CRWR 190 A-Z - Advanced Topics in Creative WritingSemester Hours: 3
Fall, Spring
Special topics related to the creative writing genres. Subjects are to be selected yearly.
Current Special Topics
CRWR 190K: The Poet’s Toolbox
What gives vitality and character to a line, to a stanza, to the overall movement of a poem? In this poetry workshop, we study– and put into practice– the patterns that shape rhythm, syntax, and meaning. Throughout the semester, students will deploy a broad range of tools in the poet’s toolbox. We will consider fundamental ways of arranging lines into stanzas (couplets, tercets, quatrains); various rhyme schemes and their spectrum of effects; and an array of forms inherited from different literary traditions, including the ballad, the villanelle, the blues lyric, the pantoum, the haiku, and the sonnet. We will also experiment with some of the key rhetorical strategies that have empowered poets from ancient times to the present. Students will develop a first-hand knowledge of the poet’s craft by engaging in the process of hearing/feeling/seeing how a particular arrangement of syllables creates a singular experience. We will read a wide selection of works exemplifying stylistic possibilities, discussing the qualities that make a poem especially resilient and resonant. Most importantly, members of this workshop will compose, recite, and revise poems that let us hear what we see and see what we hear. Regular attendance and participation are required.
CRWR 190O: Opening a Novel
A fiction workshop This is a traditional fiction-writing workshop in which we will be exploring the art of the novel, specifically how to start one and build the momentum that is necessary for sustaining a longer work. We’ll be exploring character, point of view, tense, the idea of chapters, and plot as we feel our way toward grasping the novel’s possibilities and expanse, the many different ways there are to approach the form. Additionally, there will be assigned readings from various novels that we will explore in order to both learn to read like writers and to understand how others begin the long form of fiction. Among the authors we will read are Jane Austen, Toni Morrison, Tommy Orange, Virginia Woolf, Tim O’Brien, Emile Zola, and others.
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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