Spring 2010

All WRT courses are restricted to graduate writing students in the Michener Center's MFA program or our affiliated programs in English, Theatre or RTF unless special permission is granted.

Poetry Workshop
Brigit Pegeen Kelly
WRT 380 (64650)
FDH Wednesdays 2-5

Obviously a workshop provides structure for writers, an impetus to write, an immediate audience, exposure to new work, critical feedback, and a community. But I think the most important thing it offers is the rare opportunity to learn how to read in practical ways work in process. This is a paradoxical practice, involving, as it does, making exacting observations and raising incisive questions about the material at hand while simultaneously getting out of the way of the poem and the poem's author. If done well, the practice requires the reader to pay as much attention to the way he/she reads, sees, and makes judgments as to the way poems operate. I definitely don't think a workshop should be an editing venue, a repair shop, or a critical combat zone. I like to think of it as studio space-a place to work, revise, observe, think, exchange ideas, and play. You'll be writing a poem, some exercises, and observational/critical pieces weekly. No books will be assigned, but we will look at the work of various authors throughout the semester.

The New York School of Poets
Brigit Pegeen Kelly
WRT 380 (64645)
FDH Mondays 2-5

This class is designed to help us develop a sound basis for thinking about the relationship between the New York School of Poets and the contemporary "institutional" avant-garde. To do this, we'll first put the New York School into a larger historical and critical context by looking briefly at Rimbaud, Stein, Eliot, Ginsberg and Lowell through the lens of Perloff's The Poetics of Indeterminacy and Breslin's From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry 1945-1965. Then, using Lehman's The Last Avant-Garde, Cage's Silence, and Perloff's Frank O'Hara as sounding boards, we'll focus closely on the work and lives of Ashberry, Koch, O'Hara, Notley, and Asekoff. You'll be required to write one five page paper that will form the basis for a craft lecture you will present to the class, and one 10-15 page paper that will look closely at the work/life/thought of one of the writers central to this class.

Reading List:

• Asekoff, The Gate of Horn
• Ashberry, The Collected Poems
• Breslin, From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry 1945-1965
• Cage, Silence: lectures and writings
• Eliot, The Wasteland
• Koch, The Collected Poems
• Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde
• Lowell, Life Studies
• Ginsberg, Howl
• Notley, The Selected Poems
• O'Hara, The Collected Poems
• Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy
• Perloff, Frank O'Hara: Poet Among Painters
• Rimbaud, The Illuminations
• Stein, Tender Buttons

Recommended:

• Berger, Theory of the Avant-Garde
• Pogioli, The Theory or the Avant-Garde

Screenwriting Workshop (crosslisted with RTF 380N)
Kathleen Orillion
WRT 380 (64640)
FDH Wed 10:00 am - 1:00 pm

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

This course will be a workshop for students who want to write an original, full-length feature screenplay. Over the course of the semester, students will create a step outline for their project and regularly submit script pages for class discussion. Students will also read one another's work and provide thoughtful and detailed feedback. Although 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. No textbook or packet will be required, though some outside reading and/or viewing may be assigned.

History's Greatest Hits (crosslisted with HIS 381)
H.W. Brands
WRT 380 (64635)
GAR 1.122 Mondays 6:00-9:00 pm

A workshop for graduate students devoted to the craft of writing history. Students will read selections from some of the greatest writers of history (Herodotus, Plutarch, Gibbon, Carlyle, Parkman, Strachey, Tuchman, and many others), and will assess what makes for compelling historical writing. Students will meanwhile develop writing projects of their own. Some students will bring drafts to the workshop and polish these. Other students will commence drafts during the semester. All will present their works-in-progress to the seminar, with the ultimate goal of writing history in the most riveting manner possible.

Fiction Workshop
Elizabeth McCracken
WRT 380 (64630)
FDH Tuesdays 10:00 am -1:00 pm

The good news and the bad news is: there are no rules. When it comes to writing, a piece of fiction succeeds or fails only depending on how it obeys its own rules, when it teaches the reader how to read and enter the particular fictional world. In our workshop, students will read each other's work with generosity and optimism and rigor, to understand each piece's best intentions and try to help the author to fulfill them-to learn, in other words, not only how to be critics, but how to read our own work critically. We will discuss in class and in conference both the smallest details of writing fiction as well as its loftiest aims.