Course Descriptions

Fall 2012

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.  Click for other departments’ workshops in fiction, poetry, playwriting, or screenwriting.

First-Year Seminar: WRITERS & THEIR OBSESSIONS (Required of/limited to all entering MFAs)

Anthony Giardina, visiting writer
WRT 380
FDH, Wednesdays, 9:oo am – 12:00 noon

In this class, we will explore the work a group of novelists, 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?

The works we’ll be reading and discussing will be chosen from among the following:

(Poetry) The Wild Iris by Louise Gluck, February in Sydney, Yusef Komunyakaa, “The British Countryside in Pictures” by James McMichael.   (Novels) Nosferatu by Jim Shepard, A Fan’s Notes by Frederick Exley, City of God by E.L. Doctorow, The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop., Robert Coover, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943-1954 by Steven Millhouser.   (Plays) Take Me Out by Richard Greenberg, Via Dolorosa by David Hare.   (Screenplays) The Third Man, Graham Greene.  (Nonfiction) But Beautiful, Geoff Dyer, “On Boxing”, Joyce Carol Oates, “Fathers Playing Catch with Sons”, Donald Hall, The Pleasure Dome, Graham Greene, “Standards”, E.L. Doctorow, Mrs. Nixon, Ann Beattie

Writing assignments will take the form of short pieces exploring the topics the writers in question explored. Each week, in the class following the one  where we discuss the subject a given group of writers explored (sports, music, nature, movies, politics), you will bring in a short piece, to be read aloud in class, on the same subject. This is not to be critiqued, but simply to be read and shared. Then we will conclude with one longer work, based on your own obsessional- or extracurricular- interest. This can be in any form you choose (story, essay, poetry, play, screenplay), but this time it will be workshopped.

Writing about Class in Classless America

Anthony Giardina, visiting writer
WRT 380s
FDH, Thursdays, 10:oo am – 1:00 pm

Why has the subject of social class always been such a difficult one for American fiction writers to tackle? And why have so many of the more well known examples by those who have attempted to do so failed to capture the reality of class in this country, substituting, in its place, a simple myth of rich and poor?

At a time of renewed class consciousness, this course will look at some of the well known, and less well known, American novels and stories in which  writers have attempted to deal with aspects of a subject Americans have not, until very recently, wanted to admit existed. A particular concentration will be placed on works that tell a kind of secret history of class in opposition to the more public story we have always told ourselves.

Among the works being considered for discussion: Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, both of which provided the early template for writing about class; John O’Hara’s “Imagine Kissing Pete”, and James Salter’s Light Years, which offered a new way of looking at class, albeit using radically different fictional techniques (providing a contrast between writing about class through social detail and through the prism of the individual consciousness) ; Hortense Calisher’s “In Greenwich There Are Many Gravelled Walks”and Richard Yates’ A Special Providence, as well as Yates’ story “Oh Joseph, I’m So Tired”, which introduced to postwar America the notion that art and education were changing traditional views of class;  Dorothy West’s The Wedding and Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, which look at racial and ethnic class consciousness in contemporary settings.

In the last weeks of this course, each student will write and present an essay on a particular writer or individual work, concentrating on both the subject of class and the fictional technique used to explore the subject.

Fiction Workshop

James Crace, visiting writer
WRT 380W
FDH, Tuesdays, 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm

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 weekly 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. The philosophy of this workshop is that feedback, no matter how critical, is not an affront but an essential support.

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, et cetera.

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. These will be the kind of discussions—intimate and supportive—that you might have in the future with your agent or editor.

Poetry Workshop

Dean Young, MCW Livingston Chair in Poetry
WRT 380W
FDH Tuesdays 10:00 am-1:00 pm

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.

Long Form Journalism

Stephen Harrigan, MCW Adjunct Professor
WRT 380W
FDH, Wednesdays, 1:00 – 4:00 pm

The course will be taught in collaboration with Jake Silverstein, the editor of Texas Monthly and graduate of the Michener Center for Writers, and with the participation of journalist and author Sam Tanenhaus, who is currently the editor of the New York Times Book Review.  The semester’s work will center on the writing of narrative non-fiction, with a strong focus on reporting.  Straight-out memoir is discouraged, but we’ll welcome any personal dimension to a story that makes a case for itself.   Students will be expected to complete two writing assignments: a shorter piece of between 1000 and 2000 words that might be a work of criticism, observation, or argument; and a longer (5,000-6,000 words) reporting-dependent story that, in the judgment of the instructors, would make sense as a publishable magazine story.  There will be readings of exemplary and instructive magazine articles, field trips, and discussions, all geared to a real-world understanding of the long-form journalism business as it exists now and, as much as can be divined, as it is likely to exist in the future.  Students should regard the teachers as editors, and expect a good deal of rewriting.  It’s our hope that the insights and practical experience gained in this class will result in work that might ultimately be publishable in Texas Monthly or other paying markets.