BEGINNING FICTION WORKSHOP

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. The beginning workshop in fiction is designed for students with little or no experience writing literary texts in fiction. Students are introduced to a range of technical and imaginative concerns through exercises and discussions, and they eventually produce their own writing for the critical analysis of the class. The focus of the course is on the rudiments of voice, character, setting, point of view, plot, and lyrical use of language. Students will begin to develop the critical skills that will allow them to read like writers and understand, on a technical level, how accomplished creative writing is produced. Outside readings of a wide range of fiction supplement and inform the exercises and longer written projects.

• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• M 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• R 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• T 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• R 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• 3 points

BEGINNING NONFICTION WORKSHOP

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. The beginning workshop in nonfiction is designed for students with little or no experience in writing literary nonfiction. Students are introduced to a range of technical and imaginative concerns through exercises and discussions, and they eventually submit their own writing for the critical analysis of the class. Outside readings supplement and inform the exercises and longer written projects.

• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• R 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• 3 points

BEGINNING POETRY WORKSHOP

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. The beginning poetry workshop is designed for students who have a serious interest in poetry writing but who lack a significant background in the rudiments of the craft and/or have had little or no previous poetry workshop experience. Students will be assigned weekly writing exercises emphasizing such aspects of verse composition as the poetic line, the image, rhyme and other sound devices, verse forms, repetition, tone, irony, and others. Students will also read an extensive variety of exemplary work in verse, submit brief critical analyses of poems, and critique each others original work.

• R 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• T 10:10 a.m.-noon
• W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• 3 points

TRADITIONS IN NONFICTION

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. The seminar provides exposure to the varieties of nonfiction with readings in its principal genres: reportage, criticism and commentary, biography and history, and memoir and the personal essay. A highly plastic medium, nonfiction allows authors to portray real events and experiences through narrative, analysis, polemic or any combination thereof. Free to invent everything but the facts, great practitioners of nonfiction are faithful to reality while writing with a voice and a vision distinctively their own. To show how nonfiction is conceived and constructed, class discussions will emphasize the relationship of content to form and style, techniques for creating plot and character under the factual constraints imposed by nonfiction, the defining characteristics of each authors voice, the authors subjectivity and presence, the role of imagination and emotion, the uses of humor, and the importance of speculation and attitude. Written assignments will be opportunities to experiment in several nonfiction genres and styles.

• R 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• Instructor: Zoe K Hardwick
  Info
• 3 points

TRADITIONS IN POETRY

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. 

“For those, in dark, who find their own way by the light of others’ eyes.” —Lucie Brock-Broido

The avenues of poetic tradition open to today’s poets are more numerous, more invigorating, and perhaps even more baffling than ever before. The routes we chose for our writing lead to destinations of our own making, and we take them at our own risk—necessarily so, as the pursuit of poetry asks each of us to light a pilgrim’s candle and follow it into the moors and lowlands, through wastes and prairies, crossing waters as we go. Go after the marshlights, the will-o-wisps who call to you in a voice you’ve longed for your whole life. These routes have been forged by those who came before you, but for that reason, none of them can hope to keep you on it entirely. You must take your steps away, brick by brick, heading confidently into the hinterland of your own distinct achievement.

 

For the purpose of this class, we will walk these roads together, examining the works of classic and contemporary exemplars of the craft. By companioning poets from a large spread of time, we will be able to more diversely immerse ourselves in what a poetic “tradition” truly means. We will read works by Edmund Spencer, Dante, and Goethe, the Romantics—especially Keats—Dickinson, who is mother to us all, Modernists, and the great sweep of contemporary poetry that is too vast to individuate.

 

While it is the imperative of this class to equip you with the knowledge necessary to advance in the field of poetry, this task shall be done in a Columbian manner. Consider this class an initiation, of sorts, into the vocabulary which distinguishes the writers who work under our flag, each of us bound by this language that must be passed on, and therefore changed, to you who inherit it. As I have learned the words, I have changed them, and I give them now to you so that you may pave your own way into your own ways, inspired with the first breath that brought you here, which may excite and—hopefully—frighten you. You must be troubled. This is essential

• T 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Ofi Davis
  Info
• 3 points

SHORT PROSE FORMS

Prerequisites: No Prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. Flash fiction, micro-naratives and the short-short have become exciting areas of exploration for contemporary writers. This course will examine how these literary fragments have captured the imagination of writers internationally and at home. The larger question the class seeks to answer, both on a collective and individual level, is: How can we craft a working definition of those elements endemic to short prose as a genre? Does the form exceed classification? What aspects of both crafts -- prose and poetry -- does this genre inhabit, expand upon, reinvent, reject, subvert? Short Prose Forms incorporates aspects of both literary seminar and the creative workshop. Class-time will be devoted alternatingly to examinations of published pieces and modified discussions of student work. Our reading chart the course from the genres emergence, examining the prose poem in 19th-century France through the works of Mallarme, Baudelaire, Max Jacob and Rimbaud. Well examine aspects of poetry -- the attention to the lyrical, the use of compression, musicality, sonic resonances and wit -- and attempt to understand how these writers took, as Russell Edson describes, experience and made it into an artifact with the logic of a dream. The class will conclude with a portfolio at the end of the term, in which students will submit a compendium of final drafts of three of four short prose pieces, samples of several exercises, selescted responses to readings, and a short personal manifesto on the short prose form.

• R 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• Instructor: Alan Ziegler
  CULPA: 5 Info
• 3 points

OPEN FICTION WORKSHOP

Prerequisite: Student must have taken beginning workshop in any undergraduate creative writing concentration. Open workshops are for students who are acquainted with and have experience in at least one beginning workshop in creative writing. In Open Fiction Workshops, particular attention will be paid to the components of fiction: voice, perspective, characterization, and form. Students will be expected to finish several short stories, executing a total artistic vision on a piece of writing. The critical focus of the class will include an examination of endings and formal wholeness, sustaining narrative arcs, compelling a reader's interest for the duration of the text, and generating a sense of urgency and drama in the work. A portfolio of fiction will be written and revised with critical input from the instructor and workshop. Outside readings may be used to supplement and inform the exercises and written projects. Please visit
https://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate
for information about registration procedures.

• T 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Marie G Lee
  CULPA: 3 Info
• Instructor: Samuel Lipsyte
  CULPA: 5 Info
• Instructor: Sophie F Kemp
  Info
• 3 points

SENIOR FICTION WORKSHOP

Prerequisites: The department's permission required through writing sample. Please go to 609 Kent for submission schedule and registration guidelines or see http://www.arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate. Seniors who are majors in creative writing are given priority for this course. Enrollment is limited, and is by permission of the professor. The senior workshop offers students the opportunity to work exclusively with classmates who are at the same high level of accomplishment in the major. Students in the senior workshops will produce and revise a new and substantial body of work. In-class critiques and conferences with the professor will be tailored to needs of each student.

• T 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Hilary J Leichter
  Info
• 4 points

HOW TO BUILD A PERSON

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Departmental approval NOT required. Character is something that good fiction supposedly cannot do without. But what is a character, and what constitutes a supposedly good or believable one? Should characters be like people we know, and if so, how exactly do we create written versions of people? This class will examine characters in all sorts of writing, historical and contemporary, with an eye toward understanding just how characters are created in fiction, and how they come to seem real to us. Well read stories and novels; we may also look at essays and biographical writing to analyze where the traces of personhood reside. Well also explore the way in which these same techniques of writing allow us to personify entities that lack traditional personhood, such as animals, computers, and other nonhuman characters. Does personhood precede narrative, or is it something we bestow on others by allowing them to tell their story or by telling a story of our own creation on their behalf? Weekly critical and creative exercises will intersect with and expand on the readings and discussions.

• R 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Mina Seckin
  Info
• 3 points

How to Write Funny

"Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die."   

--Mel Brooks 

"Comedy has to be based on truth. You take the truth and you put a little curlicue at the 

End."                                                                                                                --Sid Caesar 

"Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it."                                                                                                                                  --E.B. White 

 

"What is comedy? Comedy is the art of making people laugh without making them puke."                                                                                                                                       --Steve Martin 

"Patty Marx is the best teacher at Columbia University."

--Patty Marx 

O

• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Patricia A Marx
  Info
• 3 points

BUILDING BETTER WORLDS

As 20th century literary traditions prove increasingly ill-equipped to capture the realities of 21st century life, readers look towards fictional worlds for inspiration and escape from the political chaos of day-to-day existence. When we write we shape the world, because the worlds we imagine impact the world we inhabit. But what does it mean for a writer to 'build a world?' What obligations does the creator of a fiction have to readers who inhabit a world they wish to escape? Are the worlds we build for escape always political? Can we build another world as an avenue to better understand this one?

In this seminar we will explore the concept of "world building" by looking at a variety of work from authors who are known for their immense secondary worlds (such as J.R.R. Tolkein, Ursula K. Le Guin, N.K. Jemisin, or Octavia Butler) but also at fiction that applies techniques of both immersion and politics in ways that may subvert our understanding of what it means to 'create.' Writers discussed are as wide ranging as Toni Morrison, Angela Carter, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Margaret Atwood, Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, Clive Barker, all the way up to contemporary writers whose works populate our best loved Independent bookstores: Helen Oyeyemi, Victor LaValle, Ted Chiang, Marlon James, Jeff VanderMeer, Colson Whitehead, Salman Rushdie, Carmen Maria Machado, Alexandra Kleeman, or Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah.

• W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Molly L McGhee
  Info
• 3 points

NOT EXACTLY SCIENCE FICTION

In this course we will explore the possibilities of scientific language and ideas both as literature and in literature. The texts we will consider will range from science fiction, to writings by scientists, to nature writing, and much else. We will also consider works that might at first appear unrelated to scientific thinking, such as folk tales, mysteries, and fantastical stories. Special attention will be paid to the special effects generated by scientific language when it appears near other styles of expression. Students will also be responsible for four short creative assignments inspired by the readings, as well as a brief in-class presentation.

• T 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Rivka R Galchen
  CULPA: 6 Info
• 3 points

OPEN NONFICTION WORKSHOP

Prerequisite: Student must have taken beginning workshop in any undergraduate creative writing concentration. Open workshops are for students who are acquainted with and have experience in at least one beginning workshop in creative writing. In Open Fiction Workshops, particular attention will be paid to the components of fiction: voice, perspective, characterization, and form. Students will be expected to finish several short stories, executing a total artistic vision on a piece of writing. The critical focus of the class will include an examination of endings and formal wholeness, sustaining narrative arcs, compelling a reader's interest for the duration of the text, and generating a sense of urgency and drama in the work. A portfolio of fiction will be written and revised with critical input from the instructor and workshop. Outside readings may be used to supplement and inform the exercises and written projects. Please visit
https://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate
for information about registration procedures.

• T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Daniel Felsenthal
  Info
• Instructor: Lars Horn
  Info
• 3 points

INTERACTIVE MEMOIR

What does it mean to invite readers to play in—and with—your memories? Can memoir writing be…a game? In this seminar, we will explore the basics of interactive narrative design as applied to memoir, essay, and creative non-fiction, investigating how games and interactivity can transform what it means to tell your life story. We will will read, play, and discuss videogames, artgames, interactive (non-)fiction, innovative digital media, and experimental non-fiction, developing an aesthetics of interactive nonfiction writing that informs two open-platform interactive memoir projects over the course of the semester. Tutorials on interactive narrative tools like Twine, Bitsy, and Downpour will accompany playtesting workshops to establish a game-literate creative community committed to pushing the boundaries of the form.

• W 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Nat Mesnard
  Info
• 3 points

AT THE NEW YORKER

In this seminar we will consider the history, legacy, and ongoing cultural contribution of
The New Yorker
, a magazine that is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. During the past century, the magazine has been the primary venue for what we might call the “the literature of fact”—nonfiction writing with belletristic flair and high ambition across all genres: profiles, essays, personal histories, reporting, and criticism. We will read across the genres as we ask questions about these various nonfiction forms: Can criticism be the equal of art? How do nonfiction writers establish “authority”? How do they investigate the past and make sense of the new? How do they create work as rich and challenging as the best literary novels and short stories? What roles do voice, point-of-view, character, dialogue, and plot—the traditional elements of fiction—play? How did T
he New Yorker
create a—perhaps even
the
—modern American literary style?

Week to week, since 1925, the magazine has showcased work from a staggering diversity of contributors. We will consider many of them, including James Thurber, Janet Flanner, E.B. White, Wolcott Gibbs, Joseph Mitchell, Lillian Ross, John Hersey, Edmund Wilson, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Hannah Arendt, Calvin Tomkins, Renata Adler, Pauline Kael, Kenneth Tynan, Mark Singer, Ian Frazier, Arlene Croce, Janet Malcolm, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Robert Caro, Tony Horowitz, Zadie Smith, and Susan Orlean. In addition, we will be keeping our eye on issues of
The New Yorker
as they roll out each week.

We will welcome guest speakers from the magazine—editors and contributors, from past and present.

• M 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• Instructor: Mark Rozzo
  Info
• 3 points

EDITING, REVISING, PITCHING, PUBLISHING

EDIT, REVISE, PITCH, PUBL

What does an editor do? How do writers revise? How do writers pitch and place pieces? This cross-genre seminar aims to demystify the art of editing, and to empower students to edit their own work and that of others with sensitivity, imagination, and skill. Through the close analysis of case studies, essays on craft and American literary history, long-form interviews, letters, and corrected manuscripts and typescripts, we will learn about the decision-making processes of writers and editors such as Lydia Davis, Toni Morrison, Raymond Carver, Gordon Lish, Samuel R. Delany, Jane Bowles, Paul Bowles, Elizabeth Bishop, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Max Perkins, Ursula K. Le Guin, Diane Williams, George Saunders, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Vladimir Nabokov, as well as editors at publishers like Random House and Scribner’s, major literary publications like the
New Yorker
and the
Paris Review
, and small magazines like
NOON
and
Gigantic.
Regularly we will apply what we’ve learned to edits and revisions on our own texts as well as assigned texts drawn from the instructor’s experience as an editor at
McSweeney’s Quarterly
, the
Believer
, VICE, and
Gigantic
. Students will also work to revise a piece of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry, and develop a nonfiction story idea, so that they will have a revised work to submit—and a polished story idea to pitch—by the end of the semester.

• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: James C Yeh
  Info
• 3 points

OPEN POETRY WORKSHOP

Prerequisite: Student must have taken beginning workshop in any undergraduate creative writing concentration. Open workshops are for students who are acquainted with and have experience in at least one beginning workshop in creative writing. In Open Poetry Workshops, students may be instructed in aspects of craft including the poetic persona, the prose poem, the collage, open-field composition, and others. They may also study verse forms such as the villanelle, sonnet, sestina, ballad, acrostic, free verse and also non-European verse forms such as the pantoum. They may read source texts as examples and/or critical texts as theoretical frameworks, and afterward, submit brief critical analyses. They will put their instruction into regular practice by composing original work that will be critiqued by their peers. Students will be encouraged to develop their strengths and to cultivate a distinctive poetic vision and voice but must also demonstrate a willingness to broaden their range and experiment with new forms and notions of the poem. A portfolio of poems will be written and revised with critical input from the instructor and workshop. Please visit
https://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate
for information about registration procedures.

• M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• None None-None
• Instructor: Alexander Dimitrov
  Info
• Instructor: Lynn Xu
  Info
• 3 points

TRAUMA & ITS AFTERMATH: POETIC FORM(S) O

“After a great pain, a formal feeling comes —" 

—Emily Dickinson 

The history of literature has, in many ways, become inseparable from the history of trauma. Poetry can be an excavation site of memory and the subconscious dreamscape, and inevitably, trauma is what is unearthed there. Poems working with, through, and out of personal and collective trauma can create what Dorothea Lasky calls “the material imagination;” a shared world inhabited by both poet and reader long after the poem has been read—a physical space we are in together that helps us move through, process, and in the best of cases, rewrite trauma into the generative and healing space of metaphor and imagery. In this way, poems are—in both their content and their form (which are often are indivisible)—an invitation to the reader to access the depths and complexities of the human psyche that we are all connected by, perhaps in a way they might not have before. The poem creates a finite terrain that anchors infinite possibility. This class will study texts that stem from, speak to, document and process historical, ecological, collective and personal trauma. How can a poem hold, house, and reconfigure traumatic events for both reader and poet through its formal and thematic architecture?

• M 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Samantha Zighelboim
  Info
• 3 points

LIVING AT THE MOVIES: THE PERSONA POEM I

Inspired by the Jim Carroll book of the same name, this class will examine the persona poem form specifically through the lens of film and television, focusing on how style, atmosphere and character translate from visual media to poetry. We will examine and discuss persona poems based on movie/television characters, writing the self into movies/television, and writing movie/television characters into personal experience. We will generate ideas and/or drafts of our own, centering the following questions, among others:

How do you create, sustain, and complicate tone without sacrificing clarity? How does a character transcend space/time limits to evolve from a first introduction to a cherished and known persona in a constrained space, whether that constraint be a 90-minute film or a 16-line poem? Which tensions accelerate and/or stifle character development, and which tensions permit a persona the most accessible, familiar, or surprising presence for a reader? What differentiates movie stars or actors from literary protagonists? Why are movies “cool,” how has “cool” evolved in film, and how do we render “cool” in poems, for the purpose of deepening the poem? What separates sentimentality from earnestness in film versus poetry?

The class is structured as a hybrid seminar/workshop: we will spend our time in class discussing assigned texts, visual media, and the connections and divergences between the two, as well as crafting our own poetic responses and interpretations and sharing them in a workshop format. Source material will include poetry that is persona-based in perspective or subject, film and television prompts, and field trips to meaningful NYC literary and/or filmic landmarks. We will explore possibilities in poetry to evoke and render common filmic techniques such as the tracking shot, the closeup, the montage, and others.

• R 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• Instructor: Soren Stockman
  Info
• 3 points

PAYING ATTENTION WITH ANNIE DILLARD

PAYING ATTENTION ANNIE DI

Annie Dillard was only in her twenties when she began writing what would become the nature writing classic
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. Over several seasons, she took her notebook to the creek and paid close attention to the muskrats, water bugs, and birds, focusing on the miraculous minutiae of the material world, and compiled what Thoreau might have called “a meteorological journal of the mind.” With a child’s capacity for awe, Dillard captured what she found to be holy and singular about nature, and reveled in the “scandal of particularity” that so bedeviled theologians. “Why, we might as well ask, not a plane tree, instead of a bo?” Dillard wonders. “I never saw a tree that was no tree in particular.” Since its publication,
Pilgrim
has inspired generations of writers who return to it for its commitment to specificity and its joyous prose. What does the moon look like? Like “a smudge of chalk,” or “softly frayed, like the heel of a sock.” What do you call the shedding of leaves in fall? “A striptease.” What does cold air do? “Bites one’s nose like pepper.” (And so on.)

In this cross-genre seminar, we will read
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
and use the book as a guiding text to hone our own faculties of attention, observational writing skills, and descriptive ability. We will work and rework our descriptions so that no tree is just a tree, and no sunset is just a sunset. The output of this course will not be stories, essays, or poems, but rather, lists of descriptions of oranges, the texture of bark, weather, and a repertoire of new vocabulary words for describing colors and materials. Weekly exercises will prompt us to become nature writers in the city: we will stalk pigeons, inventory trash and weeds, study maps of buried streams, and examine a drop of puddle water through a microscope. We will dissect Dillard’s prose to see how she puts her words together to achieve various effects. We will compile lists of active verbs and make our sentences somersault and sing. Though taking inspiration from
Pilgrim
and based in the natural world, the exercises in this class are meant to carry over into other kinds of writing; paying close attention is an asset no matter what the subject matter. Field trips will include a walk in Riverside Park, a visit to the Greenpoint Sewage Plant, and an optional day-trip to the Beinecke Library to se

• R 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Anelise I Chen
  Info
• 3 points