Fall 2009

First Year Seminar: Writers and Their Obsessions
Tony Giardina
WRT 380 (66450)
Wednesdays, 9 am-Noon
J. Frank Dobie House

In this class, we are going to explore the work of a group of novelists, poets, playwrights and screenwriters did when they either stepped out of their customary genres to write about their interests and obsessions in other forms, or when they attempted to incorporate those obsessions into their own work. What happens when writers set out to explore their seemingly non-literary interests? How do they manage to make those interests “literary”, and how did they have to bend and expand the scope of their work in order to do it?

Writing assignments will take the form of short pieces  exploring the topics the writers in question explored: sports, music, nature, movies. Then we will conclude with one longer work based on your own obsessional interests.

Readings to be chosen from among the following:
Poetry
The Wild Iris, Louise Gluck
February in Sydney, Yusef Komunyakaa

Fiction
Nosferatu, Jim Shepard
A Fan’s Notes, Frederick Exley
City of God, E.L. Doctorow
The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop., Robert Coover

Playwriting
Take Me Out, Richard Greenberg
Via Dolorosa, David Hare

Screenplays
The Third Man, Graham Greene

Nonfiction
Joyce Carol Oates, On Boxing
Graham Greene, The Pleasure Dome
“Standards,” E. L. Doctorow

Fiction Workshop: The Writing Life
Jim Crace
WRT 380 (66460)
Tuesdays, 2:00-5:00 pm
J. Frank Dobie House

The main purpose of this class is to workshop student manuscripts and to provide encouragement for fiction projects. It will be a meeting of friendly professionals doing their best to be generous and helpful.

It is presumed that any writer accepted by the Michener program will be gifted and industrious. However, group sessions will start from the premise that raw talent is rarely enough to produce the best work or to forge a writing career. The course will, therefore, investigate the challenges and rigours of a professional writing life and hope to provide relevant skills and strategies. As well as receiving and offering painstaking and supportive reactions to colleagues’ manuscripts, students will explore the possible responses of critics, publishers, line editors, publicists and readers to their work.

We will address some of the following issues:

• Have students identified and developed their strongest and most natural writing voices?
• Are they working on  the right novel or story collection for their skill sets?
  How to deal with setbacks and surmount obstacles – everything from writers’ block and rescuing a failed narrative to knowing when to abandon a project?
• Is the manuscript ready yet? Has it been appropriately edited? (There will a focus on editing techniques).
• What is the book’s strongest pitch? Who are its readers, what is its constituency?
• What strategies will help writers cope with the rare successes and the common disappointments of seeking an agent or editor and then making a work public?

The course will comprise approximately eight manuscript workshops. Students will need to find the courage to bring their problems rather than their achievements to the table. Writers need to pay more attention to their weaknesses than to their strengths.

A further four sessions will be role-play encounters in which students (with their own manuscripts under scrutiny) respond both to project proposals and to finished work as a publisher’s panel might, fillet the prose as a line editor would, and offer the kind of critical and commercial responses that mark the publication of any book.

The remaining sessions will look pragmatically at the Writing Life, its rewards and its dilemmas.

There are no required texts, but there will be required reading throughout the course – not only the submitted work of colleagues, but also short pieces which highlight some of the technical decisions to be made before embarking on a story or a novel – tense, voice, tone, point of view, etcetera.

To summarise, the course aims to strengthen the writers’ resolve by facing up to rather than dismissing the personal and professional problems they will inevitably encounter.

[The instructor expects to be available to all students for private meetings during his semester in Austin.]

Play into Film Workshop
Tony Giardina
WRT 380 (66465)
Thursdays, 2-5 pm
J. Frank Dobie House

In this course, we will begin by examining a number of very different plays that have been turned into films, then watching their film versions, looking at the choices made by writers and directors in translating the theatrical into the cinematic.  In doing so, we’ll examine instances where the transfer has been successful, as well as instances where it hasn’t, in each case asking the question, when the transfer worked, why did it work? (and when it didn’t work, why didn’t it?)  Does a theatrical work always have to be fully reimagined for the screen, and if not, what aspects of a theater piece allow for a natural transfer? How does language differ in the two mediums?

Some examples of the kinds of films we’ll be looking at:
Lewis Milestone’s earlie talkie version of Hecht and MacArthur’s The Front Page
William Wyler’s films of  Elmer Rice’s Counsellor at Law (with John Barrymore) and Sidney Kingsley’s Detective Story (with Kirk Douglas)
Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (directed by Mike Nichols)
The film versions of Peter Shaffer’s two most theatrical plays, Equus and The Royal Hunt of the Sun
David Mamet’s film of Terence Rattigan’s The Winslow Boy
Robert Altman’s film of David Rabe’s Streamers
Richard Linklater’s films of Stephen Belber’s Tape and Eric Bogosian’s SubUrbia.

In the later part of the course, students will write and workshop either a screen adaptation of one of their own plays, or if no play exists, adapt an existing play that’s never been made into a movie.

Poetry Workshop
Dean Young
WRT 380 (66455)
Monday, Noon-3 pm
J. Frank Dobie House

Students will be expected to turn in one new poem a week, an impossible goal perhaps, but our aims will be primarily generative, our discussions pointing forward. Of course the paint will be wet so our focus in the close examination of this work will be descriptive rather than evaluative, with suggestions towards exploration rather than correction. Poetry can be usefully thought of as a craft, as a series of devices and perfectable techniques that can be learned, but it is also an art, a product of the imagination and, while the imagination can be made more sophisticated (one of our main goals), it does so through liberation, experimentation, recklessness. What may initially seem like an error may in fact be the crucial point at which the poet is trying to discover new territory. A mistake may be a great opportunity; the Liberty Bell is better for the crack. Poetry often verges on the debacle of itself. It ain't math. But it must also actively assert itself as poetry through resistences to and/or identifications with aspects of pre-existent poetry (and there's sure a lot of it.) We'll do our best to honor the forward trajectory of the imagination while still working towards revision and polishing, towards making finished poems.

Spring 2009

Metaphysical Messages
Peter LaSalle
WRT 380 (64425)
Wednesday, 2:00-5:00
Frank Dobie House

This is a course for graduate creative writing students, MFA or MA. It will examine the metaphysical element in a selection of modern and contemporary literature (prose, poetry, and drama) as well as in some painting. For our purposes, the metaphysical element will basically mean the creative imagination exploring, questioning, and ultimately—and very daringly—going beyond standard assumptions about time and space, reality and unreality, etc., as perhaps true knowledge begins. The works themselves may be seen as the "messages" of the course's title.

The Reading:
I. Symbolism, Surrealism, etc.
The Flowers of Evil, poems, Charles Baudelaire
Nadja, a novel, André Breton
Paris Peasant, a book-length personal meditation, Louis Aragon
Nightwood, a novel, Djuna Barnes

II. Borges and Bombal: The Buenos Aires Connection
Labyrinths, stories and essays, Jorge Luis Borges
New Islands, stories, María Luisa Bombal

III. An Interlude with Painters
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Giorgio de Chirico, and René Magritte
(paintings viewed on Web sites).

IV. Contemporary Messages
Transparent Things, a novel, Vladimir Nabokov
Collected Shorter Plays, Samuel Beckett
The Lime Twig, a novel, John Hawkes
Best American Fantasy 2007, stories by Elizabeth Hand, Kelly Link, Ramola D., and others in (more or less) the New Weird movement
Selected Poems, Mark Strand

The student will write two papers. The first will be a personal essay on thinking about the metaphysical element in relation to the student's own creative writing. In the second paper, longer, the student will select a writer whose work seems metaphysical and examine that work according to ideas developed in the course, for the sort of engaging and even stylistically innovative original essay about literature written by a creative writer and found in a literary magazine (rather than something simply functional and done by a scholar as a research article for an academic journal).

Screenwriting for Fiction Writers
Steven Harrigan
WRT 380 (64420)
Monday, 2-5pm
J. Frank Dobie House

This course is designed to introduce students who are used to writing for the printed page to the often counterintuitive and aggravating world of screenwriting. In the instructor's opinion, a novelist or short story writer must shake loose certain cherished ideas of authorship and prose perfection in order to become a successful screenwriter. Through readings, class exercises, and viewing of film clips we will explore the crucial differences between the solitary devotion of the fiction writer and the team spirit and flexibility necessary to succeed in film and television. Visitors to the class will include film and televison agents from International Creative Management along with several writers who have had experience in both publishing and filmmaking.

Fall 2008

Fiction Workshop
ZZ Packer
WRT 380 (67965)
Tuesday, 2:00-5:00
Frank Dobie House

In this course we will critique student fiction in a seminar-style discussion method known as a "workshop." We will also discuss the craft of fiction, emphasizing the elements of scene, structure, characterization, dialogue, imagery, point of view and voice. Each student will be asked to draw upon these lessons in craft to strengthen his/her own fiction as well as that of his or her classmates.

Students will be expected to: complete and be prepared to discuss all reading assignments; type and double-space any take-home writing assignments; carefully read each workshop story, submitting constructive, written criticism to its author. Each student will also write and revise at least two stories submitting the stories to the class for workshop.

POETRY WORKSHOP
Dean Young
WRT 380 (67960)
Monday, 9:00 am -noon
J. Frank Dobie House

Students will be expected to turn in one new poem a week, an impossible goal perhaps, but our aims will be primarily generative, our discussions pointing forward. Of course the paint will be wet so our focus in the close examination of this work will be descriptive rather than evaluative, with suggestions towards exploration rather than correction. Poetry can be usefully thought of as a craft, as a series of devices and perfectable techniques that can be learned, but it is also an art, a product of the imagination and, while the imagination can be made more sophisticated (one of our main goals), it does so through liberation, experimentation, recklessness. What may initially seem like an error may in fact be the crucial point at which the poet is trying to discover new territory. A mistake may be a great opportunity; the Liberty Bell is better for the crack. Poetry often verges on the debacle of itself. It ain't math. But it must also actively assert itself as poetry through resistences to and/or identifications with aspects of pre-existent poetry (and there's sure a lot of it.) We'll do our best to honor the forward trajectory of the imagination while still working towards revision and polishing, towards making finished poems. Somehow all this will get done starting at nine on Monday mornings so get to bed early, or not at all.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR
ZZ Packer
WRT 380 (67955)
Wednesday, 9:00 am - noon
J. Frank Dobie House

As movements, Modernism and Postmodernism grapple with time, order, chaos, history and sense of self in wildly varying ways, from existential angst (modernism) to playful abandon and surrender (postmodernism). Both movements are fertile ground for the sort of literary cross-pollination we'll be engaging in during the semester.

Though the class reading list will feature some weighty books-don't let Ulysses scare you off-and some works that are delightfully heady and dizzyingly (and sometimes annoyingly) self-conscious and self-referential, we'll be reading as “readers” rather than academics. The goal will be to survey a certain mode of thought that influences our present literary climate (sometimes visibly but often subliminally), and to unearth writers and who take tessellated, labyrinthine approaches to addressing identity, memory, time and existence.

Novel-length Fiction:
James Joyce’s Ulysses
(Optional, but recommended: Harry Blamire’s The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses)

Short Stories:
You've Got to Read This, edited by Ron Hansen;
The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, edited by Ben Marcus.
Postmodern American Fiction: a Norton Anthology edited by Paula Geyh, Fred G. Leebron and Andrew Levy

Plays and Screenplays:
Susan Lori Park’s Topdog/Underdog
Edward Albee’s Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Films:
Robert Altman’s Nashville.
Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction
David Mamet’s Glengary Glen Ross.

Creative non-fiction:
Joan Didion’s We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Non-fiction

Poetry:
Legitimate Dangers, edited by Michael Dumanis and Cate Marvin.
Excerpts from the Heath Anthology of American Literature, Volume D, Modern Period: 1910-1945, edited by Paul Lauter.

POETRY WORKSHOP - Breaking Through
Marie Howe
WRT 380 (66355)
Tuesday, 4:00-7:00 p.m.
J. Frank Dobie House

We’ll meet in a workshop each week where we’ll generate poems, and read and critique each other’s work. Each week you’ll bring in a freshly written poem, closely read the poems written by others , and meet with another member of our class in a “poetry date”. We’ll encourage each other to write beyond where we would end - to break through boundaries of thought, feeling, syntax, diction, rhythm, image, forms - to write poems that astonish us. Each member of our class will meet with me within the first three weeks -- bring to that meeting a half dozen poems. And bring to our first class meeting, a poem by someone else you wish you had been able to write - 15 copies. We’ll work hard, help each other, and have a wonderful time.

Playwriting Workshop
Sharon Kramer
WRT 380 (66360)
Wednesday, 2:00-5:00
WIN 1.130

VISUAL METAPHOR
A writing workshop
How it blossoms inside the spectator.  What it does when it gets there.  Why we passionately need it and go to the theatre to get it.  Why nothing else quite does it.  How we go about filling it up and letting it spill out into our work and audiences.  How it has everything and nothing to do with the word "image."  .

Playwriting Studies Course
Sharon Kramer
WRT 380 (66345)
T TH, 11:00-12:30
Frank Dobie House

THE PERCEPTION SHIFT
A play happens inside us. In our apprehension it comes alive and vital and complete. It does not impose any context except the context of our own perceptions--the bare minimum necessary for any investigation. A play exists only in terms of itself and it literally creates those terms whole, from the ground up, as it creates itself. The rules which govern a universe are only available to us after that universe is created.
 
In the end, the place where a play happens is not on stage, but in the eye and heart and mind of the spectator, in that space or in that energy or as the relationship that is created between the audience and the play.
“Just the ordering of our perceptions is capable of carrying the form and essence of art.  Dramatic action is our sense that something significant has happened, and what has happened is our own mental activity.  Dramatic action is a metaphorical term for the effect which is our subjective experience.”
  Okkie Brownstein

We'll be investigating a text almost every class period, mostly plays, but also essays, poems, and perhaps a screenplay and novel.  The question of how art is and is not a moral instrument will be asked often.  Work for the class will range from short assignments to class presentations. 

Fall 2007

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR
Antonya Nelson
WRT 380 (68260)
Wednesday, 9:00-noon
Frank Dobie House

This class will trace the creative linkage among a variety of genres and historical time periods, focusing on how one piece of art (or history) inspires another, and thereby reinvents artistic expression. As a group, we will begin with Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, researching its origins (in Latin American conquest history) and pursuing it through the creative responses it has engendered over the years, including Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, and the documentary on the making of that film, Hearts of Darkness.

Students will then be required to pursue individual projects, locating chains of influence among genres and time periods, presenting their findings to the class at large, and, finally, making a creative contribution to that chain with their own work, be it poetry, screenplay, fiction, etc.

Some sample linkages might be:
Anne Carson's The Glass Essay, with its attendant background material of Emily Bronte and Alzheimers' research

Ray Carver's updating of Anton Chekhov, whose background material included Plato's Symposium

Shakespeare's Lear, which led to Kurosawa's Ran, as well as Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres (not to mention that Lear was based on a verison of Cinderella)

Susan Orleans The Orchid Thief, a research project and book then reinvented for film in Adaptation

Cornelius Eady's Brutal Imagination, with its feet in all manner of black history and myth

Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Michael Cunningham's The Hours, and the subsequent film, not to mention Woolf's diaries and sad biography

And any other linking chains that students uncover that include at least two genres and that span time in a sufficiently deep way.

FICTION WORKSHOP
Antonya Nelson
WRT 380 (68270)
Tuesday, 2:00-5:00 p.m.
J. Frank Dobie House

This class is a workshop, the primary texts of which are student manuscripts. These manuscripts are to be handed out in hard copy no later than one week in advance of discussion – with longer lead time for pieces over 25 pages in length – and must be typed and double-spaced. Three submissions are required during the semester, only two of which are for public consumption. Genre work is not permitted. No revisions of previously workshopped material unless the revisions are substantial.

Students interested in working on novels are encouraged to claim their workshop time in a single, longer session for which they submit no more than 70 (yet no fewer than 50) pages of material. This workshop will do its best to accommodate writers working in either short or long form, keeping in mind that those are different writerly temperaments.

Active participation is mandatory. Margin and endnotes on manuscripts are essential, as is a meaty discussion of the work during class meetings. A study of secondary texts will be used to amplify points on technique and structure and unity of purpose.

Required texts:
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell
Symptomatic by Danzy Senna
Collected Stories by William Trevor
Collected Stories by Eudora Welty
Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose, in addition to individual pieces referenced in this text (Chekhov, Joyce, O’Connor, Carver, Kafka, etc.)

LONE STAR LIT
Don Graham
WRT 380 (68265)
Monday, 2:00-5:00
J. Frank Dobie House

Beyond the borders of the second largest state in the Union, Texas writing is often mischaracterized in the same way that much else about the Lone Star State is. Here, for example, is a description of Southwestern & Texas writers that appeared in a mass-market paperback anthology from the 1980s: “Some were born among the sagebrush and the mesquite trees. Others traveled here from the soot choked cities of the East. But all write with their feet dusty from the mesas or with fingers greasy from chicken-fried steak.” If authors of the Southwest are such uncouth rubes, what of their home-grown audience? A comment from a 1998 article in the British magazine The Economist tells us that “Even educated Texans have often preferred insubstantial humour books and western pulp fiction to ‘highfalutin’ writing.” This course will set everything right by taking a close look at significant literary efforts to depict Texas in truer terms than those afforded by uninformed outsiders. We will read Katherine Anne Porter, J. Frank Dobie, Larry McMurtry, Cormac McCarthy, Américo Paredes, Sandra Cisneros, and a host of other writers who have made Texas their literary field of dreams. Requirements will include one essay—a site visit to a nearby literary place associated with a particular author—and a longer essay.

SCRIPT TO SCREEN
Alex Smith
WRT 380 (99989)
Time TBA
J. Frank Dobie House

This is the first part of an advanced two-semester screenwriting and production practicum.  The practicum is designed to provide students the opportunity to develop potential feature film projects from the script stage through full-fledged pre-production. This two-semester practicum will generate feature film projects to be made as part of UT Film Institute's new Feature Film Lab, a five-semester program that takes a project from script through pre-production, production, post-production, and marketing.
Students are expected to gain a deep understanding of the complicated, collaborative work required to turn a feature-length script into an actual film. Although we will focus on improving the chosen projects and preparing them for production, the emphasis of this class will be on process, not product.
 
The fall 2007 semester, sponsored by The Michener Center for Writers, will be an in-depth exploration of the chosen scripts, with the emphasis being on finding the movie within the script. Extensive script work-shopping and revision will be required, with a focus on carving out story/character elements that are working, and shedding the rest. Students will also examine other crucial practical considerations-such as identifying the audience for their scripts, and potential methods of financing their projects. The semester will culminate with fully cast and rehearsed professional readings of the selected scripts. All scripts from the fall semester will be considered for inclusion in the spring semester production lab --where a core group of filmmaking talent (directors, actors, editors, cinematographers, designers, composers, et al.) collaborate with one another to "pre-produce" the projects.
 
The instructor is UTFI Creative Director Alex Smith, an RTF faculty member (and Michener Center graduate) with professional experience as a writer-director, who also has experience with the Sundance Institute's Feature Film Program.

This is an organized course that is open to graduate and undergraduate students; undergraduate students may enroll for either undergraduate or graduate credit. In order to submit, ALL screenplay submissions must:

1) Be Feature Length (we won't take treatments, first acts, etc.)
2) Be Low-Budget (or be willing to be rewritten with a low budget in mind.)
    Low-Budget means 1 million or, preferably, much less.
3) Be able to be shot in Texas. (Or be willing to be rewritten with Texas as
    the shooting location).

Spring 2006

THE WORKING SCREENWRITER
Stephen Harrigan
WRT 380 (65240)
Frank Dobie House
Mondays 11:00 AM-2:00 PM

This course will focus on the practical problems of screenwriting, examining in an intimate way issues of plot and character development, dialogue, structure, etc. At the same time we will take a look at the external realities of the movie and (to some extent) television business through conversations with a series of prominent visitors from the industry. Among those who have agreed to speak to the class, pending availability, are William Broyles, Jr. , the screenwriter of Apollo 13 , Cast Away, Unfaithful and, most recently, Flags of Our Fathers; John Lee Hancock, writer-director of The Rookie and The Alamo; Lawrence Wright, screenwriter of The Siege and Noriega: God’s Favorite; and Elliot Webb, a founding partner of the Broder Webb Chervin Silberman agency, which recently merged with International Creative Management.

During the course, students will be expected to complete three writing assignments: a brief scene whose characters and situation will be dictated by the instructor; an essay dealing with the strengths and weaknesses of a feature film screenplay of the student’s choice, and a brief outline for a feature-length screenplay. Because students in the class will have varying levels of experience in screenwriting, some accommodation will be made in the nature of these assignments if the instructor thinks it advisable. There is no required reading list as such, but the visitors will each propose a particular screenplay as a point of departure for the discussion. Copies of these screenplays will be made available, and the students are expected to read them carefully.

Fall 2006

First Year Seminar (required and open to first-year Michener Fellows only)
WRT 380 (67150)
Instructor: Tony Giardina
Wednesday, 9:00 am-12:00 pm
Frank Dobie House

I am calling this class “Extracurricular Activities” because in it we are going to explore the work a group of novelists, poets, playwrights and screenwriters did when they either stepped out of their conventional genres to write about their interests and obsessions in other forms, or when they attempted to incorporate “extracurricular” obsessions in theirown work. In other words, what happens when writers set out to explore their seemingly non-literary interests? How do they manage to make those interests “literary,” and how did they have to bend and expand their work in order to do it.

Writing assignments will take the form of short pieces for most of the semester, with one longer work based on your own “extracurricular” interests to come later in the semester.

The reading list below may change, so don’t buy any of the books yet.
Readings:

Poetry:

The Wild Iris, Louise Gluck
Selections from February in Sydney, Yusef Komunyakaa

Fiction:

Nosferatu, Jim Shepard
A Fan’s Notes, Frederick Exley
Selections from City of God, E.L. Doctorow
Selections from Rumble, Young Man, Rumble, Benjamin Cavell

Playwriting:

Take Me Out, Richard Greenberg
Via Dolorosa, David Hare

Screenplays:

"The Third Man" and "The Fallen Idol", Graham Greene

Non-fiction:

Fathers Playing Catch with Sons, Donald Hall
On Boxing, Joyce Carol Oates
Selections from All What Jazz, Philip Larkin
Selections from Blue Notes, Yusef Komunyakaa
My Garden (Book), Jamaica Kincaid
The Pleasure Dome, Graham Greene

Writing About Movies
WRT 380 (67155)
Instructor: Tony Giardina
Tuesday, 2:00-5:00
Frank Dobie House

Texts (a partial list): Movie Love in the 50’s, James Harvey: Writers at the Movies: Twenty Six Contemporary Authors Celebrate Twenty Six Memorable Movies, Shepard,ed.; Nosferatu, Jim Shepard; “The Films of Richard Egan”, Giardina

Films (again, a partial list): Psycho, Touch of Evil, I Know Where I’m Going, Nosferatu, Night of the Hunter, A Summer Place

In the first half of the course, we will look at essays written by writers like James Harvey, Margot Livesey, and Charles Baxter, who have explored creative ways of writing about movies outside of the mold of reviews and straight journalism. We will also watch the movies that correspond to the writing: at least two Hitchcock movies that go along with Harvey’s essay “Hitchcock’s Blondes”, Michael Powell’s I Know Where I’m Going and Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter to correspond with Livesey’s and Baxter’s essays. This half will culminate in the writing of a longish essay about a movie, one chosen individually by each member of the class.

In the second half, we will read fiction ( Nosferatu by Shepard, “The Films of Richard Egan” by Giardina) that uses film as the basis for an exploration of fictional form. This half will culminate in the writing of a story or poem (or play or screenplay) about the movies.

Fiction Workshop: "Voice"
WRT 380 (67160)
Instructor: Colm Toibin
Mondays, 2:00-5:-00 pm
Frank Dobie House

The course will use classical Greek theatre as the basis for discussion, especially Medea, Antigone and Electra, and also Greek myth. These works will be used as a diving board only, a way of showing how voice can be used. Before our initial class meeting, students are asked to find any easily available text of the three plays and read them beforehand, so we won't waste time.

In the course of the semester, students will complete either a long work of fiction (which they can draft and redraft as the course proceeds) or a collection of short fiction (the individual stories being completed throughout the semester). Whether long or short work, I'd like to see at least 2000 new words from every student every week. Students are free to use or consider the plays and the myths under discussion, or ignore them.

Each student should also pick a writer and write a short biography using diaries or letters and a long biography already written. The biographical essay will be a way of finding style to enter into the spirit of another writer. I am not looking for critical insight as much as, for example, ways of opening and ending paragraphs and sections, finding a prose style to deliver and ponder complex information—ending with something as satisfying and well-written as fiction, but using fact only. This essay should be between 5,000 and 10,000 words.

On Plenitude and Politics:
The Implications and Influence of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda
WRT 380 (67165)
Intructor: Colm Toibin
Tuesday, 11-2:00
Frank Dobie House

The class will look at this Eliot novel and then other books which have similar themes. For example:

1. A passionate and intelligent woman who marries a bully: Phinneas Finn by Trollope; Portrait of a Lady by James; the section on Dorothea's marriage in Middlemarch; John McGahern's Amongst Women.

2. Destitute in a city: Ester Waters by George Moore; Chapter One of Baldwin's Another Country; The Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle

3. Politics: Age of Iron by J.M. Coetzee; The Late Bourgeois World by Gordimer; On Beauty by Zadie Smith

Students will write a book review of at least 5000 words of two of the books under consideration, taking the rest of the author's work into account.

Spring 2006

Poetry Workshop
WRT 380 (64215)
August Kleinzahler
Thursday 2:00-5:00
FDH

The objective of the course is to disabuse the students of the nonsense visited upon them by the assorted ninnies who teach poetry workshops in America these days and to investigate the fundamental ways that poetry, as an art, works. Along these lines, we will dwell at length on the ways in which the poetic line functions and how to generate and sustain poetic music, chiefly rhythm, in the service of whatever emotional information a given poem is seeking to convey. There will be a good deal of studying assorted poetic models, almost all of which, if not all, will be unfamiliar to the student.

There will be exercises, chiefly imitation of assorted models. The students will be asked to bring in a poem by a contemporary poet (b. 1925 or later) and a well-dead poet for each class. The students will be prepared to read both in a fashion that suggests they understand what they’re reading. The students will be required to have a poem of their own ready to read aloud for each class. The students will learn to read poetry aloud, their own poetry and the poetry of strangers. Psychodramas and prima donna behavior will be verboten and punished by torture or execution. The students will be expected to participate in discussions in an intelligent fashion (fake it, if necessary). Evaluation will be based on demonstrating, however primitively, that somewhere in the course of the semester the nickel managed to drop. It would be pleasing to have every student produce at least one poem that he or she might not be ashamed of twenty years later.

We shall have fun, damnit.

Short Non-Fiction Prose Forms
WRT 380 (64205)
August Kleinzahler
Tuesday 2:00-5:00
FDH

This course will be primarily a reading course but include a number of assignments involving imitation of various writers and genres. Short non-fiction prose includes the essay, dictionary or encyclopedia entry, newspaper column, letter, diary, review, memoir, biography, pensee, scientific tract. among others. Those writers we shall be having a look at will include, depending on availability, are: Joseph Mitchell, Whitney Balliett, Aldo Buzzi, David Thomson, Ivor Cutler, Red Smith, Kennedy Fraser, John Aubrey, Nicholas Slonimsky, Kennth Cox, George Bernard Shaw and J. Henri Fabre, among others. Much of the world’s best writing exists in what is customarily dismissed as minor or ephemeral forms.

Books to be bought and have on hand will be David Thomson’s New Biographical Dictionary of Film and Philip Lopate’s The Art of the Personal Essay, Kenneth Cox’s Collected Studies In The Use Of English, and, if it’s available in the U.S., The Assassin’s Cloak: An Anthology of the World’s Greatest Diarists. The emphasis will be on how an author establishes assorted tonalities and voice in a relatively short time. We shall examine diction, sentence structure, punctuation along with broader stylistic elements. The requirements will include a twenty minute presentation on relevant author of one’s choice, along with various aforementioned written assignments. There will be much reading and some discussion of that reading. Evaluation will be based on class participation, assignments, and demonstration that the student has broadened his knowledge in the area of short non-fiction forms and become a more informed and critical reader in the process.

Reading List:

1) The New Biographical Dictionary of Film by David Thomson It's published by Knopf and available in paperback.

2) Up In The Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell, probably still available in paper from Vintage

3) American Musicians by Whitney Balliett, probably (hopefully) available in paper from Oxford U. Press

4) Anything you can find by Aldo Buzzo or J. Henri Fabre

5) John Aubrey's Brief Lives

Physical Presence In The Narrative
WRT 380 (64210)
Lars Gustafsson
Wednesday, 2:00-5:00
FDH

In order for a narrative to become more than two-dimensional the protagonists, the actors and the sufferers of their actions have to become more than names and more than place-holders. The physical presence of a person in a narrative can be achieved in many different ways and is very much connected with the physical presence of the entire situations.

From the very expressive and fascinatingly simple descriptions of persons in the Icelandic saga, represented in our course by Nials Saga to the highly refined and detailed face and body descriptions in the great French realists we will follow a tradition.

We will also see how this tradition changes and to some extent gets diluted in the run of the Twentieth Century. The faceless figures in Gibson's novels, characterized more by their clothing than by their bodies, will serve as an example.

The course will involve reading from the artisan's point of view rather than from the literary historian's, by the anonymous author of Niala, by Cervantes, Goethe, Zola, Flaubert, Thomas Mann and Gibson. Like in my earlier course, the reading will be interfoliated with regular writing exercises, where the participants are given opportunity to try out their own hand—in the following with or in opposition to the techiques which have been encountered and discussed.

Fall 2005

Screenwriting Workshop
WRT 380 (unique #65812)
Instructor: Kathleen Orillion
Time: Thursdays 930am-1230pm
Place: J. Frank Dobie House

"It is the character's personality that creates the action of the story."
--Flannery O'Connor

Students will write an original, full-length feature screenplay. Over the course of the semester, each student will have 3-4 opportunities to submit script pages for class discussion, and everyone is required to read one another's work and provide thoughtful and detailed feedback. Students should come to the first class meeting with at least one, preferably two, project ideas. Although you will be producing a step outline or treatment (your choice) and we will be considering issues of plot, structure, and momentum, this workshop will, for the most part, emphasize character-driven screenplays -- that is, stories that develop organically from the character(s) that you create (see Flannery O'Connor quote above). No textbook or packet required, though some outside reading and/or viewing may be assigned.

Fiction Workshop
WRT 380 (65808)
Instructor: John Dufresne
Place: J. Frank Dobie House
Time: Tuesday 2-5

Richard Hugo: "A creative writing course may be the one of the last places you can go where your life still matters."

This is a graduate level course designed, obviously, for those who are interested in exploring the art and craft of fiction. In part, a large part, the course will function as a workshop in which student works-in-progress will be read and discussed. Students will revise their work and submit a final portfolio, a minimum of two stories of publishable quality, at the end of the semester. The class will also read essays concerning the theory and practice of fiction and will discuss issues raised by the essays during the class. Students will also read and discuss works of published fiction from time to time and use those works to help define what exactly fiction is, or what it has been, or what it can be. Critical reading is as important as creative writing in a workshop. One cannot be a writer without first being a reader. The aim of the workshop discussions is to enable the writer to improve his or her work with the editorial and critical assistance of the readers. Our goal is to help the story in question to be the best story it can be.

Some thoughts on the workshop process:

In order to develop as a writer, you have to be able to take what you need from this class to nourish your writing and to disregard what you don't need or what, in fact, might be detrimental to your writing. (Of course, don't be too hasty in determining what it is you don't need.)

We’re here, I trust, and will assume, because we love stories and want to know what makes them work and not work. We're not here because we enjoy making pronouncements on literature. We simply want to find out what the story in question wants to do and determine if it achieves its desires. Our ultimate hope is that in so doing, we might be able to avoid the pitfalls of composition ourselves and learn the techniques that will enable us to write breathtaking stories.

Our discussions and possible disagreements will be aesthetic and technical, not personal. You don't have to like each other, but you do have to respect each other. Respect means this: to be generous as a reader, to be a specific as a critic, to be honest as a writer. Don't write remarks on the author's paper that you would not say to the writer in front of us all.

Hearing criticism gracefully and utilizing criticism intelligently are valuable skills to cultivate. The writer has the power and control over her story. The bottom line for a writer is that she does not have to accept any criticism she is offered. We might think she’s foolish, but that’s her right and perhaps her responsibility. A workshop such as this one should strive to be a community of writers trying to help one another accomplish their best writing. Discussions of the stories and poems take place primarily for the benefit of the author and for the other writers to the extent that we can all learn from each other's mistakes and successes, and not so that critics can show off. Reading the stories closely will help each of us understand the nature of fiction and poetry. Discussions take place so that the readers can communicate to the author how his or her work has affected them and what possibilities they see in the work.

The most important relationship in workshop is the one between you and your writing. You ought to feel good about it, respect it, be proud of what you've done. Sometimes the rest of us can help you do that. Writing is its own reward. It has to be because it's so hard. Write for the good of the work. Write so much that you miss it if you don't do it.

First-Year Seminar

(Open to first-year Michener Center fellows only)
WRT 380 (65810)
Instructor: John Dufresne
Place: J. Frank Dobie House
Time: Wednesday 9-12

Maybe we’ll call the class “The Varieties of Literary Experience.” We’ll focus on the creative impulse, the creative act, and the creative process. We’ll spread our literary wings and attempt to write in several genres, some of them perhaps new to us, doing so in our weekly responses to the readings. We’ll read short and long fiction, poetry, plays, screenplays, and creative nonfiction in its various guises–memoir, literary journalism, nature and food writing, examples of what I consider to be compelling and significant works of art. I’ll also suggest essays on writing by writers for you to read. You’ll also be asked to examine your motivation for writing, to explore, develop, and articulate a personal aesthetic, and to cultivate the habit of your literary art. Your beliefs and values--aesthetic and moral--are the light by which you see. You’ll be expected to formulate answers to questions like “Why do I write?” “Why do I write what I write?” “How do I write?” “What is the purpose of my art?” “What do I have to say that can only be said in a novel? a prose poem? an essay? and so on. A final paper, twenty pages or so, of publishable prose, will be a manifesto of your personal aesthetic. Here’s my start at compiling a list of what we’ll read. I may decide that we’ll read selections rather than entire books from some of the writers so that we can expand our list without overwhelming ourselves. I’ll revise and update it later.

Short Stories:

Anton Chekhov: “The Lady with the Dog,” “Misery”
James Joyce, “The Dead”
Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”
William Trevor, “The Ballroom of Romance”
Alice Munro, “Carried Away”
Lorrie Moore: “How to Become a Writer”

Novels:

Debra Monroe: Newfangled
Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

Poetry:

B. H. Fairchild: Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest
Denise Duhamel: Two and Two
Elizabeth Bishop: Geography III
Philip Larkin: High Windows

Creative Nonfiction:

Vladimir Nabokov: Speak, Memory
John Krakauer: Under the Banner of Heaven
The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon
Gretel Ehrlich: The Solace of Open Spaces
Laurie Colwin: Home Cooking

Plays:

David Ives: All in the Timing: Fourteen One-Act Plays
Tom Stoppard: Rozencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Screenplay:

Billy Bob Thornton: Sling Blade

SPRING 2005

Alice Tuan. Graduate Playwrights Workshop
Playwrights will generate new texts in this course towards completion of a new play. For those in progress with a play, the workshop will serve as feedback, also with sights to complete a draft. The semester will start with The Great American Play Bakeoff, inspired by Paula Vogel. Before the semester starts, playwrights will be given a 'recipe' of elements that they can think as much as they want on, the actual writing or 'baking' of the play to happen in 48 hours. The results of the Bakeoff plays will be read on the first day of class. In class writing exercises will give playwrights a chance to generate scenes based on such elements as light, money, offstage soundscapes, and the 'Apple Eras.' Time permitting, there will be a week of Extreme Sport writing. Playwrights will be expected to come to all workshops, show new scenes, and respond to other playwrights' work as well. We will also discuss workings of the theater world and market vs. craft.

Alice Tuan. Towards 21st Century Theater
What might be the clues to a post-911 theater? This reading course surveys a couple of dozen plays, old and new, private and public, solo and multi-charactered. The elder plays include Seneca's Medea, Shakespeare's Richard III, and a play from the Yuan Dynasty, looking at political content and pertinence to the present. Contemporary classics which resonate with lasting 20th century gestures include Pinter's Homecoming, Fornes' Fefu and her Friends, and Beckett's Endgame. Churchill's Faraway will locate the importance of concision and a look at early 20th century Rachel Crothers' A Man's World, will examine the term 'New Woman.' The second half of the course will look at newer work, which are planting seeds towards a 21st century sensibility. The practice of monologue vs. docudrama will include two new solo works and Smith's Twilight:Los Angeles. The epic anthology The Square, compiled by Chay Yew and Lisa Peterson, will survey both Asian and non-Asian views of a public Chinatown square. And further discussion of the U.S. view writing towards an more international scope will read Vogel's Long Christmas Ride Home and Wellman's Cleveland. The course concludes with new plays resonating with 21st century content and a discussion of hypertext theater, where epic theater twisted with channel-surfing yields random multi-linear storytelling, with the audience determining the sequence of scenes. Students are required to read all assigned plays and respond in class discussion. Creative writing exercises will spring from the plays and students will turn in a short paper at the end of class, manifesting their own ideas of drama in the 21st century.

Naomi Shihab Nye. Poetry Workshop
This poetry writing workshop/discussion class will invite one poem per week from each participant. Five revisions will be required by the end of the semester, with informal paragraphs describing how the class response to the poem helped (or didn't) shape the revision. It is hoped the tone of class will be jolly and friendly, encouraging and expansive. Each student, at one time during the semester, will share a hand-out of a single poem which has been crucial to his/her work and lead a reading/discussion of that poem. Additional handout readings will include poems by Milosz, Justice, Valentine, Merwin, Simic, Amichai, Boruch, Darwish, Mullen, Stafford, and others.

Naomi Shihab Nye. Poetry Readings Course
An energetic reading/discussion course. We will read poets of widely variant ages and backgrounds (85 and 27, Russia and rural Maine, for example). Writing assignments will be one review of the book of your choice from assigned list, one creative longer essay linking current issues/popular media sources with a chosen text (to be presented in class) and some poetry in response to texts. Some handouts in addition to texts.

Reading List:
Dancing in Odessa, Ilya Kaminsky
Sleeping Late on Judgment Day, Jane Mayhall
Kneeling Orion, Kate Barnes
Ghost Girl, Amy Gerstler
Delights & Shadows, Ted Kooser
The School Among the Ruins, Adrienne Rich
Desire Lines, Lola Haskins

Don Graham. Lone Star Literature
The view of Texas writing from beyond the borders of the second biggest state in the Union at times seems a bit skewed. Here is a description of Southwestern writers that appeared in a mass-market paperback anthology from the 1980s: "Some were born among the sagebrush and the mesquite trees. Others traveled here from the soot choked cities of the East. But all write with their feet dusty from the mesas or with fingers greasy from chicken-fried steak." If authors of the Southwest are such rubes, what of their home-grown audience? This is from a 1998 piece that appeared in the British magazine The Economist: "Even educated Texans have often preferred insubstantial humour books and western pulp fiction to 'highfalutin' writing." This course will set everything right by taking a close look at significant literary efforts to depict Texas in truer terms than stereotyping of authors and audience permits. To that end we will read Katherine Anne Porter, J. Frank Dobie, Larry McMurtry, John Graves, Cormac McCarthy, Américo Paredes, Sandra Cisneros, and a host of other writers who have made the Lone Star state their literary field of dreams.
Requirements will include two short essays and a longer one. One of these will be based upon a site visit pertaining to nearby places associated with the work of writers read in the course.

FALL 2004

Steve Harrigan. First Year Seminar: A Writer's Life
This course is concerned with the practical realities of constructing and sustaining a writing career. Through readings and discussions with guest speakers, we will talk about various ways of making a living, strategies for keeping up morale, and traps of attitude and character to avoid. There will be only two writing assignments, one very brief and one requiring research, but students will be expected to share and discuss with the class samples of their ongoing work in their primary field.

Reading List:
The Writing Life by Annie Dillard
Poets in Their Youth by Eileen Simpson
Ross and Tom by John Leggett
A Tragic Honesty: the Life and Work of Richard Yates by Blake Bailey
Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman
Act One by Moss Hart
Youth by J.M. Coetzee

Joy Williams. Fiction Workshop
Three to four manuscripts will be required from each student in the course of the semester. We'll also study some estimable work by others -- Schwartz, Stone, Salter, Kafka, Gass, and more.

Joy Williams. Risk Fiction
I have chosen the following works for the reading course for their risk-taking, their integrity, their excellence, and the variety of their forms. Students will be required to lead a portion of the class each week on attendant themes and works. This is a course for writers who want to analyze, enjoy (even emulate) works of honor, nerve, and ambition.

The Man Who Loved Children, Christina Stead
The White Bone, Barbara Gowdy
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
Concrete, Thomas Bernhard
The Body Artist, Don Delillo
Elizabeth Costello, J.M. Coetzee
The Emigrants, W.G. Sebald
Vanishing Point, David Markson
Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry
Three Lives, Gertrude Stein

SPRING 2004

Stephen Harrigan. Writing Creative Non-Fiction
Readings, discussions, and hands-on practice in researching and writing personal essays and other forms of factual literature. During the semester, students will write three pieces of moderate length, with the expectation that at least one of these pieces will require extensive reporting and/or research. Required text is The Art of the Personal Essay, by Philip Lopate, with perhaps one or two other titles yet to be decided.

Lars Gustafsson. Intensely Subjective Narrative
The objective of this course is to understand and explore the special qualities and possibilities of a type and a tradition of prose narrative which characteristically does not only use the first person mode but as opposed to story-telling with realistic or naturalistic ambitions tends to create its own subjective world. In contrast to the realist tradition the subjectivist one tends to set the rules of the narrative game as it goes on. Something which is forbiden in sports and most games but can prove to be highly productive in art. In this course we shall read and analyze some central books in this tradition but also try out, in some writing experiments how it is done.

The reading list will contain as major texts:
Inferno, August Strindberg
Doctor Glas, Hjalmar Söderberg
Rilke Malte Laurids Brigge, Rainer Maria
Thomas Mann, Felix Krull
Celine, Journey to the End of Night

The writing exercises will be short and concentrated .E.g. to rewrite a page or two from a different perspective than the one taken in the original text.

Marie Howe. The American Poet—A Reading Course for Writers
What does it mean to us to be writing poetry within the American Culture? Cultures? Empire? What is the chamber? To where goes the open road? What is the song? To whom does it sing? Is the How the What as well?
Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, Brenda Hillman, Tony Hoagland, Jane Kenyon, Yusef Komunyakaa, Larry Levis, Alice Notley, Jean Valentine, Kevin Young may be among the authors we'll read closely. You can expect to come to every class, to read a book a week (often with additional essays), to meet with another member of our class each week, and to write critical responses. I ask for your passionate participation.

Marie Howe. Poetry Workshop
We'll meet in a workshop each week where we'll generate poems, and read and critique each other's work. Each week you'll bring in a freshly written poem, closely read the poems written by others , and meet with another member of our class in a "poetry date." We'll encourage each other to write beyond where we would end—to break through boundaries of thought, feeling, syntax, diction, rhythm, image, forms—to write poems that astonish us. Each member of our class will meet with me within the first three weeks: bring to that meeting a half dozen poems. And bring to our first class meeting, a poem by someone else you wish you had been able to write, 15 copies. We'll work hard, help each other, and have a wonderful time.

Anne Rapp. Advanced Screenwriting
Course will require each student to complete a full screenplay by the end of the semester. Class will meet for three hours once a week and will include the reading of and a general discussion of every student's work-in-progress. There will also be a number of classes, which do not focus on student screenplays but on the climate of the film industry for screenwriters in Hollywood in the 21st Century.

During my career as a script supervisor (1981 - 1996), I had the privilege of working on several movies with the acclaimed cinematographer, Nestor Almendros. Nestor's cinematography career began in the early sixties in Europe, where he shot about a dozen films apiece for the renowned French director Francois Truffaut and German director Eric Rohmer. His first American film was "Days Of Heaven" in 1978, for which he won an Academy Award. Nestor spent most of the remainder of his career shooting American films for directors such as Robert Benton, Martin Scorcese, Mike Nicholls and many others.

The last decade of Nestor's life was split between Barcelona, Spain, and New York, where he often taught classes and gave film seminars at Columbia University. I worked on three films with Nestor and spent a lot of time with him during his last ten years, and was privileged to have many discussions with him about his teaching experience and film theories. He blessed me with his extensive "must-see films" list that he always used for his students. That list is divided into categories by directors (as Nestor always believed a director's fingerprint on any film is the boldest and most distinct). The list not only includes a lot of American films but also a good selection of foreign films. I have cherished this list since the day Nestor handed it to me, and have affectionately referred to it as the "Nestor List." I am very excited to be able to share it with this class and hopefully enhance our filmmaking experiences and processes through it.

Movies have changed drastically since Nestor passed away in early March of 1992, at the age 61. I often wonder what he would think of the movies of the 21st Century, and what he would be telling his film students today about storytelling on the big screen. I'm sure he would continue to use his list of what he considers the classics -- the films he believed would withstand time and its cultural changes. I look forward to using the "Nestor List" this semester as a guide to the key elements that made films great a half century ago, and still make the difference in a mediocre movie and a great one today.