CRWR 185 A-Z - Special TopicsSemester Hours: 3
Fall, Spring
Special topics related to the creative writing genres. Subjects to be selected yearly.
Current Special Topics
CRWR 185S: Writing the Environment
In this multi-genre course, we explore the history and future of writing the environment. The natural world can no longer be written about as something sacrosanct or separate; landscape today is intensely braided with the social, the economic, the medical, the political, and the emotional. Across this course, student response–both creative and critical–is required as we consider a range of classic and contemporary artistic interpretations, including memoir, fiction, essay, and poetry.
Observation is key, journals are required, and the writing goal is to define your relationship with place. In Land of Little Rain, Mary Austin wrote, “We are not all born at once, but by bits.” Similarly, in this class we will strive to redefine what environmental writing means today and to track its evolution, by bits. In some cases, the focus is simply on making the invisible seen. In others, labels of environmental classism and racism are interrogated as we strive to find beauty in the face of our inevitable collective direction: no one is safe.
We will look at a range of examples, including selections from many of the following:
Mary Austin, Land of Little Rain; Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac; Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire; Rachel Carson, excerpts from Silent Spring and The Sea Around Us; Wallace Stegner, “The Wilderness Letter” and Crossing to Safety; Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place; John McPhee, The Pine Barrens; Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History; Kathleen Norris, Dakota; John D’Agata, About A Mountain, Janisse Ray, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood; Drew Lanham, Birding While Black; Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass; and selected poems from Lucille Clifton, Mary Oliver, Joan Kane, Camille Dungy, and others.
CRWR 185R: Poetry of Witness
“In the dark times, will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing.
About the dark times.”
Bertolt Brecht
In this workshop we will study “poetry of witness,” a genre of poetry described by Carolyn Forche in her anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness written by “significant poets who endured conditions of historical and social extremity during the twentieth century—through exile, state censorship, political persecution, house arrest, torture, imprisonment, military occupation, warfare and assassination.” Poems that “bear the trace of extremity within them, and [that] are, as such, evidence of what occurred.” We will expand upon Forche’s definition of the poetry of witness and study how poets bear witness to their own lives and the world in general in poems about disability, racism, health issues, domestic violence, sexual abuse, etc.
In addition to writing a new poem every other week, each student will give an oral presentation on a poetry collection chosen from a recommended reading list, which includes poets Natasha Trethewey, Bruce Weigel, Tom Sleigh, Brian Turner, and Joy Harjo. Required reading includes the following books: Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, edited by Carolyn Forche; Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, edited by Jennifer Bartlett, Sheila Black & Michael Northen; Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine; Dien Cai Dau by Yusef Komunyakaa; A Wreath for Emmett Till by Marilyn Nelson; Off Duty by Katie Donovan; Little Witness by Connie Roberts; Mama Amazonica by Pascale Petit.
Prerequisite(s)/Course Notes:
WSC 001 and CRWR 133 . May be repeated for credit when topics vary. As individual subjects are selected, each is assigned a letter (A-Z) which is affixed to the course number. Specific titles and course descriptions for special topics courses are available in the online class schedule.
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