12086

WRIT 121      Fiction Workshop I

Benjamin Hale

M  W   11:50 am-1:10 pm

OLIN 107

PA

PART

 This introductory-level course is for students interested in writing fiction as a means of both critical and creative engagement. Over the course of the semester we will read works that reflect a range of aesthetic approaches in order to broaden our exposure to literature and enrich our palettes as emerging practitioners. Through our own creative work, and the close, critical reading of our stories, we will try to become better artisans of language and narrative. No writing sample or personal statement is required after registering. 

Class size: 14

 

12087

WRIT 122      Nonfiction Workshop I

Susan Rogers

T  Th 10:10 am-11:30 am

OLIN 306

PA

PART

 This course is for students who want to write “creative” essays. Creative nonfiction is a flexible genre that includes memoir, the personal essay, collaged writings, portraits, and more. They can be lyrical or analytical, meditative or whimsical. Students will read a range of works and then offer up their own creative experiments, paying particular attention to the relationship between language and ideas. Weekly writings and readings. No prior experience with creative nonfiction is needed. In spring term this course is not restricted only to first-year students. No writing sample or personal statement is required after registering.  

Class size: 14

 

12088

WRIT 123 A  Poetry Workshop I

Michael Ives

T  Th 11:50 am-1:10 pm

OLIN 101

PA

PART

 Open to students who have never had a workshop in poetry and who desire to experiment with making their own writing a means of learning both about literature and poetry and about the discipline of making works of art. Attention is mainly on the student’s own production, the individual’s awareness of what sorts of activities, rhythms, and tellings are possible in poetry, and how poets go about learning from their own work. The central work of the course is the student’s own writing, along with the articulation, private and shared, of response to it. Readings are undertaken in contemporary and traditional poets, according to the needs of the group, toward the development of familiarity with poetic form, poetic movement, and poetic energy. Attendance at various evening poetry readings and lectures is required. No writing sample or personal statement is required after registering.  

Class size: 14

 

12090

WRIT 236      Reading & Writing Nature

Susan Rogers

T  Th  3:10 pm-4:30 pm

OLIN 107

PA

PART

 Cross-listed: Environmental & Urban Studies In this course we will read and write narratives that use the natural world as both subject and source of inspiration. We will begin the course reading intensively to identify what is nature writing and what makes it compelling (or not). What is the focus of the nature writer and what are the challenges of the genre? To this end we will read works by Emerson, Thoreau, and Muir, and then move forward to contemporary writers such as Annie Dillard, Gretel Ehrlich, and Edward Abbey. There will be weekly writings on the readings and an occasional quiz. In addition, students will keep a nature journal and produce one longer creative essay that results from both experience and research. This means that students must be willing to venture into the outdoors—woods, river or mountains. Prior workshop experience is not necessary. A curiosity about the natural world is essential.

Class size: 14

 

12500

WRIT 242      Death is Not the End

Wyatt Mason

T  Th  3:10 pm-4:30 pm

OLIN 101

PA

 Literature is death-haunted. What it looks like; what it costs; what it means: death has been considered, evoked, and defined variously in the verbal arts of different cultures since the beginning of the human record. In this course, we will seek death in artistic life. Among the writing we will consider: excerpts from classical epics (Iliad, Aeneid) and religious texts (Quran, Bardo Thodal, Bhagavad Gita, Bible); essayistic inquiries (Montaigne, “That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die;" Sir Thomas Brown, “Hydriotaphia”); as well as modern fiction, poetry and non-fiction including Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich; T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets; Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori, Kenzaburō Ōe’s A Personal Matter; E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web; Joan Didion’s, The Year of Magical Thinking, and David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth. These core texts will be supplemented by a variety of shorter pieces and poems by Villon, Dickinson, Browning, Auden, Nabokov, Aleksandar Hemon, David Foster Wallace, Gwendolyn Brooks, Oliver Sachs, Jenny Diski, and John Jeremiah Sullivan. We will also consider songs by the Stanley Brothers, Son House, and Geeshie Wylie. In addition to short daily writing assignments on our reading, students will each produce two workshop pieces that document literal death—not from personal history but as observed in nature—as well a final paper that responds intellectually to the question that no one in the history of literature has exhausted: What is death?

Class size: 14

 

12501

WRIT 312      Poetry III: The Long View

Michael Ives

W       1:30 pm-3:50 pm

HEG 300

PA

 This is a workshop in poetry for advanced students with an interest in developing an extended project involving original research, retrieval of materials, and the examination of works in the tradition of investigative poetics. Students are expected to complete a fully realized sequence of poems by the end of the semester, and to provide ancillary documents related to its composition. This course is restricted to students who have taken at least one previous Written Arts workshop in poetry, preparing motivated writers for the work of the senior project. Students who are interested must contact Michael Ives (ives@bard.edu) directly with a writing sample and statement of interest prior to Dec 3.

Class size: 12

 

12503

WRIT 323      Writing Workshop for Non-Majors

Mary Caponegro

M          1:30 pm-3:50 pm

OLIN 307

PA

 This course is designed to give non-Written Arts majors the opportunity to explore the medium of creative writing in a rigorous fashion, through a combination of prompts and student-generated topics.  Some prior experience of independent writing is required, but no formal training.  Students are encouraged to allow knowledge of their particular field, as well as extracurricular interests, to enrich their creative endeavors.  Students are asked to send a brief paragraph about their background and their interest in the course. 

Class size: 12

 

12091

WRIT 326      Writing and Resistance

Joseph O'Neill

M         11:50 am-2:10 pm

HEG 200

PA D+J

PART DIFF

Cross-listed: Human Rights

Our current political reality demands that we return to the problematic and remarkable relationship between literature and politics.  With renewed urgency and awareness of the role language plays in constructing and reshaping our reality, we will read across a broad range of texts, asking: how can resistance, protest, ideological critique, and indoctrination inhabit a piece of fiction? How can the imagination take part in the events of the day? What sort of creative response can be offered to the structures of power and justice? We will be investigating these and other urgent questions through a reading of various texts by the likes of P. B. Shelley, Jonathan Swift, Barbara Ehrenreich, James Baldwin, Franz Kafka, Roberto Bolano, Doris Lessing, and Muriel Spark; and we'll be writing “political” stories and essays of our own. No writing sample or personal statement is required after registering.

Class size: 12

 

12502

WRIT 331      Space Is the Place: Real and Imagined Landscapes in Literature and Cartography

Benjamin Hale

F     11:50 am-2:10 pm

RKC 200

PA

 This course will focus on space in literature, and literature’s relationship to space.  We’ll start small, reading, thinking about, and mapping stories that take place in enclosed spaces, like Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, and Sartre’s Huis Clos.  Then we’ll move outdoors, into cities, towns, and rural areas—Thoreau’s Walden Pond, Joyce’s very real Dublin, Raymond Chandler’s semi-fantastical Los Angeles, the picturesque Italian resort towns where Patricia Highsmith’s characters often committed and covered up their murders—and investigate experiments in psychogeography (Debord, Defoe, Thomas De Quincy, Will Self, Rebecca Solnit, among possible others).  Then at last we’ll explore the stories and maps of writers who imagined and charted entire countries and worlds (and often languages) for their readers: J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea novels, Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (again, among possible others).  This is, most of all, a craft class; we will be traversing a lot of space (good walking shoes advised), drawing our own maps, and filling them in with our writing—fiction and nonfiction.  The coursework will be two significant writing projects, which we will read and critique over the semester, and two maps.

Class size: 12

 

12092

WRIT 334      Writing the Roots

Robert Kelly

W       4:00 pm-5:20 pm

SHAFER 301

PA

PART

 2 credits  What can a word tell us about its thing?  The poet Charles Olson used to talk about ‘running a word,’ tracing it back to its sources.  Etymology reveals social and physical conditions in history which in turn condition what words mean to us, how we think with them, how we use them. A small conference group will investigate by writing from and through what the words can teach us.  This is a writing workshop in terms of the work to be done.

Class size: 7

 

12517

WRIT 336      Prose Studio

Luc Sante

T         1:30 pm-3:50 pm

AVERY 338

PA

PART

 Just as the visual arts employ studios to stretch muscles, refine technique, and launch ideas, so this class functions for writers of fiction and nonfiction. Every week there are paired reading and writing exercises concerning, e.g., voice, stance, texture, rhythm, recall, palette, focus, compression, word choice, rhetoric, and timing. For serious writers only. This course is restricted to students who have taken at least one previous Written Arts course (in any genre: fiction, poetry, or nonfiction). No writing sample or personal statement is required after registering. 

Class size: 12

 

12510

WRIT 348      Documentary Fiction

Valeria Luiselli

M          1:30 pm-3:50 pm

OLIN 310

PA

 Cross-listed: Latin American & Iberian Studies; Human Rights

This course is centered on the relationship between method, process, and final result of a work. How does the creative process determine or at least leave a trace in the last version of a piece? In looking at a diverse range of pieces –textual, visual and audio– we will discuss method and process, and think of the ways that these are readable in the final version of a work. We will be concentrating on the different ways that we can document and creatively respond to the current situation at the US-Mexico border. We will be paying particular attention to examples of pieces where the artist or writer has proceeded by documenting the everyday, and has, in some way or the other, allowed his or her process to manifest in the final piece. Finally, we will of course be thinking in the ways that we, too, can shorten the distance between method, process and final outcome in our own work.

Class size: 12

 

12093

WRIT 350      The Long Story II

Mona Simpson

Fridays, video conferencing times to be determined

Barringer  104

PA

PART

 This two-semester course is for students interested in exploring the long story as both readers and writers. In the fall semester, students will read and respond to a number of long stories and novellas with a view to analyzing how they function and how students can adapt the writers' forms, styles, approaches, and other tools in the construction of their own long stories. Over the course of the fall semester, students will write two stories between twenty and forty pages in length in preparation for the second semester, which will focus on intensive revision.  Students will be expected to read the assigned stories and work to establish a daily writing practice. The seminar will meet for two long retreat days three separate times over the course of the semester. Students will be responsible for weekly writing assignments. Conferences between intensive sessions will be held on the phone and via weekly video conference.

Class size: 10

 

12094

WRIT 405      Senior Colloquium:Written Arts

Dinaw Mengestu

M          4:40 pm-6:00 pm

OLINLC 115

 1 credit The Senior Colloquium in the Written Arts is an important supplement to the Senior Project. It has several objectives: intellectual/artistic, social, and vocational. The primary purpose is to guide seniors, both practically and philosophically, in the daunting task of creating a coherent and inspired creative work of high quality within a single academic year. Emphasis is on demystifying the project process, including its bureaucratic hurdles, as well as exploring the role of research in the creative realm, and helping students use each other as a critical and inspirational resource during this protracted solitary endeavor, sharing works in progress when appropriate. This supplements but never supplants the primary and sacrosanct role of the project adviser. Program faculty and alumni/ae, career development and other staff, and outside speakers (such as editors, translators, MFA graduates and directors, publishing personnel, etc.) contribute their collective wisdom and experience, sharing the myriad ways in which writers move an idea toward full creative realization, and giving a glimpse of the kinds of internships and careers available to the writer. Required for students enrolled in a Written Arts Senior Project. All such students are enrolled automatically by the Registrar. 

Class size: 25

 

 

Cross-listed courses:

 

12030

LIT 331      Translation Workshop

Peter Filkins

Th     1:30 pm-3:50 pm

OLIN 306

FL

FLLC

Cross-listed: Written Arts Class size: 12

 

12287

THTR 107 A  Introduction to Playwriting

Jorge Cortinas

W       1:30 pm-4:30 pm

FISH STUDIO NO.

PA

PART

 Cross-listed: Written Arts Class size: 12

 

12288

THTR 107 B  Intro to Playwriting

Jorge Cortinas

Th    10:10 am-1:10 pm

FISH STUDIO NO.

PA

PART

Cross-listed: Written Arts  Class size: 12