn ways of staying with such challenges as maintaining the story's voice, determining the order of experience, and arriving at an ending that satisfies the design of the story as well as the intentions of the writer. Workshop members share their stories in class throughout the semester and comment in detail on one another's work. Participants should have some experience writing short stories.

Writers hoping to improve the sentence-by-sentence quality of their fiction or creative nonfiction have a dilemma—there are so many different ideas on what makes good prose it’s impossible to apply them all to a piece of writing. This class starts with an assumption that a few good ‘tells’ in a sentence can signal that some quick work can be done to improve it. With a stripped-down editorial toolset, you can find and fix simple mistakes without making any big stylistic decisions or changing the tone and texture of the piece. A bonus—some of these techniques work at the paragraph and scene levels, too. It’s not hard to make your writing better fairly quickly when you know what to look for, and for a semester we’ll practice on your work every week. We’ll also read and comment on each other’s writing and fiction by Julie Orringer, George Saunders, ZZ Packer, and others.

The only stories worth writing are the ones that you – not someone else - want to tell. In this short story workshop, we’ll look at how to discover the story you are trying to tell and how to identify ways of telling it. In order to familiarize you with some of your options, we’ll read master stories written in various styles (epistolary stories, memory stories, envelope stories, speculative stories, character studies). Discussions of these stories will emphasize the elements of craft employed by authors across forms (point-of-view, voice, setting, characterization.) Central to this class will be student presentations of their own work. Workshop members are required to read stories by published authors and by their classmates, write even more, and participate actively in classroom discussions. Open to all.

The main goal of this course is to provide students with ways how to enhance traditional storytelling by new technologies without diminishing the role of the written word. We will examine every aspect of the craft of traditional fiction writing: plot, structure, point of view, narrative voice, dialogue, building of individual scenes, etc as well as the new techniques of the digital age: hypertext, visual and audio images, social media. We will learn how to balance the traditional with the new without overwhelming the written text with gadgets. The class will become a creative lab studying ideas by others, coming up with their own, presenting their fiction, responding to the writing of others, and discussing questions about literature, editing, and publishing in the digital age.Each student will create and present to class a work of fiction based on some of the ideas we will be discussing.The works don’t have to be in the electronic form, but the students will need to explain how they would work. Each student will create a basic website with a writer’s profile and portfolio of her works. Readings will include fiction by: Borges, Nabokov, Michael Joyce, Margaret Atwood, Jennifer Egan.

This class explores the hard decision-making involved in fiction, and attempts to give the students tools for deciding which content belongs in a story and which needs to be put aside for later use, or discarded altogether. We look at ways to discover what the first and second drafts are about, and which parts of the story add to that idea and which detract. We also hold a traditional workshop, discussing student stories in a roundtable session.

Voice is the first thing we encounter in compelling writing. Voice is the palpable presence of the writer, the hand that reaches out to pull us in. It is writer’s persona, the sound of his or her presence. Voice is what persists, whispering in our head, long after the essayist's convictions are aired, long after we have closed the book, or closed the browser. This multi-genre writing workshop will help hone an essential and potent element of your writing: an ability to adapt your voice to the medium. Whether it is the rigor of short fiction or the convictions of the personal essay owe will explore different ways to develop your voice. We will close-read published stories and essays as a starting point for your own writing. We will explore aspects of craft: point of view, character, theme, rhythm, structure and so on. We will burnish each other’s work with frank and constructive comment and grapple with the rigors of editing. The course will require close-readings of fiction by Kafka, Cortazar, Ha Jin, Lahiri, Oates, and personal essays by Hemon, Dillard, Jo Ann Beard, Laymon, Coates, and other writers. In addition to writing fiction and essay and studying aspects of craft, students will also be invited to make presentations.

A workshop and introduction to the story writing concepts—Theatre of the Mind, Evoking, Thingness, Story Time, Character Want, Reader Want, POV Contracts, Consistency—that story writers have used through the ages to accomplish that first and last task of every narrative, the waking of want in the reader to reach for the next page. We will workshop student drafts and favorite published fictions. With student work (turned in under deadline and duress) we will concentrate on potential as opposed to measuring drafts against the completed best. As best we can we will focus on "the how" of the craft of fiction as opposed to focusing on "the what" of what a story might have to say. Required materials: open mind, obsession to learn, humbleness mixed with arrogance (it takes a certain arrogance to imagine anyone would want to give up part of their life to read what you have written), a sense to be humored.

Attention alone — that attention which is so full that the ‘I’ disappears — is required of me. I have to deprive all that I call ‘I’ of the light of my attention and turn it on to that which cannot be conceived. —Simone Weil In her novel The Waves, Virginia Woolf reminds us that looming behind every person's story about selfhood is the ambient sensation of consciousness itself: “the body of the complete human being whom we have failed to be, yet at the same time cannot forget.”In her diaries, she repeatedly imagines writing a book which moves past fiction’s “remorseless analysis” of identity toward a more mysteriously biocentric sense of being an animal alive in the world. Almost a century after Woolf published her major works, contemporary neuroscientists are now offering us radical new insight into all the shifting qualities and states of awareness that actually comprise personhood. The research has also ratified Woolf’s sustained argument that knowledge is much more than wordable thought, and that being—the full psychosomatic experience of a human life—is infinitely more complex than selfhood. In this creative writing seminar, we’ll explore both literature and science in an attempt to transcribe those parts of ourselves we usually fail to get on the page, from ordinary boredom to nonconscious cognition, intuition and “bare attention.” If selfhood, as these neuroscientists argue, isn’t a single abiding essence but a “repeatedly reconstructed biological state,” how can we represent that tumultuously physical process on the page? How does the process of identity formation help a human being survive? Which artists are seriously engaged in these questions? We’ll work from the hopeful premise that the more mindfully we write what human consciousness actually feels like from eyeblink to eyeblink, the more sensitized we become to all the knowledges we share with other living organisms, the more attuned we become to the natural environment, and the more capable we become of imagining new forms of life. Readings will supplement fiction by writers like Woolf, Don DeLillo, Samuel Beckett, Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, and Joy Williams with selections from works on linguistics, evolutionary biology, cognitive science and neurobiology. Assignments include several writing prompts elicited by these readings as well as several original pieces of writing to be workshopped by the class.

Most good writing depends on some balance of concrete and abstract, and this workshop course will likewise balance inquiries into fiction’s grander theoretical questions with more mechanical considerations, such as how to apply dialogue, insert flashback material, and so on. Assignments will include outside essays and stories as well as occasional short exercises, but our primary focus will be student writing. Participants will be asked to read each others’ work rigorously, with an eye to precision, plausibility and art, but also generously. Remember that fiction itself has many goals, and your colleague across the table may be onto something ingenious and inspired, even if the work itself still needs development.

Individual scenes are important building blocks of any prose narrative, yet the craft of designing a scene is often neglected by aspiring writers. In this class we will study all the aspects of designing a successful scene: setting, inner plot, inner structure, spotlight on the characters, POV, choreography of physical movement, dialogue. We will study how to write sex scenes, death scenes, party scenes, battle scenes, nature scenes. The readings will include Diaz, Danticat, Tolstoy, Ferrante, Baldwin, Bolano, Proulx, Munro, Waters.

In this workshop (practicum), poets will focus on the foundations and intricate dynamics of poetry as a writer's process. A weekly reading of a new poem by each poet in the circle will serve as point of departure for discussion of the relationships of craft and expression. A final portfolio of polished poems is required at the end of the course.

In this course, we will examine contemporary voices in poetry and build our own poetry writing practice, engaging in lively questions about process and craft as we work to define and contextualize poetry in our class discussions. We will investigate the complexities and craft lessons from contemporary poetry by reading recent collections of up-and-coming poets. Students will individually produce material and submit drafts to the poetry workshop for discussion where we will learn to offer serious and constructive criticism. The goal of the poetry workshop is generative: it propels a dynamic revision process so that at the end of the semester, each student will submit a portfolio of revised material. By the end of this course, you should have a deeper understanding of poetry, language, and the craft of writing, a growing sense of your own voice and aesthetic interests, and a small body of your very own creative work.

Along with lessons from the attendant social, racial, and political upheavals brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, we have also had a deep reckoning with place—the places we choose and find ourselves in, the places that we long to inhabit, and those being radically transformed. This course invites writers to explore what it means to be a poet in New York City in this particular moment in history. How can the City itself speak in your poems? Using the resources of New York City—its infrastructure, cultural institutions, and the stories of its inhabitants—this generative course brings writers into the City through site-based writing exercises. Throughout the course, we will explore texts and poems from a range of writers whose work explores New York’s cityscapes, including Langston Hughes, Alfred Kazin, Yusef Komunyakaa, Audre Lorde, Frank O’Hara, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Rebecca Solnit, and Walt Whitman. Our readings will consider texts that center the City as more than a setting, and instead as a source for stories that need to be told. To create new work, we will visit cultural institutions and locations throughout the city to do place-based writing on site, reflecting on where and how to find material for poems. Through close readings and through workshop and revision, writers will learn about how to understand and construct a poem. The class combines class readings and discussions, site visits to generate new work, workshops of poems written for the class, and will close with a public group reading of finished work.

Powerful memoirs are more than powerful memories. As V.S. Pritchett said, "It's all in the art. You get no credit for living." In this course, we'll learn the art of writing original memoir, asking, how do we write autobiographically about our families of origin with enough emotional distance to create believable, dimensional scenes? How do we render ourselves characters on the page? How do we build universal themes when the stakes are so very personal? We'll read master memoirists who have navigated this territory - authors like James Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Richard Rodriguez, Alison Smith, Joan Didion and Vivian Gornick - to understand this rich genre. We'll write one piece from a child's perspective, one profile-style piece, and one fully-populated scene. All three pieces will be workshopped and require major revision.

This course will introduce students to the practice of art criticism, and art writing through examining the relationship of art history, art writers, poets and artists. Students will practice both writing as a method of thinking through and evoking ideas, as well as practice verbally describing artwork in real time and negotiating conversations with practicing artists invited to the Criticism + Value platform. Participants in this hybrid creative writing and criticism course will hold studio visits with working artists as well as produce different forms of writing such as ekphrasis, poetry, short essay, art writing and criticism. Students will have opportunities to produce images through photography, photo-collage, and a collaborative publication of visual criticism/ art writing.

In this course, we will think together about how to create a writing practice that is sustainable and sustaining. Writing is not just a form of reporting what we learn in our work, but is itself a way of knowing. Writing is a way of being in relation: to ourselves, to our communities, to lands and waters, to the past and future, and sometimes, to readers that we will never otherwise know. Our course will engage in reading and writing about writing as a practice. We will attend to practices of description, citation, revision, rest, reading, and collaborative writing as relation and meaning-making.

THIS COURSE TAKES PLACE AT NYU-BUENOS AIRES. This is an introductory course in creative writing: prose is predominant, all genres are accepted, and no previous experience or expertise is required. The thematic focus starts with the condition of being a foreigner abroad, outside of one’s normal context or comfort zone. Many readings and writing exercises draw specifically on being in Buenos Aires and the Latin American region. Both writing exercises and reading combine to motivate and refine students´ work as they expand on the chronicler’s main subjects of place, people, and things. Grounding one’s writing with fact/verisimilitude is key, as is detailed observation plus awareness of one’s own position in the greater context. Later details involve developing plot and dramatic tension (suspense), using diverse narrative points-of-view, and working with voice and character. The course allows for flexibility in terms of genre: students may work with poetic discourse or with fiction or with non-fiction and even autobiography. All work will be discussed in accord with the criteria of literary writing (i.e. this is not a “journaling” or “blogging” class); hence, reading as well as writing exercises will focus predominantly on working with language in attentive, even innovative ways. Critical analysis of published texts and of each others´ work are guided by the instructor to develop knowledge and application of literary critical criteria. The students give opinions and also intuitive sensations about the readings on issues like how a text is working, what strategies it is employing, and what effects it is producing thereby.

In this class students are encouraged to consider the intersectional environments (natural, urban, cultural, historical etc.) that they interact with and within, and how their sensibilities differ living away from home to contemplate how a sense of place can be conveyed through writing. We will engage with a diverse range of readings – featuring many Australian authors – and discuss technical elements and affective poetics to learn how to ‘read as a writer’. Weeks are devoted to crafting the short story, contemporary indigenous storytelling, creative nonfiction, and poetry. The class emphasizes the importance of embodied interaction with the city through a field trip using ‘The Disappearing’ – a downloadable app featuring over 100 site-specific poems spanning a ‘poetic map’ of Sydney, created by The Red Room Company. Students will think about the possibilities of marrying new technologies with writing as they navigate using poems as landmarks. Students shall workshop their drafts during the course, learning how to effectively communicate critical feedback and how to be receptive to constructive critique.