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.
- W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
- R 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
- T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
- M 10:10 a.m.-noon
- M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Livia G Blum
Info -
Instructor:
Tobi Orisarayi
Info -
Instructor:
Hannah E Ross
Info -
Instructor:
Hannah M Wederquist-Keller
Info -
Instructor:
Lara Waas
Info - 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.
- W 10:10 a.m.-noon
- M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Mimi Solmssen
Info -
Instructor:
Cole Huey
Info -
Instructor:
Frances Thomas
Info - 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.
- M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
- T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
- W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Nicolas R Duran
Info -
Instructor:
Natasha Wolkwitz
Info -
Instructor:
Miranda G Gershoni
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.
- W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Alan Ziegler
CULPA: 5
Info
- 3 points
Hauntings: Ghosts, Presences & Residues
Hauntings: Ghosts in Lit
“I believe
—
I know that ghosts
have
wandered the earth. Be with me always
—
take any form
—
drive me mad!”
—Emily Brontë
, Wuthering Heights
In this course we’ll expand our understanding of how writing is often the site of lingering, numinous, immaterial presences. We’ll begin with the tradition of
the ghost story
— a literary device beloved by writers for centuries across many genres. Beyond the consideration of the supernatural, we’ll also investigate more abstract capacities in which texts—and writers (and sometimes editors!)—are inevitably possessed by an
other
, a presence that lingers persistently, making itself known whether we welcome it or not. Memory and trauma are their own kinds of ghosts. Similarly, we’ll discover how traces of works by writers we admire, our teachers, even a specific text or image, can manifest as spectral forms inhabiting our work. We’ll address the complexities of those vestiges in terms of appropriation and originality—what Harold Bloom calls “the anxiety of influence.” Students will process and explore these ideas in both creative and analytical writings throughout the semester.
Course Books (available at Book Culture):
Eileen Myles
, Afterglow
Diana Khoi Nguyen,
Ghost Of
Lucie Brock Broido,
Trouble in Mind
Mary Reufle
, A Little White Shadow
Max Porter
, Grief is the Thing With Feathers
All other readings will be posted on Courseworks as PDFs.
- M 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Samantha Zighelboim
Info - 3 points
ART OF PRACTICE
Just as musicians practice scales, painters sketch, and dancers work at the barre, writers turn to exercises to build strength, technique, flexibility and fluency.
This course gives writers opportunity to isolate and deliberately practice a range of techniques, traversing the writing process from generation to revision.
In each meeting, you’ll work through a series of progressive exercises grounded in short readings and centered around a single theme. Weekly topics may include: establishing voice and point-of-view; writing beginnings and endings; playing with form; experimenting with genre; attending to sound; and drafting Big Moments.
Throughout the course, writers will experience the community, guidance and encouragement that supports risk-taking. In our final classes, you will develop and facilitate your own writing exercise, addressing questions of technique that arise from your own creative work. At semester's end, you’ll will write a reflective essay, drawing on examples from your ongoing creative writing, to demonstrate how you’ve applied these techniques.
- T 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Keri E Bertino
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.
- R 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
- T 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
- W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
- R 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Libby Flores
Info -
Instructor:
Marie G Lee
CULPA: 3 Info -
Instructor:
Samuel Lipsyte
CULPA: 5
Info
-
Instructor:
Sofia Montrone
Info - 3 points
SENIOR FICTION WORKSHOP
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. Please visit
https://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate
for information about registration procedures.
- W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Molly L McGhee
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.
- M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Mina Seckin
Info - 3 points
PLANT PEOPLE
Plant people are in our midst: they covet plants, grow them, and obsess over them. We call plant people green thumbs. They tend gardens; sniff herbs; make poultices; take cuttings. Plant people risk life and limb in pursuit of plants or become plant-like themselves. They tire of human ways and root in place, preferring the company of trees. As people can become plant-like, plants can also appear people-like, as sentient, sovereign beings who should be addressed with the proper pronouns. These plants have the power to act upon the world of people, and not always benignly. Finally, plant people can be everyday people like you and me, who consume and incorporate plants into our bodies, often without thought or awareness.
In this fiction seminar, we will read all about plant people: stories about plant obsessives, plant witnesses, plant actors, and plant consumers. How do we write stories about plant people? We will discuss craft techniques that relate to writing about plants, from voice to perspective to plot. How do we pull off the disorienting perspectival shift when writing from the vantage of an oak tree? How do we render plants precisely, botanically; what new vocabulary do we need to know? What are some of existing tropes about plants? Most importantly, how do we overcome plant blindness? In addition to short stories and novels, we will also read some nonfiction that will inform our fiction writing. Authors on the syllabus include Ursula Le Guin, Elif Shafak, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Richard Powers, Han Kang, David Diop, Andrea Barrett, and Christina Garza Rivera.
- R 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Anelise I Chen
Info - 3 points
OPEN NONFICTION WORKSHOP
Prerequisite: Student must have taken beginning workshop in any undergraduate creative writing concentration. Open Nonfiction Workshop is designed for students with some experience in writing literary nonfiction. Intermediate workshops present a higher creative standard than beginning workshops and an expectation that students will produce finished work. Outside readings supplement and inform the exercises and longer written projects. By the end of the semester, students will have produced thirty to forty pages of original work in at least two traditions of literary nonfiction. Please visit
https://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate
for information about registration procedures.
- T 10:10 a.m.-noon
-
Instructor:
Elizabeth L Greenwood
CULPA: 3 Info - 3 points
SENIOR NONFICTION WORKSHOP
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. Please visit
https://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate
for information about registration procedures.
- T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
-
Instructor:
Justin Taylor
Info - 4 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.
- W 12:10 p.m.-2 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.
-
Instructor:
Alexander Dimitrov
Info - 3 points
SENIOR POETRY WORKSHOP
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. Please visit
https://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate
for information about registration procedures.
MYSTERIES
Mystery once referred primarily to religious ideas: divine revelations, unknown rites, or the secret counsel of God. In the 20th century, the word began to be used in reference to more prosaic things, like whodunits. But what is coming to be known in a story? Why and what is a reader tempted to try to know, and what, today, can she possibly think is going to be revealed? When do the ‘tricks’ of withholding information annoy, and when do they compel? What are clues? What are solutions? In what ways can and do stories not straightforwardly written as mysteries use the tropes of mystery? And to what mechanisms of meaning-making do these tropes point?
In this course we will read with the intention of noticing how writers have borrowed, avoided, warped, translated, or disguised the structures of mystery. In this way, we will think about what techniques of mystery we might integrate into our own work. There will also be four five to seven page creative writing assignments, based around: the Clue, the Crime, the Search and the Detective.
In addition to the creative writing assignments, each student will be responsible for one presentation on a reading. The guidelines for presentations are appended after the sample syllabus below.
- T 10:10 a.m.-noon
-
Instructor:
Rivka R Galchen
CULPA: 6
Info
- 3 points