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The most memorable prose descriptions make use not only of word choice but of syntax, context, rhythm, and sound for their effectiveness. In this class, we will discuss examples of exemplary descriptive prose as a means of helping participants enhance their own powers of description.

“Magnitude and Bond: Imagery and the Sensual in the Work of Gwendolyn Brooks and Lucille Clifton” with Vievee Francis

Vievee Francis will explore the way Brooks’s and Clifton’s provocative and surprising use of imagery allows broad readings of the black body’s restraint and boundlessness. Through this exploration we may all find a means of (re)claiming our bodies for ourselves.

Diary, daybook, to do list: these quotidian forms can be fruitful fodder for works of imaginative literature in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, spurring and dramatizing consciousness self-discovery in what feels like real time. This lecture will examine works by Hilton Als, A.R. Ammons, Sarah Manguso, Enrique Vila-Matas, and others to see what can be accomplished when these kinds of real-time check-ins are used as literary forms.

Poets use form to challenge themselves by the form’s limitations. Poets also use form to participate in poetic tradition. In many cases, poets push against the limitations for forms as a way to push against the traditions which created those forms. Specific forms, however, have specific strengths which allow for specific dynamics to arise in the poem. To this end, poets have often created new forms as ways to reference new cultural limitations, create new traditions and make possible new dynamics.

This lecture will focus on the way popular TV series hook the viewer, construct scenes, build character, and structure an episode, and how this can easily be adapted to add energy to short stories and novels.

What makes us fixate on a character so that we cannot look away? What causes a character to have power over us? Why do such people make us think about them? This is an immensely important and difficult topic, especially in these times, and I would like to talk about such characters as Morrison’s Sula, Melville’s Ahab, Dostoevsky’s Stavrogin, and possibly one of Shakespeare’s characters as “magnetic personalities.”

Surprise creates a rupture in the reading experience; we are stunned, stilled, caught. In this class, we’ll discuss surprise in terms of craft, and consider ways in which to manage surprise, suspense, reversals, and plot twists in fiction. The class will include discussion of published stories as well as in-class exercises aimed toward rendering surprise on the page.

This lecture concerns itself with the fragmented narrative as a vehicle for bearing witness.

You’ve immersed in flow, process, form, revision, workshop, submissions, and now—what will/could all that creative and administrative energy add up to? What are the hallmarks, conventions, and pitfalls of the debut collection? How can a book “sound like” its author? This talk explores the elements of and issues around the debut poetry collection, both in contemporary literary history and in current publishing practices—and is meant to inform, inspire, and challenge those poets working on their first manuscripts.