creative writing courses 2023

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28 Best Adult Creative Writing Classes in 2024

Showing 28 courses that match your search.

How to Write a Novel

Reedsy's course, led by Tom Bromley, is a 101-day program aimed at helping writers finish their first novel draft. It includes daily video masterclasses, a structured approach for drafting, and access to a forum and live webinars for interaction and feedback. The course covers various aspects of novel writing, including preparation, character development, plot skills, and writing techniques.

Website: https://reedsy.com/learning

Categories: Adult

Start date:

Open all year round

Prerequisites: No prerequisites

Andrea Beginners Creative Writing Course March 2024

In this practical class, you'll learn techniques to unlock your creativity even when inspiration seems scarce. By the end of the course, you'll be equipped with a toolkit full of writing hints and tips. Additionally, you'll join a supportive global community of Black Women & Women of Colour writers, fostering connections and support.

Website: https://www.rewritelondon.com/product/andrea/

March, 2024

Adult Writers Circle

The Writers Circle

Led by Judith Lindbergh, this virtual 11-week workshop caters to adults 19 years and older. It focuses on various writing forms and genres, offering a supportive environment for developing writing skills. Key aspects like structure, character development, and style are emphasized, along with guidance on the publishing market.

Website: https://writerscircleworkshops.jumbula.com/2023WinterWork...

Your story matters. Unlock your potential with daily video lessons from bestselling ghostwriter Tom Bromley, and finish your first draft in just 3 months. Learn more →

Creating Complex Characters

Dive into character development in this class, where students learn to add real human depth to their characters. By creating detailed backstories and understanding life-altering scenes, students will move beyond standard roles to develop characters whose personal traits make their story roles not only feasible but essential.

Website: https://litreactor.com/classes/creating-complex-character...

The Creative Writing Project

Contemporary Arts Center

The Creative Writing Project is a series of workshops tailored for adult writers at all levels. It provides a platform to delve into creative writing, supported by a community of writers and educators. Each month-long series features guidance and instruction from a diverse group of local and published writers.

Website: https://www.contemporaryartscenter.org/discover/programs/...

Bring Your Book to Life

This 10-week live webinar series is designed to help participants write, publish, and monetize their non-fiction books. It provides guidance on taking a book idea to the first draft in just 10 weeks, offers strategies for efficient writing, and helps in structuring and titling the book to resonate with the target audience. The program also includes a private book writing consultation session with Lisa Tener, personalized feedback on outlines, and advice on finding the right tone and structure for the book.

Website: https://www.lisatener.com/book/

Prerequisites: Before the first weekly class, you should have a book concept, content and structure.

How To Write A Book Online

Writers Write

This course provides a personalized learning experience for aspiring authors, focusing on turning ideas into plots, creating memorable characters, and the art of show-not-tell in writing. It includes eight 45-minute Skype sessions with a writing coach, immediate access to 60 modules, a printable workbook and PDF course, and practical exercises with feedback. The course is designed to be engaging and interactive, ensuring students receive personalized guidance and support in their writing journey.

Website: https://www.writerswrite.co.za/product/how-to-write-a-book/

The Write Your Memoir Course

UK Writers College

Ideal for anyone with a life story to tell, this course guides you through crafting a compelling memoir. With the support of a published writer, you'll learn traditional editing techniques, find your voice, structure your story, and start your manuscript with a 10,000-word target. The course includes seven modules with personalized feedback, fitting around your schedule over a 12-month period​​.

Website: https://www.ukwriterscollege.co.uk/write-your-memoir-cour...

The Classic Storytelling Course

The Novelry

This self-paced, year-long course consists of 55 lessons and includes a 45-minute coaching session. It focuses on developing storytelling skills, creating compelling characters, and constructing engaging storylines. With access to over 40 live classes and workshops a month, it's ideal for writers at all stages, including beginners, and is designed by a Booker Prize-listed author​​.

Website: https://www.thenovelry.com/courses/the-classic-course

The 100-Day Book Program

The Write Practice

This transformative online program guides aspiring authors to complete a book in 100 days. It provides daily writing inspiration, weekly lessons, and regular check-ins with a book coach. Participants are motivated by a $100 incentive for meeting deadlines and finishing their book​​​​​​​​​​​​.

Website: https://thewritepractice.com/writeabook/?sc_ref=4RKhS2SIk...

Enchanting Copywriting

Designed for small business owners and freelancers, this self-paced, practical course focuses on writing persuasive sales pages without the sleaze. It offers a blend of video tutorials, activities, templates, and examples to enhance copywriting skills, emphasizing persuasive techniques, structuring sales pages, and avoiding common mistakes​​.

Website: https://www.enchantingmarketing.com/copywriting-course/

Freelance and Feature Writing

London School of Journalism

This course offers 12 lessons and 30 exercises over 9-15 months, focusing on modern freelance writing. It's flexible, catering to individual interests and expertise, with many students publishing work by course end. Ideal for those seeking to balance writing with another career or as a standalone profession​​​​.

Website: https://www.lsj.org/courses/distance-learning/freelance-a...

How to choose an adult creative writing class

Looking to build your writing skillset, learn more about your genre, or finally finish that book you’ve been working on? You’re in the right place. That’s why we built this directory of the best creative writing courses.

However, creative writing classes aren’t one size fit all. If you’re planning to join an adult creative writing class in particular, you’ll want to make sure that it matches what you’re seeking to learn about the genre.

So make sure to consider the following questions when you’re researching adult writing courses:

• Who is the instructor? How many years of experience do they have in writing books?
• Is there something in particular you’d like to learn in a writing class for adults? Does this course include it?
• How long is the course, and where is it taught?
• How much does the adult writing course cost? Does it fit into your budget?

More creative writing resources

Whether you’re a new or established author, there are always evergreen resources out there to how to get a headstart on writing books. 

Free online materials

• Creative Writing Prompts (resource)
• Book Title Generator (resource)
• Character Name Generator (resource)
• Plot Generator (resource)
• How to Write a Novel (blog post)
• How to Edit a Book (blog post)

Recommended books

• For writers in the UK:  Writers' & Artists' Yearbook  
• For writers in the US:  Writer’s Market 2020

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Best Online Creative Writing Classes

Masterclass is our best overall writing course to learn the art of writing

We independently evaluate all recommended products and services. If you click on links we provide, we may receive compensation. Learn more .

Creative writing is often focused around writing fiction (but may also include nonfiction), which can feature any type of writing from poems to short stories, novels, and more. Online creative writing classes help you learn how to become a better storyteller, produce completed manuscripts, and publish your work. Since the classes takes place over the internet, you can study anywhere. The best online creative writing classes offer a rich curriculum, provide a good value for the cost, and are taught by experienced professionals.

Here, we've rounded up our top picks for prospective students to learn about creative writing from the comfort of their own homes. Some online courses even offer certifications upon completion to pursue creative writing as a career. Compare top options to find the best price range, topics, and class schedule to help you get started. 

Best Online Creative Writing Classes of 2023

• Best Overall: Neil Gaiman Teaches the Art of Storytelling
• Best for Beginners: Beginning Writer’s Workshop by ed2go
• Best for Certification: Coursera's Creative Writing Specialization by Wesleyan University
• Best Live Class: Creative Writing 101 by Gotham Writers
• Best for Writing Critique: UCLA Extension’s Introduction to Creative Writing
• Best for Creative Non-Fiction: Udemy’s Creative Non-Fiction Writing - You Can’t Make This Stuff Up!
• Best Ivy League Class: Harvard's Fundamentals of Fiction
• Our Top Picks
• Neil Gaiman Teaches the Art of Storytelling
• Beginning Writer’s Workshop by ed2go
• Coursera's Creative Writing Specialization by Wesleyan University
• Creative Writing 101 by Gotham Writers
• UCLA Extension’s Introduction to Creative Writing
• Udemy’s Creative Non-Fiction Writing - You Can’t Make This Stuff Up!
• Harvard's Fundamentals of Fiction
• See More (4)

Final Verdict

• Compare Classes

Can I Teach Myself Creative Writing?

Can you make a living off of creative writing, methodology, best overall : neil gaiman teaches the art of storytelling.

 MasterClass

• Cost: $180 for annual Masterclass membership
• Length: Approximately 5 hours
• Certificate: No

Neil Gaiman Teaches the Art of Storytelling took our top spot because the course has a robust curriculum and is taught by an award-winning author.

Short, engaging videos

Access content from your computer or smartphone

Easy-to-digest video lectures

No instructor feedback

Masterclass subscription required

No student collaboration

We like this class because students learn many creative writing techniques from a world-renowned fiction writer. The course is a series of 19 short video lectures, which include:

• Truth in Fiction
• Sources of Inspiration
• Finding Your Voice
• Dialogue and Character
• Character Case Study
• Worldbuilding
• Dealing with Writer's Block
• The Writer's Responsibilities

As you watch the nearly five hours of content, you'll learn the fundamentals of writing stories (including how to make your story feel real), find unique angles to explore, develop your writing voice, create compelling plots, characters, settings, and dialogue, and edit and improve your work. You’ll also write short stories, understand different writing genres, and learn tips for getting unstuck when you have writer’s block. 

This course of study is self-paced, so you won’t receive any feedback on your writing. You can access the videos on your smartphone or computer.

There are no requirements to enroll. However, you can only access the class if you have a Masterclass subscription, which currently costs $180 for the year. Once you have a Masterclass membership you can take any course offered. If you’re dissatisfied with the learning platform, you can email customer service within 30 days of purchase for a full refund.

Best for Beginners : Beginning Writer’s Workshop by ed2go

• Length: 24 hours

Beginning Writer’s Workshop by ed2go gives new writers the foundational information they need to complete a piece of creative work.

Rich curriculum including various genres, literary techniques, the writing process, and more

Instructor and peer feedback

Budget-friendly

Course access ends after six weeks

Must adhere to a schedule to participate in discussions

Not all course requirements are included in enrollment

We like Beginning Writer’s Workshop because it’s designed to quickly turn a true beginner into a confident writer with a publication-worthy piece. When you finish the six-week, 12-lesson course, you’ll know how to:

• Distinguish between and speak to the different writing genres and subgenres
• Use various literary techniques and devices like similes, metaphors, imagery, etc.
• Develop plots, characters, and other story elements
• Navigate the entire writing process, including pre-writing, drafting, editing, and finalizing a piece
• Peer-edit the creative work of others
• Combat writer’s block
• Go through the publishing process

The class includes 24 hours of instructional content. For the first six weeks, you’ll get access to two new self-paced lessons per week. Lectures include reading material and videos.

There’s also an online discussion board where you can post questions and talk about the lectures. Discussions only remain open for two weeks after a lesson is released. So, while you can study when it fits your schedule, you’ll want to keep up with the work.

The course is facilitated by Carmen Marquez, a journalist, writer, and teacher. They’ll reply to any inquiries you post on the discussion board within 24 to 48 hours. You’ll also have the opportunity to get feedback on your writing from the instructor and other students. 

The class costs $149. A new round of the course begins every month, so you can get started when it’s convenient for you.

Best for Certification : Coursera's Creative Writing Specialization by Wesleyan University

• Cost: $0 or $49 per month to unlock more features
• Length: Approximately 11 hours
• Certificate: Yes

Coursera's Creative Writing Specialization by Wesleyan University is our choice for this category because it offers a certificate upon completion, allowing students to use the knowledge gained for their career path. As a bonus, this class is free, so students can access content from the school at no cost.

Access to free content from a well-regarded school

Self-paced study

Free trial and "audits" allow students to view material before purchasing

No feedback or interaction without a subscription to Coursera

Does not include lessons on literary style

May take up to six months to complete

The course is hosted by Coursera, an online learning platform. Coursera gives you the option to “audit” the class at no charge, allowing you to view all of the included videos and reading materials without subscribing to the platform.

The specialization includes four classes you can audit:

• Creative Writing: The Craft of Plot
• Creative Writing: The Craft of Character
• Creative Writing: The Craft of Setting and Description
• Creative Writing: The Craft of Style
• Capstone: Your Story

Each class features a few hours of content, and you can take them in any order and on your own time.

As you go through the lessons, you’ll learn how to:

• Develop a story with a beginning, middle, and end
• Bring the players in your tale to life
• Create a detailed world with your words
• Refine your piece via the editing process

The course of study has multiple instructors, all with backgrounds in English or creative writing.

If you want a more interactive experience that includes writing assignments, access to a discussion board, or feedback on your work, you’ll have to purchase a Coursera membership for $49 per month. The company offers a seven-day free trial, so you can test it out before buying.

Having full access will also allow you to obtain a certificate of completion once you’ve finished the specialization.

Best Live Class : Creative Writing 101 by Gotham Writers

Gotham Writers

• Cost: $319 plus $25 registration fee
• Length: 18 hours

Creative Writing 101 by Gotham Writers is our best pick for live classes because it features weekly live lectures via Zoom. Students are also offered feedback for their writing while learning about both fiction and nonfiction.

Live, interactive meetings

Writing feedback available

Includes both fiction and nonfiction

Course is somewhat pricey

Registration fee required

No certificate offered upon completion

We like this class since you can learn about creative writing in a fully interactive environment and get your questions answered in real time. The course is designed specifically for newer writers or experienced writers looking for a refresher.

The six-week class meets for three hours a week and features:

• An introduction to creative writing
• A discussion on fiction writing to include types of fiction, components of the genre—such as plot, characters, and point of view—and how to write it
• A discussion on the different types of nonfiction, including narrative nonfiction, memoirs, and personal essays
• Guidance on how to find story ideas, cultivate good writing habits, and get past writer’s block

Between lectures, you’ll also complete writing assignments and get feedback on your work. The course has multiple instructors, all with education and experience in writing.

You must be 18 or older to take the course. The class is offered on various days and times, so you’ll have to look online to see which option fits your schedule.

Creative Writing 101 costs $319 for the online or Zoom classes. The company also charges a $25 registration fee per term, but you might be able to find discounts or promotions to reduce the cost.

Best for Writing Critique : UCLA Extension’s Introduction to Creative Writing

UCLA Extension 

UCLA Extension’s Introduction to Creative Writing is our choice as best for writing critique because the class features small, weekly breakout sessions to workshop student writing.

Small group workshops for detailed feedback

Guest lecturers

Offers lessons on writing in multiple styles

Limite to 12 students; not always available for enrollment

Requires students to be present for 3-hour weekly class

This class allows you to learn from and work closely with instructors, writing experts, and other students. The course is limited to 12 students and is designed to help learners explore creative writing.

The Introduction to Creative Writing course runs for six weeks and meets live over Zoom for three hours weekly. In each class meeting, you’ll start in a breakout session to discuss the writing assignment and how you’re feeling as a writer. Then, you’ll transition into a lecture with a guest expert about topics like fiction, nonfiction, screenwriting, and poetry.

Throughout the class, you’ll:

• Experiment with writing in different styles
• Learn how to critique the work of other writers
• Network with other creatives
• Be inspired to write and learn more about the craft

The course has several different instructors who are all accomplished writers.

Since this is a beginner course, you won’t get graded on the writing you produce. Instead, you’ll be evaluated based on assignment completion, the feedback you provide to your peers, and overall participation.

The course costs $485, and if you need to withdraw, you must do so within two weeks of the start date to receive a refund.

Best for Creative Non-Fiction : Udemy’s Creative Non-Fiction Writing - You Can’t Make This Stuff Up!

• Cost: $19.99
• Length: Approximately 2 hours

Udemy’s Creative Non-Fiction Writing won this category because the class specifically focuses on creative nonfiction. While the class is short, it's also the most affordable on our list, and it's a great introduction to the topic for curious students.

Specific focus on creative nonfiction

Most affordable option for beginner writers

Certificate of completion given

No writing feedback available

Only 2 hours of lectures available

Not in-depth on each topic compared to similar courses

If you’re interested in writing true stories rather than fiction but still want that creative element, you might want to consider creative nonfiction, like personal essays and memoirs. We like this class because it helps you dive into the world of creative nonfiction at a budget-conscious price.

The $19.99 course is self-paced and includes nine modules and 26 video lectures. The modules include:

• What is Creative Nonfiction?
• Writing the Vignette
• Using Sensory Language
• Writing in Scenes
• Using a Plot Diagram
• Making the Personal Universal

During the nearly two hours of lectures, you’ll learn the skills required to write creative nonfiction pieces, such as memoirs and essays, the basic building blocks of storytelling, such as plots, characters, and scenes, and several writing techniques and literary devices. You’ll also learn: 

• How to find your writer’s voice and be more confident
• How to turn your personal experience into a compelling story that will appeal to the masses
• The revision process

Although you won’t get any feedback from your instructor, the class includes writing projects you can complete independently and quizzes to review your learning. To supplement the lectures, you’ll also have access to downloadable resources like templates and graphics.

Your instructor is the creator of the class, Trace Crawford. Crawford has more than 20 years of writing and teaching experience.

You don’t have to meet any particular requirements to take this course. It’s designed for any curious writer. 

In case you’re unhappy with the class, it’s backed by a 30-day money-back guarantee. When you finish the last lecture, you’ll receive a certificate of completion. You’ll also have lifetime access to the content.

Best Ivy League Class : Harvard's Fundamentals of Fiction

• Cost: $3,100
• Length: 5 months

Harvard's Fundamentals of Fiction is designed for intermediate to advanced writers interested in applying their skills to creative fiction. This is not a course for beginners, but rather an in-depth study that concludes with each student finishing their own short story or the first chapter of a novel.

Students learn creative writing from Ivy League professors

Offers formal experience in creative writing

Students will complete their own short story or the first chapter of a novel by course end

Intended for graduate students with strong writing skills

Considerably more expensive than others

Students must enroll in degree program

Harvard's Fundamentals of Fiction course is a great choice for graduate-level students to focus on their creative writing skills. The course covers several topics, including:

• Plot analysis
• Structure analysis
• Fundamentals of character
• Fundamentals of dialogue
• Showing versus telling
• Point of view
• Building a narrative foundation
• Using scene structure to craft stories

The course is split into two sections: Students study plot and structure in various creative writing works, then apply this knowledge in the second half of the course to write their own short story or the first chapter of a novel.

As an Ivy League class, online students receive all the benefits of professor feedback and student collaboration that they'd receive in-class. However, students must enroll with the Harvard Department of Continuing Education to register.

There are countless online creative writing classes available, so it may be hard to choose the best course for you. Investigate any online creative writing class before you enroll to select an option that can help you finish and publish your creative masterpiece.

However, Neil Gaiman Teaches the Art of Storytelling is an excellent place to start your search. The content comes from an award-winning author and is designed to inspire you, help you develop your voice, and teach you new creative writing techniques.

Compare the Best Online Creative Writing Classes

Frequently asked questions, what do you learn in an online creative writing class.

Creative writing classes teach topics like genres of writing, outlining ideas, developing a plot and characters, and storytelling. Specific classes vary from course to course, but many include lessons about editing your work and establishing productive writing habits. The class may also include a peer-critique component to improve your own editing skills by reviewing other writers' work.

Should New Writers Take an Online Creative Writing Class?

New writers can and should take an online creative writing class. Some classes are designed especially for beginners so that learners can get the foundational information that they need. Taking an entry-level class can help you decide if creative writing is right for you and what direction to take as a writer.

How Can an Online Creative Writing Class Help Me Improve My Writing?

An online creative writing class can help you improve your writing in several ways. You'll learn about new literary techniques, refresh your knowledge about writing basics, find your unique voice, overcome writer's block, refine your work, and establish productive habits. An online creative writing class may also include personalized feedback from the instructor to hone your skills further.

How Much Do Online Creative Writing Classes Cost?

Online creative writing classes vary in cost. You can access some courses for free, while others are priced at several hundred dollars or more.

Are Online Creative Writing Classes Worth It?

Depending on your career goals , online creative writing classes can be worth your time, effort, and money. If you’re a hobbyist writer, it probably makes sense to stick with short, budget-friendly courses. But if you’re a writer by trade or would like to become a professional writer, it may be worth investing a more substantial number of hours and dollars into your development.

It's possible to teach yourself the fundamentals of creative writing when it comes to practicing narratives and storytelling, and many writers start without a formal education. However, creative writing classes can help you hone in on skills like developing characters and plots, writing in different styles, editing your work, and more.

Many writers and authors make their living from creative writing. Creative writers may focus on producing books, or they may write poetry, short stories, biographies, and other fictional or non-fictional works. The best creative writing classes can also teach you about submitting your work to publishers to develop a career .

We closely evaluated 10 online creative writing classes before making our selections. We considered the course curriculum, instructor credibility, and value. We also accounted for any unique features.

All of our choices offer a rigorous course of study for a fair price and are designed to help creative writers hone their craft and get ready for publication.

Alexander Spatari / Getty Images

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Udemy. " Trace Crawford Profile ."

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• Graduate Division
• College of Liberal and Professional Studies

Courses for Fall 2023

To join a course, click here to register via path@penn., english 3010.301 introduction to creative writing: poetry and fiction ahmad almallah mw 12-1:30pm, add to cart.

This introductory workshop explores the main tools of writing poetry and fiction. Thematically, we’ll be reading a number of different examples to learn why poets such as Gwendolyn Brooks and Sylvia Plath turn to fiction as a way to revitalize their poetic practice, and why novelists such as Herman Hesse and Herta Müller turn to poetry. And we’ll read writers who work in both genres, such Zbigniew Herbert and Salim Barakat. Students will learn to use the main tools of fiction, such as characterization, dialogue, and description, as well as the forms of poetry, such as sound, image, and enjambment. The workshop also aims at encouraging a philosophical exploration of the border between reality and imagination in the form of writing poems and short fiction pieces.

English 3014.301 Introduction to Creative Writing: Fiction and Essay Sam Apple T 5:15-8:15pm 

The scene—a contained moment or event that takes place within the larger structure of a story, essay, or piece of long-form prose—is a fundamental building block of creative writing. In this workshop-style class, we'll focus on both fiction and nonfiction techniques with an emphasis on how to write well-paced scenes with sharp dialogue and compelling action. Students will participate in weekly scene-writing exercises and also learn how to weave scenes together to form complete short stories and personal essays. Weekly assignments will include critiquing the work of fellow students and reading selected stories and essays.

English 3016.301 Introduction to Creative Writing: Fiction and Memoir Abbey Mei Otis M 1:45-4:45

This introductory level course explores prose narratives on the spectrum from the invented to the remembered. We will write and read works that offer a variety of answers to the question, “Did this really happen?” (Definitely not, maybe, sort of, definitely yes, not yet.) We will read a range of flash fiction, fairy tales, magical realism, speculative memoir, and personal essays, as we try to discern what kinds of truths are most resonant, and how to contain them within the stories we create. Through weekly writing exercises students will hone the skills of imagining, remembering, and close observation. Within our class we will consider what it means to belong within a writing community, as we push each other to become more curious and nuanced observers of the world around us.

English 3019.301 Introduction to Creative Writing: Sports Narratives Jamie-Lee Josselyn  M 1:45-4:45 

Sports shape our lives as individuals, as families, and as communities. Whether a runner completing a marathon for charity, a high school hopeful’s quest for a scholarship, or a pro team clinching—or falling short of—a title, the highs and lows of an athletic journey, when combined with literary devices, insightful reflection, and occasionally just the right amount of indulgence, make for stories that teach and inspire. Even those of us who are true amateur athletes, exclusively spectators, or even sports skeptics can tap into the emotions that sports evoke. And as we have seen recently, as well as throughout history, sports provide a crucial platform for social, political, and cultural issues via circumstances both on and off the court, field, or track. A key question we’ll ask throughout the semester is: how can storytelling enable us to leave sports better than we found them? Over the course of the semester, students in our workshop will compose a personal essay from the perspective of an athlete or fan, a reported piece on an athlete, team, or event, and a short story that centers around athletics. For their final project, students will complete a longer piece in one of these modes, along with a revision of an earlier draft. As students develop their own sports stories, we will be joined by in-class guests and we will read the work of impactful storytellers like Toni Cade Bambara, Roger Angell, John McPhee, Leslie Jamison, Hanif Abdurraqib, Mirin Fader, and Penn’s own Buzz Bissinger, Sam and Max Apple, and Dan McQuade. We will also look to professional athletes whose words and gestures have made an impact like Kathrine Switzer, Mary Cain, Simone Biles, Kevin Love, and Colin Kaepernick. And, of course, we’ll watch Rocky .

English 3025.401 Introduction to Creative Writing: Writing Asian American Lives Piyali Bhattacharya TR 1:45pm-3:15pm 

“ Kids know more about dinosaurs than they do about Asian Americans.” So says Dr. Karen Su, founding director of PAACH (Pan-Asian American Community House) at Penn, and though she’s talking about children’s literature, her sentiment might apply to adults, too. Who are the Asian Americans? What does it mean to be non-Black POC in this country? How do religion, ethnicity, gender, class, nationality, and immigration status define this group? How do we discuss all this while being inclusive of both “us” and “them”? This course will explore these questions through the lens of an introductory fiction, nonfiction, and poetry creative writing workshop. We’ll follow the traditional workshop format of critiquing each other’s short stories, essays, and poems in class, along with close reading works by authors as established as Jhumpa Lahiri, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Amy Tan, and as contemporary as Lisa Ko, Bushra Rehman, Ocean Vuong, and Mira Jacob. We’ll use these texts as springboards to examine representations of identity, inclusion, and exclusion, and we’ll be invited to consider these representations in the media around us as well as in our local communities. Finally, we’ll think through how we can contribute to discussions of these topics with our own artistic voices.  This course is cross-listed with Asian American Studies 1200.

English 3104.401 Poetry Lab Syd Zolf  T 1:45-4:45 

There’s a reason Plato banned poets from his utopian Republic: poetry is wild, uncontainable, ungovernable. The poetic is a feral force acting on and in language to upend fixed ideas and categories, ways of thinking and seeing. In the poetry lab, we’ll perform experiments to help you explore and expand your poetic potential. Students are welcome in the workshop no matter what your experience with the poetic has been. You can even be a prose writer or an artist interested in working with the force of the poetic to improve the rhythm, diction, sound, and arrangement of your writing. In this course, you’ll read and respond to a wide range of poetic works, write every week, be workshopped by your peers, and work on a poetic portfolio that is just as wild as you can be. Cross-listed with Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies.

English 3111.302 Interventionalist Tactics: Writing Off the Page Kenneth Goldsmith R 1:45-4:45

This class functions on one very simple premise: you will be required to write anywhere except for on the page. By studying the theory and practices of situationism, graffiti, and culture jamming, we will explore ways of detourning traditional methods of writing into an act imbued with alternative modes of social, political, and aesthetic value: language as a medium and method of disruption and displacement; language as a way of upending normative modes of discourse and reception; language that insists on social interaction. You may intervene subtly or grossly, loudly or silently; your work may be visible or invisible, obviously blatant or subtly imperceptible. You may write between the cracks of sidewalks, on the leaves of trees, beneath puddles of water, or across the internet; you may shout from the rooftops of buildings or set up a short-range radio station to broadcast locally; you may jam frequencies, plant internet memes, or alter Wikipedia entries. Anything goes, as long as it’s not on paper.

English 3120.401 The Translation of Poetry/The Poetry of Translation Taije Silverman and Ahmad Almallah M 1:45-4:45 

In this class we will study multiple translations of famous poems by major world poets such as Shu Ting, Gabriela Mistral, Mahmoud Darwish, Anna Akhmatova, Aimé Césaire, and Dahlia Ravikovitch. The curriculum will be tailored to the backgrounds of students who enroll, and all are welcome. Alternating between creative writing workshops and critical discussions, the course will also study the political and geographical frames that shape each text. For example, our translations of Aimé Césaire will be informed by his scholarship on colonialism, and a sense of China's Cultural Revolution will contextualize translations of Shu Ting. Conversations about history will become conversations about poetry. While essays on translation theory by writers including Borges, Keene, Carson, Benjamin, and Bakhtin will shape our approaches, this course will center around the practice of translation. Using multiple translations of major poems, we will create our own new versions, sometimes writing parallel texts and adaptations, too. Assignments will also include an oral presentation, an exchange of letters with a classmate, and a short creative essay.

English 3205.301 Science Fiction  Abbey Mei Otis W 5:15pm-815pm

Science fiction as a genre is full of contradictions. It is seen as a literature specifically of Western, scientific, empirical culture, but it also resonates uniquely with marginalized experiences. It is denigrated as lowbrow and nonliterary while also being held up as the “literature of ideas.” It is a site of rich experimentation and also commercialization. In this class we will grapple with these contradictions as craftspeople, seeking to situate ourselves within the history of the genre in order to push our imaginations in new directions. We will focus on craft concepts particular to SF—worldbuilding, extrapolation, defamiliarization—as well as those more general to prose narratives—scene and structure, tension, pacing, voice, and point of view. We begin from the position that content is inseparable from aesthetic, that language is as important to the vitality of “genre” writing as to any other literary mode. Additionally, we will consider how SF has been shaped by the people both within its community (readers, fans) and without (literary gatekeepers, scientists, tech entrepreneurs). We will explore the idea of literary genres and labels as something porous, fluid, insufficient but also essential. Throughout the semester students will write in a variety of science fictional and speculative modes, seeking to answer the question: if science fiction is the narrative of the future, then how do we create the science fictions necessary to bring the world we want into being?

English 3207.301  I Was a Teenage Monster: Coming of Age in Speculative Writing   J †Johnson R 5:15pm-8:15pm

This writing workshop explores representations of adolescence, growing up strange, and becoming other. How can fantastic exaggeration and conceit accurately represent coming-of-age experiences and the trials and tribulations of teenhood? How does becoming a monster map onto becoming an adult? How can we draw from cross-media representations of teenage monsters to write our own monsters? What do the monsters we make say about our societal and cultural concerns? We’ll examine monstering in TV, film, comics, novels, and poems, building on references students already have on hand. We will also read and discuss monster theory. Along the way, we will write and revise our own speculative stories, poems, or essays of the strange and the monstrous.

English 3208.301 Advanced Fiction Writing: Short Fiction Max Apple T 1:45-4:45pm 

The class will be conducted as a seminar. Every student will write four stories during the semester; each story will be discussed by the group. The instructor will, from time to time, suggest works of fiction that he hopes will be illustrative and inspirational but there will be no required books. Attendance and active class participation are essential. 

English 3211.301 Fiction Workshop: Friends and Frenemies Piyali Bhattacharya TR 3:30pm-5pm 

How many kinds of love exist among friends? What is the difference between friendship and romance? In what ways do the ideals of femme, masc, trans, and cis complicate friendship? What are sisterhoods and what are bromances? What is a frenemy? In what ways do we dissolve the boundaries between queer friendships? And what role does family play in making friends: that is, can one ever dilute blood? What do race and class have to do with ardor and amity? How do we define our friends outside and inside our communities? This fiction workshop will explore not only how we experience friendship, but also how we write it. We will examine novels famous for their takes on friendship (Toni Morrison’s Sula , Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend , Tanwi Nandini Islam’s Bright Lines , Nicole Dennis Benn’s Patsy , Justin Torres’s We the Animals ) and interrogate the sticky, blurry lines between friendship and love, between loyalty to a person and loyalty to a community. We’ll also be writing our own short stories, creating characters who have to make difficult decisions because of their friendships and particularly because of relationships that teeter on the edge of fidelity and fondness. 

English 3300.301 Journalistic Writing: Exploring the Genre Matt Katz M 5:15pm-8:15pm 

Journalism is the practice of asking a simple question—What’s happening in the world around us?—and turning that answer into a story. The form journalism takes has always changed dramatically amid technological innovations. News about World War II arrived via radio and newspaper; TV brought visual images of the Vietnam War; the internet opened up new avenues of content delivery, blurring lines between the audio, written, and visual forms of traditional media and upending how outlets like  The New York Times  and NPR deliver news. Journalists for legacy media outlets continue to tell critically important and compelling stories, but their reporting is increasingly displaced by podcasts and WhatsApp, TikTok and Substack. This disruption means a wider array of stories are being told in a multitude of interesting ways, but it also makes deciphering accurate information from partisan falsehoods far more complicated. In this class, we will explore the implications of journalistic disruption for civil society and democratic institutions. Required reading and listening will be high-quality journalism that holds true to the core tenets of news reporting: to give voice to the voiceless, hold the powerful to account, and connect communities. This workshop-based course explores what makes a good news story, including gathering facts, interviewing, writing ledes and kickers, and crafting narratives. And it examines how journalism is practiced in various media, including newspapers, TV, magazines, digital outlets, social media, and podcasts. While it’s geared toward building savvy and sophisticated news consumers in an increasingly complex and multidimensional media environment, students will also apply what they’ve learned and act as journalists by doing research, conducting interviews, and writing articles. Students will be required to create short audio stories that include recorded sound, basic editing techniques, and effective story structure.

English 3307.301 Creative Nonfiction Writing Max Apple R 1:45-4:45pm 

Each student will write three essays and the class will offer criticism and appreciation of each. There will be some discussion of and instruction in the form, but the course will be based on the student writing. Attendance and participation required.

English 3308.301 Cooking with Words Gabrielle Hamilton T 1:45-4:45pm 

This writing workshop, taught by eminent New York Times Magazine food columnist and restaurateur Gabrielle Hamilton, will be devoted to the topic of food, although it is not, strictly speaking, a course on food writing. Instead, we will read a manageable and engaging syllabus of writers who have used food in their work—writers who may include John Berger, KD Lang, and Ogden Nash—and then craft our own original writing about non-food topics through food. Have you ever spent the night in jail and eaten the bologna sandwich and warm half-pint of milk they leave for you in the holding cell? Let’s go at that story through the bologna sandwich. Ever ended a friendship over the way they spoke to the waitress who delivered the food? Hidden your lunch at school so no one would tease you about what was in your lunchbox? Overspent on a bottle of wine to prove to the clerk  you “knew what you were doing”? We’ll use the food story as the catalyst for the larger story, with a focus on getting the “weight” and the “freight” of each aspect of the story just right.

English 3350.301 Advanced Nonfiction Writing: Narrative Nonfiction Buzz Bissinger  R 5:15-8:15pm and  F 1:45-4:45pm (every other week)

This is a course for students who love the written word and desire to advance their ability to write and craft narrative nonfiction. Writing will be emphasized, and so will avenues of storytelling through such components as creating a narrative spine, building a dramatic plot, character development, scene-setting, and use of quotes without compromise of facts. Students must be willing to do reportage, since narrative nonfiction cannot exist without it. There will be heavy concentration on writing assignments and workshopping. We will also examine the works of authors such as Katharine Boo, Lillian Ross, Gay Talese, David Foster Wallace, Truman Capote, John Hersey, JR Moehringer, and Buzz Bissinger (instructor), the author of three bestselling books, including Friday Night Lights and most recently The Mosquito Bowl . Bissinger has been a contributing editor at Vanity Fair for nearly three decades and is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Students who have taken this course have gone on to such publications as the New York Times, the Washington Post, Bloomberg, Forbes , and Fortune . Class attendance and participation are essential. The course will meet on Thursdays 5:15-8:15 and Fridays 1:45-4:45pm on the following days: August 31; September 1, 14, 15, 28, 29; October 10, 11, 26, 27; November 9, 10, 30; and December 7. The instructor will be available for one-on-one discussions during the week of October 23 and always available by email.

English 3353.301 Advanced Nonfiction Writing: Xfic Jay Kirk M 5:15-8:15pm  

This advanced creative nonfiction workshop lets students publish their final pieces on Penn’s online literary journal  Xfic .  Xfic  is an innovative nonfiction journal for undergrad writers who want to test the boundaries of longform and earn course credit in English 3353.   The type of stories  Xfic  most wants to publish are ones where the writer is in pursuit of immediate experience. Reality as it unfolds before your eyes. Then, in workshop, we will take the raw material of experience and transform it into compelling narrative through innovative and experimental techniques.  Xfic  seeks writers seeking new ways to discover meaning, who seek to be more daring, more performative, more excellent, more virtuosic, funnier and weirder, and, most of all, who seek to directly engage and  invent  reality at the same time. Come and join us!  XFic  is sponsored by the Kelly Writers House and the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania. For questions about the class, please contact Jay Kirk at [email protected]

English 3408.301 Long-Form Journalism Dick Polman W 1:45-4:45 

We’ll be reading and workshopping some of our most adventurous, pioneering nonfiction reporter/writers. At the same time, we’ll also shepherding semester-long projects that are due during exam period. The so-called “New Journalists” have thrived ever since the iconoclastic 1960s—the era when the craft was first developed and practiced. The term itself is very imprecise—the “New Journalists” were fiercely independent of each other, employing a wide range of reportorial and stylistic techniques not previously seen in American nonfiction—and their styles differ. But they’ve shared one fundamental trait. In the words of Marc Weingarten, who authored a book about the original New Journalists ( The Gang that Wouldn’t Write Straight ), they’ve all aspired to practice “journalism that reads like fiction” yet “rings with the truth of reported fact.”  We’ll closely parse some of their work, not because they are products of long-distant eras, but precisely because their novelistic techniques—narrative storytelling, dramatic arcs and scenes, structural cliffhangers, shifting points of view, author’s voice, dialogue as action—are routinely employed by the best long-form journalists today. Indeed, many contemporary journalists take these techniques for granted, perhaps unaware of their origins.  But this is not just a reading course. The ultimate goal is for each student to take the best of these techniques and use them in the reporting and writing of a long-form nonfiction piece that is due at the semester’s end. Each student will nurture one project from September to early December. And during the semester, we will schedule the time to workshop these works in progress—with class feedback and feedback from the instructor, functioning as an editor would.

English 3411.301 The Arts and Popular Culture Anthony DeCurtis R 1:45-4:45pm 

This is a workshop-oriented course that will concentrate on all aspects of writing about artistic endeavor, including criticism, reviews, profiles, interviews and essays. For the purposes of this class, the arts will be interpreted broadly, and students will be able—and, in fact, encouraged—to write about both the fine arts and popular culture, including fashion, sports and comedy. Students will be doing a great deal of writing throughout the course, but the main focus will be a 3,000-word piece about an artist or arts organization in Philadelphia (or another location approved by the instructor) that will involve reporting, interviews and research. Potential subjects can run the full range from a local band to a museum, from a theater group to a designer, from a photographer to a sculptor.

English 3504.401 Across Forms Syd Zolf  and Sharon Hayes W 1:45-4:45pm

What if a poem spoke from inside a photograph? What if a sculpture unfurled a political manifesto? What if a story wasn’t just  like  a dance, but  was  a dance—or a key component of a video, drawing, performance, or painting? Many artists employ writing in their practices, but may not look at the texts they create  as  writing. And many writers have practices that go beyond the page and deserve attention as  art . I n this course, which is open to all students interested in art and writing, regardless of experience, students will develop multiple creative projects that integrate the forms, materials, and concerns of both art and writing. As a class we will employ critique  and  workshop, pedagogic methodologies from art and writing respectively, to support and interrogate cross-pollinations between writing and art practices. We will also study a field of artists and writers who are working with intersections between art and writing to create dynamic new ways of seeing, reading, and experiencing. Cross-listed with Fine Arts. Permission to enroll is required; please email a short description of your interest in the class to [email protected].

English 3510.301 Making Comics J.C. Cloutier and Rob Berry  TR 10:15-11:45am

This course is a creative writing workshop in the inexhaustible art of making comics. Open to both beginners and enthusiasts alike, the seminar will expose students to the unique language of comics and allow them to create their own stories in the medium. Through essential critical readings, practical homework, and lab assignments, students will develop an understanding of how text and sequential images create a unique kind of reading experience and storytelling. Over the course of the semester, students will take on a variety of roles in the making of comics (writing, illustrating, page layout, inking, character creation, and more), read groundbreaking comics theory and criticism, analyze now-classic and experimental comics, adapt a variety of prose and verse genres into comics and, ultimately, create a longer graphic narrative project as a group. A lthough this is not intended as a course in drawing, all students will be expected to explore comics storytelling through the combination of words and cartoons (don’t worry, stick figures are fine!). In-class reviews will give students direct insight into how certain choices of composition affect the storytelling process. During the first half of the semester, the course will rigorously combine theory and practice, navigating through a slew of different genres (e.g. poem, short story, journalism, memoir, etc.) and how these can be transmogrified into comics form. The second half will be dedicated to the production of the longer comic project.

English 3600.401 Screenwriting Kathy DeMarco Van Cleve M 1:45-4:45pm

Cross-listed with Cinema & Media Studies . 

English 3600.402 Screenwriting Scott Burkhardt W 1:45-4:45pm

English 3600.403 screenwriting scott burkhardt w 5:15-8:15pm, english 3601.401 advanced screenwriting kathy demarco van cleve w 1:45-4:45pm, english 3603.401 writing for television scott burkhardt r 5:15-8:15pm, english 3604.401 playwriting anne marie cammarato t r 10:15-11:45am.

Cross-listed with  Theatre Arts .

English 3606.401 Experimental Playwriting Brooke O’Harra MW 12pm-1:30pm 

In this course, students will write for theater and performance. Writers in the class will take cues from myriad experimental playwrights and performance artists who have challenged conventional ideas of what a script should look and sound like. Students will be asked to challenge how narrative is constructed, how characters are built, and what a setting can be. This class will push beyond the formal structures of the well-made play script and address how writers explore and reinvent form and language as a means for radical change in the field of performance. Some playwrights we will read include Gertrude Stein, Suzan-Lori Parks, Maria Irene Fornes, Robert O’Hara, Bryna Turner, Amina Henry, Kristen Kosmas, and Toshiki Okada. This class is ideal for playwrights, performers, screenwriters, and writers of experimental fiction.  Cross-listed with Theatre Arts . 

MLA COURSES  

English 9013 a slice of life: memoir writing kathryn watterson r 5:15-8:15pm in person.

This memoir workshop will shine light on the human experience as viewed through your personal lens. Memoir usually, but not always, is written in first-person from the author’s point of view. It is distinct from autobiography in that it’s not meant to tell a complete life story that’s chronologically and historically accurate. Instead, a memoir usually focuses on a significant aspect of your life, such as a relationship or a pivotal moment. During workshop sessions, you will identify the stories in your life that matter most to you. We will use meditation and visualization to help you access and write about these key events. We’ll discuss how description, dialogue, and action bring them to life on the page. Rough drafts and revisions will allow you to achieve the level of connection and introspection you intend. We will also find inspiration through books and stories by authors who exemplify the art and heart of personal narratives. We’ll see how memoir can illuminate larger cultural themes - from the inhumanity of war, to racism, misogyny, and economic inequality - as viewed through lived experiences. We will understand why the more individualized the story, the more universal it becomes. In our sessions, listening, full-participation discussions, in-class writing exercises, meditations, stretching and movement, visualizations, and peer review, workshops become vital experiences. The workload requires a daily practice of free writing, weekly personal responses to assigned readings, films and speakers, and ongoing work on two to three short personal essays/stories. We’ll make adjustments in the schedule, as needed, to keep the workload at a comfortable and flexible pace. If you have questions or concerns, contact [email protected].

English 9001 Fiction Workshop Stephanie Feldman T 5:15pm-8:15pm Online course

This course will investigate craft elements such as characterization, voice, world-building, conflict/tension, plot and narrative structure. How do we use these craft fundamentals in our own writing? When, if ever, do we disregard them? In our examination of craft tools, we’ll read and analyze contemporary fiction written by authors such as James Baldwin, Elif Batuman, Jhumpa Lahiri, Yiyun Li, Edna O’Brien, Helen Oyeyemi and George Saunders. In addition to reading and analysis, this course will feature intensive group workshops during which we share and discuss our works-in-progress with one another. This course will encourage students to write freely and to experiment with style, structure and content; it is open to writers of all levels of experience, including beginners.

Creative Writing

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Creative writing courses

Short and part-time courses with Oxford University

Need an extra push to finish your novel, poem or play? Want to explore new genres? Whether you're a beginner wondering where to start, or an experienced writer looking to extend your craft, we have a course for you.

Short courses

Our  short courses in creative writing  include in person and online live-time weekly classes, day and weekend schools and flexible online courses.

Courses cover all genres: fiction, poetry, memoir, creative nonfiction, drama, writing for young adults and critical reading. There are courses for beginners and options for those with experience. Class sizes are kept small to maximise interaction between you, your classmates and your tutor.

Credit earned from some of our short courses is transferable towards our  Certificate of Higher Education  – a part-time undergraduate course in which you study a main subject discipline, but also undertake study in other academic subjects.

• View all short courses in creative writing
• Ways to study: how our short courses work

Summer schools

Join us for one of our Oxford  creative writing summer courses , and spend a week or longer immersed in your craft. Accredited and non-accredited options are available; courses take place at Rewley House and at Oxford's historic colleges.

• Creative writing summer courses

Part-time Oxford University qualifications

From undergraduate level to advanced postgraduate study.

• The  Undergraduate Diploma in Creative Writing  is a two-year part-time course that helps you to strengthen your ability in four major areas of literary activity — prose, poetry, drama and analytical reading — while letting you specialise in the genre of your choice. Choose from two study options: regular in-person meetings in Oxford or mostly online, with a summer school in Oxford.
• The  Certificate of Higher Education  is a flexible, part-time programme which lets you study a main subject discipline (such as creative writing) while also undertaking study in other academic subjects. Ideal for lifelong learners, you can study what you want, when you want, how you want. The credits you obtain from taking short online courses, weekly classes and attendance at the Oxford University Summer School for Adults all count towards your final award.
• Delve deeper into creative writing with our MSt in Creative Writing – a two-year, part-time master's programme offering a unique combination of high contact hours, genre specialization, and critical and creative breadth, delivered in a clustered learning format of five residences, two guided retreats and one placement over two years.

Student spotlights

Charles bush.

Charles Bush published his debut young-adult novel thanks to the skills and experience gained from completing the Undergraduate Certificate of Higher Education.

Tahmina Maula

Tahmina worked as a senior manager in education before taking a career break to undertake the Undergraduate Diploma in Creative Writing.

Daisy Johnson

While studying the MSt in Creative Writing Daisy worked on a collection of short stories which would later become her debut book.

Upcoming courses

Chaucer's canterbury tales: text and context.

• Tue 16 Apr 2024 – 25 Jun 2024
• 11 meetings
• 4:30 – 5:30pm

Critical Reading (Online)

• Wed 17 Apr 2024 – 28 Jun 2024

Trollope, Eliot, Dickens and Hardy: Reading Victorian Fiction (Online)

Writing lives (online), reading and writing poetry.

• Mon 22 Apr 2024 – Mon 08 Jul 2024
• 10 meetings
• 7:00 – 9:00pm

Part-time award programmes

Part-time creative writing award-bearing courses for those looking to gain an Oxford qualification.

Undergraduate Diploma in Creative Writing

Mst in creative writing, undergraduate certificate of higher education.

• Creative Writing Programs
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• Prospective Students
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• Optional Summer Residency
• How to Write a Novel
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• Job Opportunities

CREATIVE WRITING

Introduction to Creative Writing

CRWR 200 2023 S Credits: 3

Techniques of and practice in multiple genres of writing, including fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, screenplay, stageplay, graphic forms, lyric forms, children's literature, and writing for new media. Manuscript submission is not required for admission.

BROWN-EVANS, TAYLOR

CRWR 200 2023 W Credits: 3

BROWN-EVANS, TAYLOR | HUSSAIN, TARIQ | TATER, MALLORY

This course is designed for students looking to develop their writing skills through an exploration of a variety of creative genres. Using a combination of lectures, active writing exercises, and in-depth assignments, students will be given the chance to explore a variety of topics and concepts designed to elevate their craft including constructing story arcs, handling structure, character development, image-building, point of view and creating effective dialogue. Genres to be explored include fiction, creative nonfiction (including memoir, personal essay, profile), poetry, songwriting, screenwriting, and playwriting. This course is an inspiring and fun introduction to the world of creative writing and is sure to get your creative juices flowing. This class is an in-person class, although classes are recorded and may be attended asynchronously.

This course is designed for students looking to develop their creative writing skills through an exploration of a variety of creative writing genres including fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, songwriting, screenwriting and more. Students will have the chance to explore a variety of topics and concepts designed to elevate their craft such as constructing story arcs, character development, image building, managing dialogue. This course will consist of video lectures and online modules with weekly writing exercises. Students will also engage in readings and some longer length writing assignments (in genres of their choosing) all of which will contribute to a regular writing practice and an end-of-term portfolio of work they can be proud of. Students will be able to complete the requirements for this course asynchronously. There will also be some synchronous activities such as peer-to-peer sharing “draft days,” discussion groups, etc. and though attendance is encouraged for these sessions, students will not be graded on their participation in these events. Note that students are required to submit new work only for this course. CRWR 200 is an inspiring and fun introduction to the world of creative writing and is sure to get your creative juices flowing.

This course is designed for students looking to develop their creative writing skills through an exploration of a variety of creative writing genres including fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, songwriting, screenwriting and more. Students will have the chance to explore a variety of topics and concepts designed to elevate their craft such as constructing story arcs, character development, image building, managing dialogue. Students will engage in readings, weekly writing exercises, and some longer length writing assignments (in genres of their choosing) in order to maintain a regular writing practice. By the end of the course, students will have amassed a solid body of creative work—a portfolio!—that they can be proud of with work they can continue to revise and draw inspiration from after the term ends. This course will take place in real time and consist of weekly face-to-face lectures, which students are required to attend. Note that students are also required to submit new work only for this course. CRWR 200 is an inspiring and fun introduction to the world of creative writing and is sure to get your creative juices flowing.

This course is designed for students looking to develop their creative writing skills through an exploration of a variety of creative writing genres including fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, songwriting, screenwriting and more. Students will have the chance to explore a variety of topics and concepts designed to elevate their craft such as constructing story arcs, character development, image building, managing dialogue. This course will consist of video lectures and online modules with weekly writing exercises. Students will also engage in readings and some longer length writing assignments (in genres of their choosing) all of which will contribute to a regular writing practice and an end of term portfolio of work they can be proud of. Students will be able to complete the requirements for this course asynchronously. There will also be some synchronous activities such as peer-to-peer sharing “draft days,” discussion groups, etc. and though attendance is encouraged for these sessions, students will not be graded on their participation in these events. Note that students are required to submit new work only for this course. CRWR 200 is an inspiring and fun introduction to the world of creative writing and is sure to get your creative juices flowing.

This course is composed to help students hone in on a variety of techniques and practices as we explore multiple genres of writing, including fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, screenplay, stageplay, graphic forms, lyric forms, children's literature, and writing for new media. Come and find your voice by playing with various craft elements and to experience instrumental published work in contemporary forms and genres through lectures, readings, writing assignments and guided discussions.

Introduction to Writing Poetry

CRWR 201 2023 W Credits: 3

An exploration of and practice in the writing of poetry, focusing on how a writer employs the technical elements of the craft of poetry. Manuscript submission not required for admission.

TATE, BRONWEN | WARRENER, SHERYDA

In poetry, the chaos and disorder of living are made meaningful by the shaping powers of language and the imagination. Drawing inspiration from a diverse array of contemporary poets including Ocean Vuong, Ada Limón, and Jericho Brown, you will write many poems and explore the capacity of language to name the world, sing us back to our senses, say what matters, and imagine other possibilities. Together, we’ll discover how to invite wildness and surprise onto the page. We’ll also investigate the radical possibilities of revision, give and receive written feedback on work-in-progress, and cultivate a shared craft vocabulary of diction, syntax, image, line, metaphor, echo, pivot, and rhythm to help you make more conscious choices in your writing. To support flexible learning, this is a blended course with asynchronous videos, readings, and exercises supported by weekly synchronous lectures and collaborations.

This course offers an accessible introduction to the process of poem-making. You will practice forms of poetic attention, experiment with craft skills and techniques foundational to the genre, and explore the sensory details of everyday life: memory, experience, feeling, and imagination. In order to write about the world, you will engage with it through intentional and focused exploration. This process will require both self-discovery and discovery of subject matter outside the self. This course blends synchronous and asynchronous content. Weekly modules of pre-recorded videos and readings allow you to move through key concepts at your own pace. In addition to reviewing online materials, you will be required to attend class, engage with assigned readings, and participate in discussions and workshops. You will utilize in-class writing exercises and prompts to spark ideas for content. For your final assignment, you will revise and assemble a collection of five poems demonstrating your technical skills and singular sensibility. Together, we will strive toward artistry, and come to a richer understanding of the possibilities of poetry.

Introduction to Writing for Children and Young Adults

CRWR 203 2023 W Credits: 3

Techniques of and practice in creating, developing and writing for children and young adults. Manuscript submission is not required for admission.

We’ll delve into the breadth of forms encompassed by children’s literature, as well as a diversity of genres and topics. We’ll examine the unique pace and structure of books for different age and reading levels. We’ll learn to build memorable characters, then send those characters on fast-paced quests and adventures. Coursework includes three major writing assignments, a mock Instagram novel review, and frequent short writing exercises. Regular attendance is required. Our goals in this class are to learn about the growth of contemporary children’s writing, to become better writers ourselves, and to embrace a spirit of childlike wonder, exploration, and fun.

Introduction to Writing Creative Nonfiction

CRWR 205 2023 W Credits: 3

An exploration of and practice in the writing of creative nonfiction, focusing on how a writer employs the technical elements of the craft of creative nonfiction. Manuscript submission not required for admission.

CATRON, MANDY

Welcome to Introduction to Creative Nonfiction!

This term we will focus on both the craft and the ethics of creative nonfiction writing and consider some of the big questions that continue to shape the genre:

• What exactly is creative nonfiction and what distinguishes it from other genres?
• How does an obligation to the truth shape the ways we tell stories and write sentences?
• Why might a reader care about an individual writer’s experiences and ideas?
• Where does the personal intersect with the political, the ideological, or the profound?
• How can we find authority and curiosity in our own knowledge and experiences?

We will spend our semester taking risks, trying out new skills, and sharing your work and ideas in a warm and welcoming environment. This is a hybrid course and students are expected to participate both online and in person.

Introduction to Writing for the Screen

CRWR 206 2023 W Credits: 3

Techniques of and practice in creating, developing, and writing a screenplay. Manuscript submission is not required for admission.

MCGOWAN, SHARON | GRAEFE, SARA

It all starts with the script. Every screenwriter has a unique creative process, but shares tools from a common toolbox.

In this course we will screen and discuss excerpts from a variety of films, analyzing the essentials that make a great screen story. You will explore these fundamentals in weekly writing exercises and script assignments, applying techniques of visual storytelling and screenplay formatting, as well as the key elements of dramatic film structure, character development and dialogue. You will also learn how to pitch a script idea, a skill that is essential to succeed in the highly collaborative practice of filmmaking.

The structure of this course is online and asynchronous, with modules and exercises posted on Canvas for completion each week.  There is also an optional one-hour Zoom drop-in session each week with bonus materials and a chance to ask questions and discuss the weekly assignments.

Your coursework will include completing weekly writing assignments (worth 15% of your final grade), writing a 4-page silent screenplay (25%), writing a 10-page screenplay with dialogue (35%), creating a written pitch for your dialogue screenplay (15%), and completing an open-book quiz on screenplay formatting (10%).

Please note that while we will discuss and screen a few feature-length films and excerpts of television series in this course, the majority of the coursework and course content will focus on short films. This is because short films are an excellent form in which to learn and apply fundamentals quickly. Short films are also one of the main starting points for building a career in screenwriting.

In this hyper-connected digital age, we consume stories at an unprecedented rate, on screens large and small.  A great film or TV show or Netflix series will make us laugh or cry and stay with us for forever. In this hands-on class, we’ll take a look behind the scenes to uncover where the magic of film begins – with the art and craft of narrative screenwriting. As the saying goes in Hollywood, “it all starts with the script.” We will screen and discuss excerpts from a variety of films, analyzing the essentials that make a great screen story. You’ll explore these fundamentals through class writing exercises and script assignments, applying techniques of visual storytelling and screenplay formatting, as well as the key elements of dramatic film structure, character development and dialogue. You will also learn and practice how to pitch a script idea, a vital skill for surviving and thriving in the collaborative film industry. You will write two original scripts – a 3-4 page silent screenplay and an 8-10 page screenplay with dialogue.

This is a blended course, meaning half your learning will take place face-to-face in the classroom, and the other half online in a text- and video-based, modular format on Canvas.

Introduction to Writing for Graphic Forms

CRWR 208 2023 W Credits: 3

Techniques of and practice in creating, developing, and writing the graphic novel, manga, and other forms of illustrated writing. The ability to draw is not required. Manuscript submission is not required for admission.

In this course, we will explore writing for comics and graphic novels through a combination of discussions, lectures, guest speakers, online content, low-stakes exercises and creative writing assignments. This course is a blended learning course, which means it is conducted partially through self-directed engagement with online content, and partially through lectures and discussion. You'll find a variety of readings and videos and exercises online each week to prepare for a weekly lecture and hands-on creation and discussion. By the end of the course, you will hopefully have gained a broad understanding of the form as well as the skills to create your own well-crafted comics, from inception to publication.

Introduction to Writing Fiction

CRWR 209 2023 W Credits: 3

An exploration of the writing of fiction, focusing on how a writer employs the technical elements of the craft of fiction. Manuscript submission not required for admission.

This introductory undergraduate course is held 100% online and is designed for those interested in the art and craft of fiction writing. We’ll focus on the creative impulse and generative process while exploring and practicing the foundational elements of fiction writing, including, character development, scene design, dialogue and subtext, prose style, the fundamentals of story structure, and the importance of emotional and psychological authenticity. We’ll experiment, take risks, and expand our creative practice each week through a variety of online activities, including pre-recorded video lectures, writing exercises, assigned readings, and discussion. Through an examination of craft, writing practice, creative inquiry, and close reading, we will bridge the gap between creative intention and execution on the page and do our best to create something meaningful and beautiful. We’ll be rigorous in our study and analysis of our efforts and invest ourselves in the efforts of our peers. The course is offered online asynchronously with a weekly synchronous Zoom session focused on generative exercises, advanced craft exploration, and discussion of course concepts with the Instructor, Teaching Assistants and fellow students.

Introduction to Writing for the New Media

CRWR 213 2023 S Credits: 3

An exploration of and practice in writing for new media, including podcasting, blogging, and writing for websites, games, and online environments. Manuscript submission is not required for admission.

CHAN, CRYSTAL

CRWR 213 2023 W Credits: 3

OSWORTH, AUSTEN | MOSS, JENNIFER

What makes media “new?” How have older media come to influence the bleeding edge? This course focuses on memes, pitching publications (and making your own), Twine games, artificial intelligence and, most importantly, how to explore and learn with confidence and conscientiousness when the media landscape is constantly evolving.

This section will be taught by A.E. Osworth .

Introduction to Creative Writing with an Indigenous Focus

CRWR 220 2023 W Credits: 3

Covers three genres from fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, radio drama, radio feature, or stageplay.

BELCOURT, BILLY-RAY

In this course, students will engage with a range of literary works by contemporary Indigenous writers as well as with supplementary critical/theoretical texts. The goal is to introduce students to the aesthetic, political, and social concerns operative in the Indigenous literary landscape. We will acquire the language to ethically and rigorously engage with the material and the larger context of colonialism in which we in North America live and study. To be clear, the aim is not to produce “Indigenous writing” (unless, of course, a student is Indigenous), but rather to write from the social locations in which students exist about topics such as race, history, identity, geography, power, and structural oppression.

Introduction to Writing for Comedic Forms

CRWR 230 2023 W Credits: 3

An examination of and practice in creative writing in comedic forms, including stand-up, sketch, film, new media, and text. Manuscript submission not required for admission.

DEL BUCCHIA, DINA

This course will be taught both synchronously and asynchronously. Video lectures and slides (with relevant questions and writing prompts) will be recorded and posted to Canvas in the Modules. Students will not be penalized for their inability to attend synchronous sessions. The course materials in Canvas will need to be completed by the due dates indicated and before the start of the weekly synchronous session.

Comedy has the ability to bring levity to the difficult things in life. In this course we will study humour writing across various forms, styles and genres, including: joke-writing; stand-up and sketch comedy; comic prose and verse; television; film; stage; and new media. Lectures and discussions will be complemented by writing prompts, group work, readings, and engaging with media relevant to all areas of comedic forms covered. A major learning objective for this course is to develop a greater understanding of comic structures and style, as well as exploring issues of comedy and free speech, and comedy as social commentary. Students will have the opportunity to not only write their own comedic pieces, but to consider the power of jokes and how humour can affect an audience.

Intermediate Writing Poetry

CRWR 301 2023 W Credits: 3

The writing of poetry in various forms using a combination of workshopping and online modules. Manuscript submission not required for admission.

WARRENER, SHERYDA

This course is part workshop, part exploration of writing in established, evolving, and invented poetic forms. You will direct language through the apertures and frames of the sonnet, prose poems, ghazal, haibun, ode, elegy, villanelle, zuihitsu, and more. You’ll explore the variations and innovations formal constraints make possible, and then return to free verse with newly-acquired technical chops and a dynamic, renewed energy. This course blends synchronous and asynchronous content. A weekly compilation of videos and craft essays feature insights from contemporary poets as they take you through advanced modes and techniques. You’ll be required to attend in-person classes, engage with assigned readings, and participate in discussions, presentations, and workshops. For your final assignment, you will revise and assemble poems into a collection that demonstrates your technical skill and formal imagination. We will strive toward artistry, and come to a richer understanding of what poetic form makes possible.

Writing for Podcast

CRWR 302 2023 W Credits: 3

Exploration of and practice in writing for podcast.

SAMMARCO, PIETRO

Intermediate Writing for Children and Young Adults

CRWR 303 2023 W Credits: 3

The writing of work for children and young adults in various forms using a combination of workshopping and online modules. Manuscript submission not required for admission.

In this class, students briefly explore a variety of forms in children’s literature before delving more deeply into the creativity and adventure of middle-grade and young-adult novels. By refining an idea, developing that idea into an outline, and writing several major scenes, students will experience some of the thought processes involved in creating a novel. Along the way, they’ll practice two major components of the writing life: individual creative work and collaborative critique. This is a hybrid class, involving weekly online lectures as well as in-person seminars. Attendance at the seminars is required. Throughout the course, students will explore the ways children’s literature can spark young readers’ imaginations and change the ways they see the world.

Intermediate Writing of Creative Nonfiction

CRWR 305 2023 W Credits: 3

An exploration of and practice in the writing of creative non-fiction, covering four of the more basic forms of this genre: memoir, profile, commentary, and exposition. Manuscript submission is not required for admission.

In its pursuit of truth, Creative Nonfiction has the capacity to help us connect with our wisest, most honest, most humane selves. In trying to say what is true, we are forced to become curious and attentive, to question our own assumptions and biases, and to create space to locate our own beliefs and sense of wonder.

Welcome to Intermediate Writing of Creative Nonfiction! This course builds on the concepts covered in Introduction to Creative Nonfiction (CRWR 205) with more emphasis on writing as a practice and process. We’ll talk about how to create a sustainable writing practice and how to think about ourselves as writers. We’ll confront some of the myths around the writing life and we’ll consider how, when approached with sincerity and rigor, one might discover something fundamentally redemptive in writing creative nonfiction. My hope is that you’ll come to think of writing as a practice, as a way of thinking, and as a powerful tool for making meaning of your experiences and the world around you.

Intermediate Writing for the Screen

CRWR 306 2023 W Credits: 3

An exploration of and practice in writing for the screen, focusing on how a writer employs the technical elements of the craft of screenwriting. Manuscript submission is not required for admission.

KINCH, MARTIN

CRWR 306 (Intermediate Writing for the Screen) is a blended course combining online teaching and in-class workshop/seminars. Each week consists of online instruction, screenings and assignments, and seminar/workshops led by our Teaching Assistants. Our primary objective is to explore the processes, craft, and techniques of screenwriting and create original work for the screen. Online, students will find a variety of videos addressing specific writing challenges, (What makes a great film idea? …How do you create memorable characters?”) short lectures on aspects of technique, illustrative and inspiring film clips from the history of the movies, and other resources addressing theoretical and practical aspects of screenwriting

The workshop/seminar sessions are focused on the wider discussion of weekly online material, writing exercises, and the creation of original work. Film being a collaborative art, attention will also be given to ways in which we analyze and critique our peers’ work and creatively participate in workshop script development.

Intermediate Writing for the Stage

CRWR 307 2023 W Credits: 3

An exploration of practice in the writing of the one-act stage play, focusing on how a writer employs the technical elements of the craft of this genre. Manuscript submission is not required for admission.

IRANI, ANOSH

This intermediate course focuses on the techniques of crafting stage plays and fiction podcasts.

You will engage in dramatic writing assignments focusing on, but not limited to, character, scene development, dialogue, and theatricality. You will also look specifically at techniques that will help you create a dramatic fiction podcast.

Instruction will be provided in person.  We will combine interactive lectures with in-class writing exercises and readings/viewings.

You will write a one-act play for the stage and a short dramatic fiction podcast.

Intermediate Writing for Graphic Forms

CRWR 308 2023 W Credits: 3

The writing of graphica (comics, manga and graphic novels), using a combination of workshopping and online modules. Manuscript submission not required for admission.

Picking up where 208 leaves off, students will be guided through the production process of creating comics, with the goal of creating a finished self-published graphic work by the end of the term. Through a combination of workshop, discussion, lecture and online content, we look at graphic storytelling, character design, world-building, panel composition, page layout, thumbnails, pencils, inking and digital design with a focus on refining student work and creating polished and professional finished products. The class meets weekly for in-person sessions with a focus on creating and building student work.

Intermediate Writing Fiction

CRWR 309 2023 W Credits: 3

TATER, MALLORY | OSWORTH, AUSTEN

In CRWR 309, students will work to sharpen their already unique writing voices and further develop a sustainable writing practice. This course will help students more consciously understand their creative choices and narrative approaches through engaging in fiction readings, writing exercises, collaborative learning and discussion.

Students in this class will focus on scaffolded assignments to deepen understanding of craft fundamentals such as characters, scenes, settings and voice. A variety of feedback modalities will be covered with an emphasis on giving and receiving feedback gracefully, and choosing what to focus on in revision.

This course will be taught by A.E. Osworth .

Video Game Writing and Narrative

CRWR 310 2023 W Credits: 3

Narrative design and writing for video games.

CLARK, RAYMOND

An exploration of narrative design and writing for video games. Manuscript submission not required for admission.

Intermediate Writing for Lyric Forms

CRWR 311 2023 W Credits: 3

Techniques of and practice in writing for lyric forms, including song lyrics, lyrical narratives, and libretti. Manuscript submission is not required for admission.

HUSSAIN, TARIQ

In this course, students will examine aspects of lyrical craft such as the use of rhyme, repetition, point of view, structure, balance and other elements. We will explore personal songwriting, writing in a non-autobiographical style, protest songs, the comic lyric and more. Students will engage in readings and listenings (song samples, podcasts, etc.) and will have ample opportunities to flex their creative muscles through weekly writing exercises and longer songwriting assignments. Students should be prepared to submit audio recordings with their assignments which can be created using phones and/or recording programs like Audacity or GarageBand. Further guidance on recording software will be offered in class and proficiency on an instrument is not a prerequisite. This course will take place in real time and will consist of weekly face-to-face lectures which students are required to attend. Note that students are expected to submit new work only for this class. Once completed, students of all levels will have participated in a rigorous and regular writing practice and will have amassed a solid body of creative work—a portfolio!—that they can be proud of with work they can continue to revise and draw inspiration from well after the term ends.

Interactive Storytelling

CRWR 312 2023 W Credits: 3

Origin, theory and practice of interactive story forms. Exploring structural links between interactive theatre, gaming, and extended (virtual, mixed, and augmented) reality.

OSWORTH, AUSTEN

Colloquially called “Infinite Fiction,” this course engages with fiction as a verb rather than a noun or adjective. We will explore controversial or commonly held beliefs using radical collaborative storytelling to examine massive concepts from varying vantage points in worlds where the consequences are imaginary: by using tabletop role-playing games “read” against academic theory. Students will also create one piece of interactive fiction using Twine over the course of the semester.

Intermediate Writing for Television

CRWR 316 2023 W Credits: 3

Elements of episodic and serialized comedic and dramatic television writing with writing practice applied to primary formats and genres.

MCMAHON, MICHELE

This course is designed for students who are interested in exploring the art and craft of screenwriting for television.  Over the course of the term you will learn how to transform your half-hour television idea (comedy or drama) into a series pitch document, then a pilot script outline, and finally the first act of a pilot script.

We are experiencing a new Golden Age of television with hundreds of shows to watch across multiple platforms.  There are more diverse stories being created than ever before and it’s an exciting time to tell your story.  A television show is the culmination of a writer’s unique vision and it all begins with their script.  While we will cover a variety of formats and genres showcased in today’s exciting television landscape we will focus on the fundamentals of television writing: structure, plot, character development, dialogue and narrative arcs for an episode and an entire season.

We will explore comedic and dramatic television in a variety of ways.  We will screen and discuss television shows, read television scripts, and analyse the essentials in what makes a script great.  We will also read current online articles, specific readings from texts, listen to podcasts and experiment with in-class writing assignments.  As television is a collaborative business, students will engage with the instructor, teaching assistants and other students as much as possible.

Please note that while we will discuss and screen the first act of a few hour-long dramatic television series, the majority of the coursework and course content will focus on half-hour television. Half-hours are an excellent form in which to learn and apply fundamentals quickly and are a growing trend on cable and streaming platforms.

Writing Genre Fiction

CRWR 319 2023 W Credits: 3

Exploration and practice in writing major genres of genre fiction, including fantasy, science fiction, romance, crime, horror, and historical fiction.

HOPKINSON, NALO

The vast majority of fiction written and read in North America falls into the broad categories of popular or commercial fiction. This course will focus on introducing students to four major genres: fantasy; science fiction; historical fiction; and young adult (that last being more of an age category than a genre). To write successfully in any of these genres requires an understanding of the development and conventions of each of them, as well as an understanding of the implicit agreement between writer and reader that exists in genre fiction writing. Genre conventions serve, like the many forms of poetry, as both limitations to and spurs to creativity, as well as wayposts to the reader that signify (usually) what to expect. Students will read texts and related materials in each genre, and practice writing in at least two of the four.

Intermediate Comedic Forms

CRWR 330 2023 W Credits: 3

Contemporary and historical comedic writing in a variety of forms. Emphasis on critical analysis and creative writing of comedic works, and changes in the comedic landscape. Recommended: CRWR 200

In this course, we take the craft of comedy seriously through experimentation, discussion and the analysis of comedic media. We play with comedic writing to develop comedic voice, and explore storytelling through a variety of forms, from comedic fiction to non-fiction, to sketches and stand up. Students will work to use comedic tools, like escalation, repetition and tone, and play with comedic elements, like irony, incongruity and surprise, to create new works that spark laughter while they tell a story. As well, through comedic collaboration, and workshops that focus on constructive and informed feedback and discussion, students will be able to work on a variety of projects that will challenge their concept of comedic writing as an art form.

This course will be taught by Dina Del Bucchia .

Intermediate Poetry Workshop - INTRMD POETRY

CRWR 351P 2023 W Credits: 3

An intermediate level workshop class in writing poetry. Manuscript submission is not required for admission.

In this class, I invite you to explore content that is meaningful to you in the form of a poetic cycle, series, suite, or sequence. Designed to foreground practices of attention and inquiry-based research, this class provides the time, encouragement, compassion, rigour, and flexibility necessary in order for you to feel both well supported and challenged in the process of poem-making. You’ll be required to attend class, engage with assigned readings, and participate in discussions, presentations, field trips, and workshops. Pre-writing and generative writing activities, as well as a self-directed research assignment, will lead to the composition of a unified collection of poems. My hope is that you will leave this class with a renewed sense of your own creative process, and a community of writerly support.

Intermediate Children and Young Adult Writing Workshop - INTRMD CHLDRN

CRWR 353Q 2023 W Credits: 3

An intermediate level workshop class in writing for children and young adults. Manuscript submission is not required for admission.

POHL-WEARY, EMILY

This section of 353 focuses on middle-grade (MG) and young adult (YA) fiction, age categories that tend to be adventurous, playful, unpretentious, and reflect the critical issues of our time. We’ll explore the weird and wonderful world of writing for young readers, the changing industry, how the age of your readers impacts your writing style, and developing our writerly voices. We will put into practice the tools learned in CRWR 203 and 303, but focus more on workshopping and incorporating feedback. Major assignments include weekly feedback on other people’s writing, two pieces of new fiction (10 pages each, double-spaced, 12pt font), a short piece of experimental writing (5 pages, double-spaced, 12pt font), and a brief presentation on a contemporary MG or YA novel.

Intermediate Screenplay Workshop - INTRMD SCRNPLAY

CRWR 356Q 2023 W Credits: 3

An intermediate level workshop class in writing for the screen. Manuscript submission is not required for admission.

Screenwriting is a craft. Creative Writing 356A (Intermediate Screenwriting) is a workshop on mastering the techniques of the craft and writing original short film scripts that you can produce. Our emphasis will be on the creation of character-driven stories that can be imaginatively told with an economy of production demands. We will also focus on visual storytelling, flexible structure, and effective dialogue. Over the course of the term, you will develop a short film screenplay, proceeding through the logline/pitch, to the outline, the first and revised drafts. At each stage, you will read and provide feedback to your fellow students’ work and participate in an in-class and online workshop discussion.

There will also be writing exercises accompanied by short talks exploring various aspects of craft.

Intermediate Fiction Workshop - INTRMD FICTION

CRWR 359P 2023 W Credits: 3

An intermediate level workshop class in writing of fiction. Manuscript submission is not required for admission.

TATER, MALLORY

The goal of CRWR 359 is to put into practice, through considered creative choices, the craft-based skills students learned in CRWR 209 and CRWR 309 (prerequisites). The discussions, exercises, collaborative learning activities and individual writing assignments in this course will help you bring greater intention to your writing process and to artfully engage in the act of revision.

CRWR 359Q 2023 W Credits: 3

Writing Poetry I - WRITING POETRY I

CRWR 401P 2023 W Credits: 3

A workshop class in the writing of poetry.

NICHOLSON, CECILY

Intimations of Place

This course will provide a hands-on approach to the study and practice of poetry as we explore ways to engage the individual poem as well as the collection of poetry in book form. Intervals of the course will be devoted to experiencing and discussing selected works related to intimations of place. Through works by Jordan Abel, Gwendolyn Brooks, Renee Gladman, Lee Maracle, Fred Wah, Rita Wong and more, we will consider site specificity, scenic narrative and setting, interrelations in ecology, geological time, and the construct of landscape, as well as the poem itself as a place that can enact geography, nation, refuge, and belonging. Students will develop a shared vocabulary as we deepen our understanding of poetic technique and expression and expand our awareness of imagery, figurative language, perspective, and positionality in poetry. Through regular prompt and exercise our reading practice will align with written assignments as we learn to experiment within a range of formal strategies.

CRWR 401Q 2023 W Credits: 3

Words Sound

This course will provide a hands-on approach to the study and practice of poetry as we explore ways to engage the individual poem as well as the collection of poetry in book form. In a discussion on the “poetics of renewal” Lillian Allen notes that “the poetic line glides, skips, is stubborn sometimes, it shouts, dances, whispers, and asserts itself as beings do in the world. We know that words are not just words as our voice is not just lines on paper.” Taking up the active and variable presence of words, we will consider elements of voice, cadence, metre, and a range of sound devices in poetry. Our readings will include works from Lillian Allen, Christie Lee Charles, e.e. cummings, Cathy Park Hong, Kaie Kellough and more. Students will develop a shared vocabulary as we deepen our understanding of poetic technique and expression and expand our awareness of diction, structure, and tone as it relates to poetry. Through regular prompt and exercise our reading practice will align with written assignments as we learn to experiment within a range of formal strategies.

Writing for New Media I - WRT NEW MEDIA 1

CRWR 402Q 2023 W Credits: 3

An advanced workshop class in writing for new media. Restricted to Majors in Creative Writing.

MOSS, JENNIFER

Take your podcasting dreams to the next level with this hands-on and applied course focussing on the finer points of audio storytelling. Encompassing aspects of scripted, and non-scripted podcasting, narrative, fiction, documentary, and more, this course will help you lean into the audio medium to deliver work that is compelling and engaging. At the same time, you’ll get practical ideas for how to identify and grow your audience and promote your show.

Writing for Children and Young Adults I - CHILD & YOUNG I

CRWR 403P 2023 W Credits: 3

A workshop class in writing for Children and Young Adults.

During this course, we’ll explore picture books, middle-grade novels, young-adult novels, and more. Students will participate in lively discussions about the craft and techniques of writing for children and young adults, with a particular emphasis on character and voice — elements necessary to catch the attention of the world’s most fickle reading audience. Workshop participants will give thoughtful feedback on work by fellow students, and will submit two original stories or novel excerpts as well as a final revision. Throughout, we’ll examine ways we can imbue our writing with fun, humour, and hope.

Writing Creative Nonfiction I - CREATIV NONFIC I

CRWR 405P 2023 W Credits: 3

A workshop class in writing creative nonfiction, focused on some of the more popular forms of creative nonfiction: autobiography, rhetoric (commentary), literary journalism, and the personal essay.

This semester we’ll immerse ourselves in the many techniques of Creative Nonfiction: everything from research and reporting to structure and style. In the first half of the term we will develop our craft through reading, discussion and frequent writing exercises. Then we’ll spend the second half of term sharing and polishing work in writer-centered workshops.

You can expect to finish the semester with a deeper understanding of the craft of creative nonfiction, a body of new work, a sharper skill set for revising your own writing, and a polished piece of short-form creative nonfiction.

CRWR 405Q 2023 W Credits: 3

MARZANO-LESNEVICH, ALEX

To Essay is to Try

This course provides an overview of one of the most elastic and exciting literary forms, the essay, often colloquially thought of as the working-through or trying out of an idea. We will read a wide range of both traditional and experimental essays, including those that are narrative, lyric, personal, fractured, and persuasive, and that use an array of subjects as their starting point. Together we will arrive at understandings of voice, tone, characterization, structure, and pacing. Students will have weekly ungraded writing assignments that will build to the workshopping of one short essay and one long.

Writing for the Screen I - WRT FOR SCREEN I

CRWR 406P 2023 W Credits: 3

A workshop class in writing for the screen.

This advanced screenwriting workshop will support students as they transform their initial story idea into a pitch, then an outline and finally 25-30 pages of a feature-length screenplay (with the option of submitting two short films with the equivalent number of pages).

While this course will focus on workshopping your writing assignments, your creative process will be supported by in-class presentations on the craft of screenwriting including: structure, plot, character development, dialogue, scenes and visual language.  There will also be substantial resources online including: current industry articles, specific readings from texts, podcasts, video clips, as well as sample screenplays from many genres.

Grades will primarily be based on your written work (70%) comprised of your revised screenplay which will be submitted in a final student portfolio at the end of the term.  You will be expected to have made substantial rewrites to the creative submitted in earlier workshops. You will also be graded on your attendance and participation (30%). Your participation includes your verbal contribution in-class and written feedback after each workshop.  As you write your screenplay your thoughtful reflections on the scripts of other students will build your own screenwriting and story editing skills.  The goal of this workshop is to creatively engage with others and to ask questions with a compassionate inquiry that supports each writer’s vision.

CRWR 406Q 2023 W Credits: 3

MEDVED, MAUREEN | MCGOWAN, SHARON

Students in this advanced screenwriting workshop will write one or two short screenplays (depending on length and number of rewrites) or an outline for a feature-length film and a draft of the first act of that film. The goal is to help each student reach their full potential in their work.

We loosely follow an industry model, so all projects, whatever length, begin with a short pitch.  The class then workshops an outline for all scripts before moving to a draft, or more detailed outline in the case of a feature length screenplay.

In class we will review and discuss aspects of story, plot, dialogue, character, theme and many more elements of the screenplay form.  We will also discuss the process of connecting with the film industry and getting a screenplay produced.

We will workshop two pieces a week, sometimes three, if they are short.  There is a minimum page count of 30 pages for workshopping in the course that must be submitted by set deadlines. Rewrites will be counted as 1 page for 2 pages of re-written material but rewrites must be substantial to be counted (at least 50% of the material on the page must be reworked).

Students will be required to review and submit written notes by set deadlines on all pieces being workshopped as well as participate in discussions of the work during class time.

Grading will be based 70% on the screenwriting work students submit and 30% on their written notes and participation in discussions of other students’ work.

Writing of Drama for the Stage I - STAGE DRAMA I

CRWR 407P 2023 W Credits: 3

A workshop class in writing of drama for the stage. Studio work is required, and some plays may be given a live stage production in Brave New Play Rites (adjudication process involved).

KONCAN, FRANCES

CRWR 407Q 2023 W Credits: 3

Writing for Graphic Forms I - GRAPHIC FORMS 1

CRWR 408P 2023 W Credits: 3

A workshop class in the writing of graphic novel, manga, and other forms of illustrated writing. The ability to draw is not required.

LEAVITT, SARAH

What are comics and how do they work? How do you make a good comic? In this class we’ll examine the building blocks of comics (text and image combinations, panel and page composition, and more) and practice the skills needed to create clear, compelling, memorable comics. By the end of the term, you’ll be a more insightful comics reader and a more skillful comics maker. No drawing skills or experience required, but we will be drawing in this class, for both exercises and assignments. Please note: this course emphasizes readings, assignments and in-class exercises; there are only a few workshops.

Students at all levels of skill and experience have produced excellent comics in this class, and many have continued to make comics after completing the course. Others find that the skills learned in comics class help them with their work in other forms. Students who plan to write comics scripts for others to draw will gain insights into the writing process from the experience of drawing.

Writing Fiction I - WRITING FIC I

CRWR 409P 2023 W Credits: 3

A workshop class in the writing of fiction.

MAILLARD, KEITH | OSWORTH, AUSTEN | IRANI, ANOSH

The purpose of this workshop is to help students write excellent fiction. Many workshops move toward final draft too quickly and encourage feedback that is largely editorial. We, however, will explore the writing of fiction anywhere on a spectrum from the earliest exploratory stages to polished final drafts. Editorial feedback is not appropriate for story ideas in their earliest stages when they are often incoherent, vague, and fragile; students will be encouraged to resubmit these early drafts until they begin to cohere. As stories move closer to completion, higher degrees of editorial feedback become appropriate. Students should expect to submit written material at least three times during the term, and they will be required to bring one of their stories to polished final draft or close to it. The social environment in this workshop should be warm, friendly, supportive, and cooperative. Students who like courses with fixed and unvarying syllabi so that they will know exactly what they will be doing in any class throughout the term should seriously consider not taking this course. The syllabus is variable and will change in response to student needs and interests.

This class, colloquially called “The Airing of Grievances,” explores writing from a place of righteous anger and using fiction to explore, expand and resist everything from the minor inconvenience to the systemic injustice. Students will depart from standard ways of discussing craft to create their own craft rubric for the semester. Workshop components will all use a Radical Praise method.

This is a workshop in the writing of short fiction designed to help students develop as both writers and critical thinkers. Each week we will discuss students’ written work as well as the craft and techniques of literary fiction. In addition, assigned readings will be posted on Canvas.  This is required reading for class discussion. During the term, students will be expected to turn in a short story for workshop, plus a rewrite of the story.  Over the duration of the course, we will examine a wide range of story elements, including—but not limited to— character, dialogue, structure, plotting and so on.  The course will also guide students through the process of rewriting their work.  Overall, this workshop aims to give students the opportunity to express themselves creatively, hone their voice, and gain a deeper understanding of their own work.

CRWR 409Q 2023 W Credits: 3

MAILLARD, KEITH

Video Game Writing - VDEO GM WRT

CRWR 410Q 2023 W Credits: 3

A workshop class on writing for video games. Restricted to Creative Writing majors.

A workshop class in writing for video games and interactive fiction. Students will create short games using Twine or similar software; the ability to program is not required. In addition to the workshop, this course includes a reading list of indie games and a small in-class presentation.

Writing for Lyric Forms I - LYRIC FORMS 1

CRWR 411P 2023 W Credits: 3

A workshop class exploring the words that accompany music in varied forms including pop, art, musical theatre, and opera.

In this class students will explore the craft of songwriting through a variety of methods from participating in creative exercises to personal practice. Students will be challenged to look deeply at the work of professionals through readings, close listenings, podcasts, and to go deep within their own work as well. Students will create, share and discuss their songs with the goal of helping each other create more effective writing through the workshopping process and will be encouraged to take risks while still holding true to their artistic vision. Audio recordings are expected for submissions along with lyric sheets however technical knowledge of recording software or proficiency on an instrument—though an asset—are not required. This course will take place in real time, face-to-face in a weekly two-hour session which students are required to attend. Participation and discussion as well as maintaining an environment of support and mutual respect is key to the success of this course as students will be participating in a genre that is more performative in nature than some others, and perhaps extra challenging if students haven’t tried it before. This should not be seen as a deterrent for anyone who’s new to songwriting, however, but rather as an invitation to try something fun, exciting, and challenging.

Workshop in Literary Translation I - WK LIT TRANS I

CRWR 415Q 2023 W Credits: 3

A workshop class in literary translation. Restricted to Majors in Creative Writing.

TATE, BRONWEN

In this workshop course, we’ll explore the many artistic choices involved in literary translation—involving sound, syntax, temporality, idiom, metaphor, literary context, social register, and so on—and consider what’s at stake in each. Guided by student interest and experience, we’ll explore translation challenges presented by particular linguistic and cultural contexts and specific genres. We’ll also discuss ethical questions raised by English as a language of empire that has become a global language, examine literary forms and movements that have traveled through translation, investigate the capacity and limits of machine translation, and consider our relationships to languages we use, languages we’ve learned, and heritage languages we may have lost. Students will translate and co-translate, experiment and play, research translation networks, and identify their principles and values as translators.

Prerequisite: Proficiency in a language other than English. (Proficiency here is understood as the ability to engage with the specific texture and structure of a language, not “mastery” or “fluency.”)

Note for MFA Students: While this course is taught at the undergraduate level, graduate students are reminded that they may enroll in six credits of undergraduate coursework with permission from the instructor and the graduate chair.

Writing for Television I - WRT TELEVISION 1

CRWR 416P 2023 W Credits: 3

A workshop class in writing for television.

SVENDSEN, LINDA

The purpose of the workshop is to create your own original half-hour TV series concept and pilot script, via three modules with peer and instructor reviewed assignments: TV series concept, pilot beat sheet (brief outline), and draft pilot script.  Concurrently, your peer review reflections and contributions in the writers’ room group/s build your TV writing and editing prowess. Essentially, while you create and write a brand-new TV series, you also act and serve as story editor on other series. While the class is not prescriptive, per se, the mission of a writer’s room is to creatively and speculatively engage, to bring your years of TV-series chops to the table, to brainstorm, to ask “what if?” while always supporting the creator/writer’s vision.

The course is front-loaded with dramaturgical grids and rubrics for each assignment, readings on structure and the industry, as well as sample pilot scripts as available. The course concludes with excerpted pilot table reads with a peer cast.

Participation:  critically thoughtful and constructive written feedback prior to the workshop discussion, collaboration with an in-class TV partner or group, as well as attendance contribute considerably to the grading component.

CRWR 416Q 2023 W Credits: 3

The course is front-loaded with dramaturgical grids and rubrics for each assignment, readings on structure and the industry, as well as sample pilot scripts as available. The course concludes with excerpted pilot table reads by a peer cast.

Participation:  thoughtful written feedback prior to the workshop discussion, collaboration with an in-class TV partner or group, as well as attendance contribute considerably to the grading component.

Writing Speculative Fiction - WRT SPEC FIC

CRWR 419Q 2023 W Credits: 3

Workshop-based class focused on writing speculative fiction, including fantasy, science fiction, and horror; emphasis on reading various genres and peer feedback. Restricted to Creative Writing majors.

Indigenous Writing - INDIGENOUS WRTNG

CRWR 420P 2023 W Credits: 3

Advanced study of contemporary Indigenous writing in North America across genres focusing on the production of critical and creative writing about coloniality, race, history, and identity.

This course is an investigation of trends and debates in contemporary Indigenous writing in Canada and the United States. We will study the ways Indigenous writers approach subjects such as history, colonialism, trauma, politics, identity, ethics, representation, and power; students will explore these subjects and reflect on how they relate to their own writing practices through a range of critical and creative modes and across genres.

Climate Writing - CLIMATE WRITING

CRWR 425Q 2023 W Credits: 3

Workshop-based class focused on writing related to climate change and environmental issues; emphasis on reading various genres and peer feedback. Restricted to Creative Writing majors. A maximum of 6 credits is permitted between CRWR 425 and 525.

OHLIN, ALIX

Stories about climate surround us, personal and global, near and far. From wildfires and mudslides in BC to climate-based migration and displacement, the reality of anthropogenic climate change is everywhere. This is a workshop class focused on creative writing about this encompassing reality. As we engage in our creative practice, we will ask: what stories do people tell about climate, and what are the stakes of those stories? What does it mean to write about, from, and of the places we live? How can artistic expression, narrative, and language itself render the complex realities of climate change—and explore the possibilities for justice, resilience, and alternative futures?

Throughout the course, we will develop our understanding of climate through reading, discussion and writing exercises. We’ll also spend a significant amount of class time sharing, discussing, and revising our own creative work. Students will be expected to read, respond, and engage in examples of writing in a range of genres (poetry, nonfiction, fiction), culminating in a final portfolio and reflective essay, and to provide thoughtful, constructive responses to the work of their peers in the class.

Preparation for a Career in Writing

CRWR 430 2023 W Credits: 3

Credit will be granted for only one of CRWR 430 or CRWR 530.

Writing is a career as well as a calling, and this course bridges the gap between the two. We’ll delve into traditional and self-publishing models, pitches and queries, collaboration with editors and agents, contracts, grants, marketing, interview techniques, and more. Throughout, we’ll hear from guests who are working in the industry, we’ll prepare our own professional materials, and we’ll build a supportive community of collaborators and mentors. This course offers practical know-how for entrepreneurship, and you’ll leave understanding more about how to sustain your own unique creative practice… while still paying your rent.

Advanced Comedic Forms

CRWR 431 2023 W Credits: 3

A workshop class exploring comedic writing in varied forms including film and television, prose and poetry, non-fiction, and new media. This course is restricted to students in the CRWR BFA program.

In this course students will learn the fundamentals of comedic forms as well as comedic tools that can be used by writers to make their work, regardless of genre, engaging, clear and hilarious. Through lectures on craft, discussions and close readings and viewings of comedic works students will be able to experiment and explore what comedy is, and the serious mechanics of humour writing at work. By the end of this course students will be able to analyze, using the language of comedy, why a work is funny, and identify the tools successfully used to create compelling comedy. The focus will be on generating comedic work, thinking deeply about comedy as an art form and practice, and creative inquiry through analysis and discussion. There will be an emphasis on asking questions about our own work, why comedy is the right choice for a piece of writing, and how to delve deep into a project designed to produce laughter.

Interdisciplinary Projects - INTRDIS PROJECTS

CRWR 440O 2023 S Credits: 3

Group projects and workshops with students majoring in other creative arts.

Writing Poetry II - WRITING POETRY 2

CRWR 451P 2023 W Credits: 3

An advanced workshop class in writing poetry. Restricted to Majors in Creative Writing.

This course focuses on modes of poetic inquiry: ways of sustaining poetic work across projects and a life in the context of a broader socio-political world. We will study how poets (1) carry out process-based, situational, and durational works and (2) account for their poetic labor through both poems and other forms of writing. By the term’s end, students will have produced a substantial amount of poems toward a larger project.

Writing for Children and Young Adults II - CHILD & YOUNG 2

CRWR 453P 2023 W Credits: 3

An advanced workshop class in writing for children and young adults. Restricted to Majors in Creative Writing.

Writing the Young Adult (YA) Novel is a new course that builds on skills learned in 403 (Writing for Children and YA) and 409 (Fiction). We will develop the tools essential for completing longer manuscripts while foregrounding the teen audience’s reading levels and life experiences. The class will involve workshops, reading discussions, and hands-on exercises aimed at outlining, plotting, pacing, character development, setting realization, deeper themes, and dramatic tension. Major assignments include preparing regular feedback on other people’s writing, discussing readings and craft topics, a midterm portfolio and a final portfolio.

CRWR 453Q 2023 W Credits: 3

SCOTT, JORDAN

A workshop class that discusses theoretical underpinnings of picture books and early chapter books and incorporates generative exercises based on elements of craft. Emphasis is placed on editing, critical reading, manuscript development, and tons of fun. Students will workshop two picture book and / or early chapter book manuscripts and are expected to provide rigorous and supportive feedback.

Writing of Drama for the Stage II - DRAM FOR STAGE 2

CRWR 457P 2023 W Credits: 3

An advanced workshop class in writing drama for the stage. Studio work is required. Assumes a greater level of experience in writing drama for the stage than CRWR 407.

CRWR 457Q 2023 W Credits: 3

Writing for Graphic Forms II - WRIT GRAPHIC 2

CRWR 458Q 2023 W Credits: 3

An advanced workshop class in writing for graphic forms. The ability to draw is not required. Restricted to Majors in Creative Writing.

Students in CRWR 458 will use their strong foundational skills in comics as a launch pad for a glorious flight into experimentation. Exercises and assignments will offer opportunities to explore a wide range of approaches to comics-making, including poetic, abstract and wordless comics. Students will also dive deep into their creative process, discovering and developing their own taste and style, as well as a way of working that’s productive and sustainable. This course will require consistent independent work in between classes, with weekly homework including readings and exercises. Please note: the emphasis is on readings, assignments and in-class exercises; there are only a few workshops.

Writing Fiction II - WRIT FICTION 2

CRWR 459Q 2023 W Credits: 3

An advanced workshop class in writing fiction. Restricted to Majors in Creative Writing.

ARMSTRONG, THEODORA

This advanced 3-credit fiction class will meet in person once a week to explore the novel/novella form. Expanding on the fundamental story-telling skills developed in 409, this class will give students the opportunity to work for an entire term on their own large-scale fiction project. Students will learn how to create solid groundwork for a book-length work by developing their skills in outlining, research, and worldbuilding. Through craft discussions and exercises, we will examine key elements of the novel, such as writing a captivating first chapter, establishing and escalating conflict, and layering image patterns and motifs, as well as deepening skills in crafting a narrative voice and creating compelling characters. Students will share several chapters from their book-in-progress with the opportunity to workshop in full class or small group sessions, as well as one-on-one with the instructor. Students taking this course should be motivated, self-directed writers with some vision of their project in mind before they begin the term. Bring your big story ideas and come to this class ready to explore, create, and collaborate with generosity.

Advanced Writing of Poetry I - ADV POETRY I

CRWR 501O 2023 S Credits: 3

MUSGRAVE, SUSAN | TATER, MALLORY

CRWR 501P 2023 W Credits: 3

TATE, BRONWEN | MUSGRAVE, SUSAN | WARRENER, SHERYDA

Don’t Write Alone: Crafting Poetry in Conversation

This course offers a deep exploration of what it means to approach writing as always after, in conversation, in relation. We’ll begin by reflecting on the many sources of influence and inspiration—chosen and imposed, joyful and fraught—that we bring to the shared space of the class. Each student will then choose a poet and a poetic element for a sustained apprenticeship experience. Over the weeks of the term, students will invite others into their process by designing an introduction, writing prompt, and questions for conversation emerging out of their apprenticeship. We will write a lot, read new work out loud, discuss process and practice, and occasionally pause for group critique. Throughout the course, we’ll explore the possibilities of new technologies (like the wiki) and old technologies (like the commonplace book) for organizing information, distilling insight, and sparking inspiration as we read and write together.

My aim is to help those who have grown up in fear and/or love of poetry attain a new perspective: "What they say "there are no words for" — that's what poetry is for.” Through a combination of workshopping, online craft lectures, writing exercises, and essays for discussion we will examine techniques and approaches to some central elements of the poet’s craft—the music of the line; rhyme and repetition; abstractions (for and against); voice or presence; imagery, metaphor and simile, the stanza, the title, revision, and, of course, getting published.

“Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.” - William Hazlitt

In this course, you will experiment with assembling longer poems from a series or sequence of smaller parts. Together, we’ll ask: How do individual poems speak to one another across a collection? Where might longer poems come from, and what capacities and resources make them possible? This inquiry will begin as an exploration of your own collections (facts, objects, memories), accompanied by close readings of contemporary poets working in sequential modes. We will re-imagine the workshop as an atelier, where writing emerges from rigorous experimentation and through the process of artistic inquiry. You’ll be required to attend class, engage with assigned readings, and participate in discussions, self-directed field trips, presentations, and workshops. The pre-writing and generative writing activities, as well as your individual creative research, will lead naturally to a cycle, series, suite, or sequence of poems unified by subject, mode, and form.

CRWR 501Q 2023 W Credits: 3

NICHOLSON, CECILY | MUSGRAVE, SUSAN

This course centres on revision as an integral aspect of the writing process. Students engaged in a poetry practice are invited to advance current work in the company of other poets, coalescing existing poems and opening the work to further contemplation. What constitutes a body of work? What elements or methods generate cohesion in your poems? What do you look for when editing poetry? And, how do you know a work-in-progress is complete? Students can expect to collaborate and dialogue as we explore multiple writing and revision techniques, drawing on new possibilities and forming fresh iterations of previous work. Alongside our written practice we will read and compare successive poetry projects from writers such as Larissa Lai, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Chris Nealon, and M. NourbeSe Philip. Following a process of revision, research, and rewriting, our final project will be a chapbook-length collection formed from a suite, series, or lengthening of previously written poems.

POETIC FORMS for the innocent, the eager, and the reluctant.

There is so much more to form than the traditional rhyming couplet, which seems to be heavily featured by budding poets who haven’t read contemporary poetry. In this course, we will look at diverse poetic forms from around the world, from the Abecedarian and ae freislighe (Irish form) to the Zejel, a form invented by a ninth century Hispano-Muslim poet, as well as the more established poetic forms (like sestinas and ghazals) and newer invented forms such as the Duplex, Golden Shovels and Blitz and Fibs.

A confession: poetic forms have long intimidated me. But learning about them, as I have allowed myself to do over the years, has, I admit, opened my   mind to the infinite possibilities. By the end of this course I hope you will feel more confident of your craft, more flexible and alert to formal choices and (among other things) to the powers of repetition and variation, to the frictions and complicities of sentence and line.

Advanced Writing for Children I - ADV WRIT CHILD I

CRWR 503P 2023 W Credits: 3

Advanced writing for Children and Young Adults, with an emphasis on picture books and early chapter books. The course focuses on genre-specific and critical readings as well as weekly writing exercises. Students are expected to complete two picture book manuscripts and one early chapter book. Peer feedback and revision are core principles of this course. Emphasis on narrative, poetry, sound, visual language, and the thrill of being a kid again.  

Advanced Writing for Children and Young Adults, with an emphasis on picture books and early chapter books. The course focuses on genre-specific and critical readings as well as weekly writing exercises. Students are expected to complete two picture book manuscripts and one early chapter book. Peer feedback and revision are core principles of this course. Emphasis on narrative, poetry, sound, visual language, and the thrill of being a kid again.  

CRWR 503Q 2023 W Credits: 3

KYI, TANYA | SCOTT, JORDAN

Prepare to embrace curiosity and wonder. This course is an interactive journey through the world of children’s literature, from picture books to young adult novels. We’ll explore narrative devices, character development, and wordplay through weekly activities and in-depth assignments. Workshop participants will give thoughtful feedback on writing by fellow students, and will submit a work or excerpt for young children as well as one for tweens or teens, along with a final revision. Students will leave the class with a broad understanding of the purpose and possibilities of contemporary writing for children.

An advanced workshop class in writing for children. This course relies on multiple manuscript submissions with a focus on editing and revision. As our schedule will focus on group critique, this course will be most useful for students who already have a general understanding of the genre conventions and craft vocabulary of picture books and early chapter books. Students are permitted to bring in material they have already started.

Advanced Writing of Creative Non-Fiction I - ADV CRTV N-FIC I

CRWR 505O 2023 S Credits: 3

TAYLOR, TIMOTHY

CRWR 505P 2023 W Credits: 3

MARZANO-LESNEVICH, ALEX | CATRON, MANDY

The Fractured, the Lyric, the Imaginary

This course examines the relationship between form and content in contemporary creative nonfiction. What possibilities might transcending genre conventions via formal experimentation, rupture, or imagined scenes offer for creating work that is, counterintuitively, more deeply true or nonfictional? We’ll consider a wide range of essays and excerpts from longer work and together derive principles of productive rupture. Students will have weekly ungraded writing assignments that will build to the workshopping of one short work and one long. These may be stand-alone pieces or excerpts from an ongoing larger project.

In this course, we will focus on Creative Nonfiction as a practice for looking more deeply at ourselves and more widely at the world around us. In our pursuit of the truth, we get to ask big questions. And, in attempting to answer them, we are forced to become more curious and attentive, to examine our own assumptions and biases, and to create space to imagine new ways of being in the world.

This semester, we'll spend the first half of the term on a series of CNF writing experiments--in memory, research, immersion, and reflection--imagining each as a mode of inquiry into self and the world. In the second half of the term, we'll turn our experiments into essays, sharing our work in structured peer workshops.

This course will be offered on Canvas in a fully asynchronous format. It welcomes those who are new to creative nonfiction as well as experienced CNF writers.

CRWR 505Q 2023 W Credits: 3

CATRON, MANDY | MARZANO-LESNEVICH, ALEX

Memoir Beyond the ‘Me’

This course considers the contemporary memoir and personal essay as sites of storytelling. How is the story of a person always also the story of a place, a time, and sociopolitical forces beyond the individual? We will read a wide variety of published work, with an eye to examining how writers evoked effects simultaneously intimate and large. Students should expect to turn in ungraded assignments weekly and to write one shorter work and one long. These may be stand-alone pieces or excerpts from an ongoing larger project.

Advanced Writing of Drama for Screen I - ADV DRAM SCRN I

CRWR 506O 2023 S Credits: 3

GRAEFE, SARA

CRWR 506P 2023 W Credits: 3

HOPKINS, ALLAN

Instructor: Zac Hug

Every movie you have ever loved started as a feeling inside someone’s heart, and the expression of that feeling involves a good deal of emotional work. Movies also involve a good deal of what’s called “story math.” In this online graduate workshop, we blend the former with the latter. With a focus on beginning, middle, and end, we’ll take a look at finding an idea that can sustain a feature length story, and break down the mechanics of three act, five act, and nine act structure ( psst , they’re all similar). We’ll talk about how early humans used story to create fire, we’ll watch a few movies, and we’ll write an entire film treatment. We’ll then move on to the key scenes of a feature-length film project (90-120 minutes) and prepare each other to finish the script. More importantly, we’ll ask some questions about your voice as a writer and use it to how to create a visual story on the page. We’ll figure out how to do all of that without relying on flashbacks. Original stories, please. (No adaptations, as that goes beyond the scope of the course.)

CRWR 506Q 2023 W Credits: 3

MEDVED, MAUREEN | GRAEFE, SARA

In this advanced, online screenwriting workshop, we focus specifically on writing for film. We will explore techniques for creating, developing and writing a long-form screenplay (a.k.a. feature film, 90-120 minutes), from initial pitch to treatment to early pages of script. Original stories only please; no adaptations, as this goes beyond the scope of the course. We will also screen movies and examine screenwriting structure, formatting, craft and business skills.

Filmmaking is a collaborative art involving other creatives, where the script serves as the blueprint for the finished film. In this course, you will be exploring and uncovering your own unique voice and sensibility as a screenwriter while also learning about North American film industry rules and conventions. You will complete this course with a sense of where your work fits in the marketplace, and with a set of professional skills to help you survive and thrive as a writer in this collaborative industry.

Advanced Writing of Drama for the Stage I - ADV DRMA STG I

CRWR 507P 2023 W Credits: 3

CRWR 507Q 2023 W Credits: 3

KONCAN, FRANCES | ROY, ANUSREE

Advanced Writing for Graphic Forms I - ADV GRAPHC FRM I

CRWR 508P 2023 W Credits: 3

Note : This is an Opt Res course, but it is open to on-campus students as well, as it is the only offering of 508. All Opt Res courses run online asynchronously over a 27-hour period.

Advanced Writing of Fiction I - ADV WRT FICTN I

CRWR 509N 2023 S Credits: 3

LYON, ANNABEL

CRWR 509O 2023 S Credits: 3

CRWR 509P 2023 W Credits: 3

MAILLARD, KEITH | RAMADAN, AHMAD | MEDVED, MAUREEN | OHLIN, ALIX

For each class I will send students a Zoom link.

The purpose of this workshop is to help students write excellent fiction. Many workshops move toward final draft too quickly and encourage feedback that is largely editorial. We, however, will explore the writing of fiction anywhere on a spectrum from the earliest exploratory stages to polished final drafts. Editorial feedback is not appropriate for story ideas in their earliest stages when they are often incoherent, vague, and fragile; students will be encouraged to resubmit these early drafts until they begin to cohere. As stories move closer to completion, higher degrees of editorial feedback become appropriate. Students should expect to submit written material at least three times during the term, and they will be required to bring one of their stories to polished final draft or close to it. The social environment in this workshop should be warm, friendly, supportive, and cooperative. Students who like courses with fixed and unvarying syllabi so that they will know exactly what they will be doing in any class throughout the term should seriously consider not taking this course. The syllabus is variable and will change in response to students needs and interests.

Times Before / Times to Come

This course will examine fiction set in times other than our own. For the first half of the semester, we’ll focus on historical fiction; for the second half of the semester, we’ll focus on writing the future. This will not be a traditional workshop. Instead, we’ll focus on close reading, craft analysis, generative prompts, and in-class assignments. By the end of term, you will have written first drafts of two short stories, one in each of these two modes (past and future), and you’ll also provide a substantive revision of one of these two drafts.

Some of the craft topics we’ll address include approaches to incorporating research, ethical considerations, voice, and how fictions from both times before and times to come essentially speak to our present.

Readings will include short stories by Andrea Barrett, P. Djèlí Clark, Ted Chiang, and jaye simpson.

Dream, make, destroy, discuss, and learn the magic of fiction writing.

This is a workshop for graduate writers of any combination of short and long fiction - short stories, micro or flash fiction, poetry/fiction/other hybrid, or chapters from a novel or novella.

The course will be mainly asynchronous with a weekly 27-hour workshop on Canvas. The rest of the week, you will produce your own fiction, read the scheduled writing of your cohort, and actively work through the weekly craft threads. We will explore fiction techniques as well as approaches to narrative and the process of writing (including revision) and examine subjects such as appropriation and literary citizenship. Excellent works of fiction and craft essays will be our texts, and we will discuss these in the context of our work in class. You will be asked to write your own tiny craft essay during this course and share it with your cohort. Students may be invited to attend Zoom sessions both in a group and one-on-one.

You are welcome to explore any form of fiction with the exception of formula or genre writing – romance, science fiction, crime, mystery – unless you spin the genre and make it new. The goal is to understand how to identify the strengths and challenges of your own work, so that you can return to your writing again and again with skill and confidence.

Repeat customers are welcome.

In this class, we’ll come together as a community to read, write, explore, dream, and play with short stories. The class will include substantial conversations about craft and assigned readings—both fiction and essays about writing. Among the many things we’re likely to discuss are: structure, point of view, techniques to develop and deepen characterization; the establishment and maintenance of narrative and stylistic urgency; the engines of form and language; and how meaning can be made from images and other tools. The first half of the semester will be focused on generating new work, experimenting, establishing a shared craft vocabulary, and building trust. The second half of the semester will move into workshop discussions of a complete short story draft. The semester’s work will culminate in a final portfolio and reflective essay. Overall, this workshop aims to push students to take risks with their work, to hone their ambitions, and to develop a sophisticated understanding of the myriad possibilities of fiction.

CRWR 509Q 2023 W Credits: 3

OSWORTH, AUSTEN | MAILLARD, KEITH | OHLIN, ALIX

This graduate-level class will focus on weekly writing that adds up to a larger work and is perfect for those writing in longer forms (novellas or novels). This process-oriented course emphasizes self-analysis, experiments in both form and generation techniques, and integration of feedback into revision. All workshop components will use a Radical Praise model.

Note: this course will be taught ONLINE by Keith Maillard.

Advanced Writing for Lyric Forms I - ADV LYRIC FORM I

CRWR 511Q 2023 W Credits: 3

Advanced Writing for Television I - ADV WRIT TV I

CRWR 514P 2023 W Credits: 3

The purpose of the workshop is to create your own original one-hour TV series concept and pilot script, via three modules with peer and instructor reviewed assignments: series concept, pilot beat sheet (brief outline), and draft pilot script. Concurrently, your peer review reflections and contributions in the writers’ room group/s will build your TV writing and story editing skills. Essentially, while you create and write a brand-new TV series, you also act and serve as story editor on other series. While the class is not prescriptive, per se, the mission of a writer’s room is to creatively and speculatively engage, to bring your years of TV-series chops to the table, to brainstorm, to ask “what if?” while always supporting the creator/writer’s vision.

The course is front-loaded with dramaturgical grids, rubrics for each assignment, readings on structure and the industry, as well as sample pilot scripts. The course concludes with excerpted pilot table reads by a peer cast.

Participation: critically thoughtful and constructive written feedback prior to the workshop discussion, collaboration with an in-class TV partner and/or small group, as well as your attendance contribute considerably to the grading component.

This advanced workshop takes a strong look at creating serialized television: from idea to development to outline to draft. Using a combination of lecture, workshop, television writer’s room methodology, and quite a bit of writing time - students will create the world of their TV shows on three levels: series, season, and finally, a pilot that students will generate over the fall and winter terms. Term One will focus on the development and outline stage of television writing, while Term Two will focus on a first draft of a pilot episode and a hybrid pitch/bible document. Students will also screen various television shows and scenes that illustrate character development, projecting future story, tying theme to a plot, and the ins and outs of a solid act out.   Please note that this course will be taught in Canvas.

This course will be taught by Zac Hug .

CRWR 514Q 2023 W Credits: 3

The purpose of the workshop is to create your own original half-hour TV series concept and pilot script, via three modules with peer and instructor reviewed assignments: series concept, pilot beat sheet (brief outline), and draft pilot script. Concurrently, your peer review reflections and contributions in the writers’ room group/s will build your TV writing and story editing skills. Essentially, while you create and write a brand-new TV series, you also act and serve as story editor on other series. While the class is not prescriptive, per se, the mission of a writer’s room is to creatively and speculatively engage, to bring your years of TV-series chops to the table, to brainstorm, to ask “what if?” while always supporting the creator/writer’s vision.

The course is front-loaded with dramaturgical grids, rubrics for each assignment, readings on structure and the industry, as well as sample half-hour pilot scripts. The course concludes with excerpted pilot table reads by a peer cast.

CRWR 519Q 2023 W Credits: 3

Advanced writing of speculative fiction, including fantasy, science fiction, magical realism, horror, folk tales, and weird stories. Emphasis on reading examples from the subgenres and peer feedback.

CRWR 521P 2023 W Credits: 3

Advanced study of contemporary Indigenous writing in North America across genres focusing on the production of critical and creative writing about coloniality, race, history, and identity. A maximum of 6 credits is permitted from CRWR 420, CRWR 521.

This course is an investigation of trends and debates in contemporary Indigenous writing in Canada and the United States. We will study the ways Indigenous writers approach subjects such as history, colonialism, trauma, politics, identity, ethics, representation, and power; students will explore these subjects and reflect on how they relate to their own writing practices through a range of critical and creative modes and across genres.

CRWR 525P 2023 W Credits: 3

Advanced workshop-based class focused on writing related to climate change and environmental issues; emphasis on reading various genres and peer feedback. Restricted to graduate students in the MFA Program in Creative Writing. A maximum of 6 credits is permitted between CRWR 425 and 525.

We’ll consider these questions through reading, discussion, and creative work. Students will produce climate-focused writing in several genres (poetry, nonfiction, fiction), culminating in a final portfolio and reflective essay. Students will be expected to read and write widely; to conduct research into climate issues and create artistic work related to that research; and to provide thoughtful, constructive responses to the work of their peers in the class.

CRWR 530 2023 W Credits: 3

KYI, TANYA | TATER, MALLORY

As writers, our creativity isn’t limited to the page. It takes that same creativity and resilience to grow a sustainable writing career. CRWR 530 will teach students the basics of book publishing, marketing, and promotion and prepare students. Students will learn how to pitch their work to literary publications as well as to develop a professional writing practice outside of class deadlines. The course will contain lectures and support on grant applications, publications and will feature online discussions through Canvas with an emphasis on the importance of community and self-care. As students complete each assignment, they will hone the skills necessary to handle the business side of their writing career.

Teaching Creative Writing - TEACH CR WRIT

CRWR 550Q 2023 W Credits: 3

In this hands-on course, students will design, try out, and reflect on assignments and lesson plans for a prospective creative writing class. Drawing on perspectives from writers, teachers, and education scholars including Mathew Salesses, Liz Lerman, Paisley Rekdal, Carol Dweck, Felicia Rose Chavez, and James Lang, we’ll think together about how to teach each part of the writing process. We will explore strategies for inclusive teaching and weigh the benefits of various workshop structures, and as well digging into thorny issues like how to handle challenging classroom dynamics and how to grade creative work.

Throughout the course, we’ll keep the student experience at the heart of our inquiry, and consider how our teaching goals and methods might vary depending on different formats (small workshop or large lecture, in-person or online) and contexts (university, public library, private workshop, prison, or community center). Students will support one another in developing a teaching persona and practice informed by scholarship on teaching and learning and enriched by individual experiences, strengths, and commitments. The course will be held asynchronously via Canvas with a few optional synchronous small-group sessions and will be assessed on a Credit/No Credit basis.

This course is open to on-campus and optional-residency students; 6 spaces have been reserved for each program for the initial enrolment window, after which slots can be allocated to students in either stream upon request. This course is not open to first-year MFA students in order to prioritize those closer to the end of their degree.

Advanced Writing for Graphic Forms II - ADV GRAPHC FRMII

CRWR 558Q 2023 W Credits: 3

Over the course of the term, students will develop a solid foundation for a book-length project, including a proposal, outline, script, thumbnail sketches and finished chapters. In addition to creating these items, students will develop collaborative and supportive working relationships within the class, meet and interview professional cartoonists, and closely study and analyze book-length comics. Students will also build skills for sustaining, developing and refining their creative practice in the long term. Please note: While this course offers many opportunities to connect and engage with fellow students, the emphasis is on readings, exercises, and assignments that support your independent progress on your project. There are only a few workshops.

Notes : This is an on-campus course, but is open to opt-res students as well, as it is the only offering of 558. The class will be delivered synchronously online for two hours each week.

Prerequisite: CRWR 508 or permission of instructor

Advanced Special Projects in Creative Writing - ADV PROJCTS CRWR

CRWR 570N 2023 S Credits: 3

CRWR 570Q 2023 W Credits: 3

This is a grad level CNF workshop with a twist: it’s for CRWR MFA’s as well as physics students from UBC’s Quantum Matter Institute. We’re going to be working on the skills to produce popular, persuasive science writing, such as might appear in Scientific American, National Geographic, Discovery, Nature, or any one of many similar publications. There is a big market for this kind of writing. And as with students in my regular 505 CNF course, I would anticipate publication opportunities for many of you.

What will these articles be about?

Quantum stuff! It’s a wild and crazy field, let me tell you. And one of the most exciting aspects of this course is that YOU will have access to researchers at QMI. I’ve been working with QMI for about a year on another project. And I’ve spoken with researchers doing a range of mind boggling things, like developing quantum computers that use photons as bits, manufacturing super-strong materials only a single atom thick, and working with some of the most out-of-this-world equipment you can imagine, like microscopes that map the surface of individual atoms, and refrigerators that can cool things down to less than 10 microKelvin. That’s a few hundredths of a degree above Absolute Zero folks. And that is, well, VERY COOL. Pick an area of research that fascinates you. Interview some people and think about why this research might just possibly change the entire WORLD. There’s your article.

Why should I consider this course?

 In addition to the cool factor, consider that we’ve never needed persuasive and truthful writing about science more than we do today. There’s a lot of skepticism out there, much of it the product of ignorance, prejudice, and political manipulation. Writers can contribute to positive change by writing persuasively about science. Researchers can contribute similarly by being able to talk persuasively about their work.

Directed Reading - DIRECTED READING

CRWR 590A 2023 W Credits: 3

CRWR 599 2023 W Credits: 6

Literature Courses 2022-23

Literary Genre: LG   Literature (Theory): LT Literature (Before 20th-C): LC General Literature: any course listed on this page

*asterisked courses* include a creative writing component and may be of interest to students; they do not indicate an additional requirement., literature course archive.

For Literature courses offered in previous academic years, browse our  Literature course archive .

All courses listed here are approved to count towards the Creative Writing major as general literature courses. Course codes indicate approval-specific distribution requirements. Students may register for eligible courses under any course number. 

These courses are offered by other departments, not the Program in Creative Writing. If you have questions about course content, structure, and schedule, please contact the department offering the course. The course descriptions below are the most recent available, to the best of our knowledge.

For courses taken prior to 2022-23, check our literature course archive. All other courses not on this list must be approved by the DUS. Contact Julie Iromuanya about approval. 

 2022 - 2023

ENGL | English Language and Literature ANTH | Anthropology CMLT | Comparative Literature BIBL | Religious Studies EALC | East Asian Languages and Civilizations GRMN | Germanic Studies HIST | History MAPH | Master of Arts Program in the Humanities NELC | Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations PHIL | Philosophy RLLT | Romance Languages and Literatures  REES | Russian and East European Studies SALC | South Asian Languages and Civilizations TAPS | Theatre and Performance Studies

ENGLISH LANGUAGE & LITERATURE

Any class offered by the Department of English Language and Literature beyond the Core can satisfy the general literature requirement for Creative Writing. Please see below for a selection of English classes that satisfy specific requirements in genre (LG), theory (LT), and period (LC). Browse the full English catalog here .

ENGL 10101 The University in Literature

How has the university been imagined in American literature during the 20th and 21st century? And how has a rise in its interest complemented or contrasted the rise of higher education in the same time period? This course will combine literary studies alongside critical university studies to assess how higher education has been intertwined with literature—sometimes in obvious ways and sometimes in subtle ways—since the early 20th century.

Francisco Olvera   2022-2023, Autumn,  LG

ENGL 10102 London Program: Literature, Property, and Violence

Ranging from the spectacular to the hidden, from the national to the domestic, affecting people unequally across races and genders, violence often confounds our expectations for representation. Similarly, property, itself unequally distributed, either appears or disappears depending on how we tell a story. Narrative is a crucial aspect of how we both reveal and conceal the presence of violence and property in everyday life. Taking its material from US literature prior to the twenty-first century, this course examines how both violence and property intertwine throughout the literary history of the United States. In this course, we will focus on the ways that literary texts, primarily prose narrative, represent these confusing phenomena to understand the political, aesthetic, and historical implications of both property and violence. We will read a variety of literary texts, including work by Harriet Jacobs, Herman Melville, and Toni Morrison with supplemental readings from a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives.

Prerequisites

Admission to the London Program (study abroad) is required.

Adam Fales ,  2022-2023 Autumn,  LG-F

ENGL 10103 The "Bad Moms" Renaissance  Crosslistings  GNSE 12116 

From the murderous matriarch to the overbearing stepmother, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literary representations of mothers reveal the anxieties, fantasies, and social ideals of reproduction, family, and gender in the period. This course argues that what makes a mom “bad” in these texts is bound up in the racial, gendered, and sexual imagination of early modern England. We will read a broad range of early modern texts from epic poetry to prose fiction, from midwifery manuals to the plays of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries. In doing so, we will confront past (and present) understandings of motherhood, care, femininity, and family structures.

Sarah Gray Lesley ,  2022-2023 Autumn  LC

ENGL 10104 What is nonfiction?

The aim of this course is to approach nonfiction as literature, to think critically about what the term “nonfiction” means and why the writings it describes have traditionally been seen as less “literary”: we will ask such questions as, what do nonfiction genres like journalism, essay, and memoir share with each other? Is the writing’s claim to truth something we can discern in the form of a text, and if not, what purpose does the concept of nonfiction serve in our publishing and reading culture? We will explore a few different theoretical approaches to “nonfiction” and some of the concepts or histories that shape our use of this term and sense of its meaning, including language philosophy, narratology, and literary theories of fiction. And we’ll read these theories alongside texts that work as case studies by either exemplifying or challenging what we think of as “nonfiction,” such as: WEB DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folk, Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Dr. Spock’s The Common Sense Manual of Baby and Childcare and Irma S. Rombauer’s The Joy of Cooking, Robert Lowell’s Life Studies and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen.

Dana Glaser ,  2022-2023 Autumn,  LT, LG-NF

ENGL 10105 Hypnotic Modernism: Literature, Psychology, Automaticity

The idea of automatic writing, or writing undertaken without conscious control, animates some of literary modernism’s most groundbreaking works. This course traces a history of automatic writing from late-nineteenth-century hypnotism and literary impressionism, through Gertrude Stein and Surrealism, to midcentury photography and the emergence of postmodernism. Readings in psychology and literary criticism will guide us as we investigate not only the modes and meanings of automatic writing, but also, and more fundamentally, the concept of the “automatic” that underpins how we think about art, mindedness, and agency. Course texts may include the prose of James Agee, Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, Ford Madox Ford, Guy de Maupassant, Frank Norris, and Muriel Spark; the poetry of André Breton and Gertrude Stein; and the critical writing of Stanley Cavell, Sigmund Freud, Michael Fried, Pierre Janet, and Ruth Leys.

Chris L. Gortmaker ,  2022-2023 Winter,  LG-F

ENGL 10106 The American Story Cycle

In this course, we will examine the short story “cycle,” a textual form which is structured as a collection of shorter narratives but expresses a certain interconnectedness (by way of common themes, characters, settings, etc.) between the stories that compels us to treat the work as somehow “whole.” In our discussions of these works, I aim to: explore the relationship between the generic unit of the story cycle and literary movements like American literary regionalism/”local color” fiction, the Harlem Renaissance, and Southern Gothic; delineate the popular-aesthetic mandates of the post-Reconstruction publishing industry in the US; and interrogate the ascendancy and prestige of the category of “the Modernist Novel” relative to short fiction in the early 20th century. Possible authors include: Eudora Welty, Jean Toomer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Chesnutt, Mary Hunter Austin.

Michael Anthony Esparza ,  2022-2023 Winter,  LG-F

ENGL 10107 The Experimental Life: Eighteenth-Century Literature and Science

In this course we will attend to several kinds of experimental texts that emerged during the long eighteenth century in Britain: descriptions (and critiques) of scientific experiments featuring microscopic observation (Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, and Margaret Cavendish); early fictional and non-fictional ethnographic narratives (Daniel Defoe, Lady Mary Montagu, and Samuel Johnson); and the emergence of the first science fiction novels (Cavendish and Mary Shelley). Throughout we will pay close attention to the rhetoric of witnessing in both literary and scientific texts, and we will also consider the relation between early scientific writing and ideologies of colonialism.

Will Thompson ,  2022-2023 Winter,  LG-F, LC

ENGL 10108 The Good Enough

What does it mean to establish, challenge, or respect interpersonal boundaries—for the imagined wellbeing of a child, lover, or stranger? What does it take, in other words, to be a “good enough” (rather than distant or overbearing) parent, partner, or friend? And how does a person’s psychic development in a “good enough” environment bring about their participation in various spheres of cultural activity? In this course, we will closely attend to essays by key figures in object relations psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott, Wilfred Bion, Masud Khan, Jessica Benjamin, Christopher Bollas, Adam Phillips) and literary criticism (Barbara Johnson, Leo Bersani, Mary Jacobus, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Lauren Berlant) alongside recent novels and films that play out the surprising difficulty of being good enough.

Yao Ong ,  2022-2023 Spring,  LG-NF, LT

ENGL 10109 Chicago's Worlds and Exhibitions: Archives and Memory Work

To prove itself as a world-class city, Chicago has amassed a large collection of objects and artifacts, putting them on display in archives, museums, libraries, and in events like The Columbian Exposition of 1893. This course will explore the ethics of curation, utilizing examples with respect to the traditional homelands of the Council of Three Fires (Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Odawa) as well as the Menominee, Miami, and Ho-Chunk nations. 

Samantha Maza ,  2022-2023 Spring

ENGL 10110 Intro to Porn Studies

Crosslistings  GNSE 23143

This course is a multi-media introduction to the Western history and study of the mode/label/genre of aesthetic production called pornography and its other appearances as “obscenity,” “erotica,” “porn,” “filth,” “art,” “adult,” “hardcore,” “softcore,” “trash,” and “extremity.” We will study how others have approached this form, how they have sought to control it, uplift it, analyze it, destroy it, take it seriously, or learn to live with it. This course is both an introduction to the academic field of “porn studies” and to its equal and opposite: the endless repository of historical and current attempts to get pornography out of the way, to keep it somewhere else out of sight, to destroy it, or to deem it unworthy of study. We begin with a conversation about what the stakes are and have been in studying porn and how we might go about doing it, and then move through history and media technologies beginning with the category of pornography’s invention with regards to drawings from Pompeii. The course is meant to introduce students to various forms pornography has taken, various historical moments in its sociocultural existence, and various themes that have continued to trouble or enchant looking at pornography. The goal of this course is not to make an argument for or against porn wholesale, but to give students the ability to take this contentious form and its continued life seriously, intelligently, and ethically.

Gabriel Ojeda-Sague ,  2022-2023 Spring,  LT

ENGL 10404 Genre Fundamentals: Poetry

The study of poetry has been fundamental to criticism, certainly to literary criticism, for nearly as long as “English” has existed as a modern discipline. It served liberal education well in this central role in developing the capacities of aesthetic sensibility and the powers of analysis and judgment. But when the lyric was enshrined at the heart of “practical criticism” by I. A. Richards in the 1920s, it was initially all about the focus on “the poem itself.” And typically it was about the poem on the page--rather than in the air, or the ear--and often about the poem in isolation from other considerations. Much good came of the decades of attention bestowed on poetry understood in this way--a great refinement in critical attention and appreciation, and a rich repertoire of terms for critical description and discrimination. In this course, we will try to reap some of the advantages of proceeding in this way with the study of poetry. But we will also be looking at poetry beyond the page, at poems in relation to other poems, at poems in relation to other forms and other things, including the history of poetic innovation. Selecting examples from across the English language and beyond, we will proceed from simple examples to more complex ones, and from more elementary topics in prosody and poetics to more advanced issues.

James Chandler ,  2022-2023 Autumn,  LG-P

ENGL 10610 Sondheim and After

Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021) reinvented the American musical. This course explores his work as a lyricist and composer, and his influence on writers including Jonathan Larson, Jeanine Tesori, and Lin-Manuel Miranda.

John Muse ,  2022-2023 Autumn

ENGL 10620 Literature, Medicine, and Embodiment

Crosslistings,  GNSE 20620

This class explores the connections between imaginative writing and embodiment, especially as bodies have been understood, cared for, and experienced in the framework of medicine. We’ll read texts that address sickness, healing, diagnosis, disability, and expertise. The class also introduces a number of related theoretical approaches, including the medical humanities, disability studies, narrative medicine, the history of the body, and the history of science.

Julie Orlemanski ,  2022-2023 Winter

ENGL 10703 20th Century Short Fiction  Crosslistings  AMER 10703

This course presents America's major writers of short fiction in the 20th century. We will begin with Willa Cather's "Paul's Case" in 1905 and proceed to the masters of High Modernism, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Porter, Welty, Ellison, Nabokov; on through the next generation, O'Connor, Pynchon, Roth, Mukherjee, Coover, Carver; and end with more recent work by Danticat, Tan, and the microfictionists. Our initial effort with each text will be close reading, from which we will move out to consider questions of ethnicity, gender, and psychology. Writing is also an important concern of the course. There will be two papers and an individual tutorial with each student.

William Veeder ,  2022-2023 Autumn,  LG-F

ENGL 10709 Genre Fundamentals: Fiction

What are basics of complex storytelling? What are its conventions and deviations? This course explores fiction by focusing on specific narrative strategies and how they change over time. Authors will most likely include Herman Melville, Henry James, Edith Wharton, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and Ali Smith, among others. 

Josephine McDonagh ,  2022-2023 Spring,  LG-F

ENGL 12320 Critical Videogame Studies  Crosslistings  CMST 27916, GNSE 22320, MAAD 12320, SIGN 26038

Since the 1960s, games have arguably blossomed into the world's most profitable and experimental medium. This course attends specifically to video games, including popular arcade and console games, experimental art games, and educational serious games. Students will analyze both the formal properties and sociopolitical dynamics of video games. Readings by theorists such as Ian Bogost, Roger Caillois, Alenda Chang, Nick Dyer‐Witheford, Mary Flanagan, Jane McGonigal, Soraya Murray, Lisa Nakamura, Amanda Phillips, and Trea Andrea Russworm will help us think about the growing field of video game studies. Students will have opportunities to learn about game analysis and apply these lessons to a collaborative game design project. Students need not be technologically gifted or savvy, but a wide-ranging imagination and interest in digital media or game cultures will make for a more exciting quarter. This is a 2021-22 Signature Course in the College.

Patrick Jagoda ,  2022-2023 Autumn,  LT

ENGL 13512 The Future

This course focuses on the future as imagined by American science fiction of the 20th century. On the one hand, we will pay attention to the scientific, political, and cultural contexts from which particular visions of the future emerged; on the other, we will work to develop an overarching sense of science fiction as a genre. We will deploy different analytical paradigms (Formalist, Marxist, Feminist, &c.) to apprehend the stakes and the strategies for imagining future worlds. After some initial attention to the magazine and pulp culture that helped to establish the genre, we will spotlight major SF movements (Afro Futurism, Cyberpunk, Biopunk, etc.) and major authors (including Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delaney, William Gibson, and Octavia Butler). Finally, we will use this 20th-century history to think about 21st-century SF work in different media (e.g., film, radio, graphic narrative).

Bill Brown ,  2022-2023 Winter,  LG-F, LT

ENGL 13570 Conspiracy, Theorized.

This course will explore the function of conspiracy theorizing in American politics and culture, focusing in particular on the relationship between the affective life of conspiracy theory and conspiracy theories’ function as vernacular epistemologies of populist political critique. Why have conspiracy theories been so popular in American culture from the founding on? Why do they have such renewed energy today? How have conspiracy theories built upon one another to develop an alternate history of America and the world? In asking these questions, we will track how these theories reproduce ideologies of race, nation, empire, and gender.

Christopher Taylor ,  2022-2023 Spring,  LT

ENGL 13580 Introduction to Asian American Literatures

This is a survey course that introduces students to the complex and uneven history of Asians in American from within a transnational context. As a class, we will look at Asian American texts and films while working together to create a lexicon of multilingual, immigrant realities. Through theoretical works that will help us define keywords in the field and a wide range of genres (novels, films, plays, and graphic novels), we will examine how Asia and Asians have been represented in the literatures and popular medias of America. Some of the assigned authors include, but are not limited to, Carlos Bulosan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa, Fae Myenne Ng, Nora Okja Keller, Cathy Park Hong, Ted Chiang, and Yoko Tawada.

2022-2023 Spring

ENGL 13590 Race and Time

In this advanced undergraduate course, we will explore the relationship between race and time. How might a concept of time already be racialized? How does the racialized subject experience time? How might such a temporality be figured through literary narratives? We’ll take up these and a host of other questions pertaining to the politics and poetics of time through a literary, theoretical, and cinematic study that asks us to think critically about schemas of time in the works of writers of colour. Some of the assigned authors and writers include, but are not limited to, Ted Chiang, Shani Mootoo, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Jamaica Kincaid, Anna Lee Walters, Yoko Tawada, and Frantz Fanon.

2022-2023 Spring,  LT

ENGL 14001 Rethinking Consumption: Food Writing and Immigrant Literature

In anglophone immigrant literary narratives, there is a place of particular poignancy and longing reserved for meditations upon food. What is the role, the space, and the import of food in immigrant lives? What diminution accompanies the loss of your own food, and what desire attaches to the rediscovery, or the replication of it in a foreign land? What are the stakes involved in charting out a dominion of your own familiar flavors or adapting to a new palate in an unfamiliar milieu? This course charts a few of these concerns and uses food writing as a point of entry into modes of being and making in immigrant literature, considering that emigration is a displacement that is sometimes impelled and accompanied by trauma, and characterized by rapid modes of adaptation to an unfamiliar and frequently hostile environment. Readings are likely to include fiction and poetry by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Amy Tan, Imtiaz Dharker, Amarjit Chandan, Monique Truong, and Cristina Henríquez. These primary texts will be supplemented by critical and analytical readings about patterns of displacement and consumption in immigrant lives and literature.

Upasana Dutta ,  2022-2023 Spring,  LG-F, LG-P, LT

ENGL 15002 Reading Disability in Medieval England

Drawing on critical disability studies and a range of literary sources from medieval England, this course asks how pre-modern texts can provide new paradigms for theorizing and celebrating disabled embodiment.

Jo Nixon ,  2022-2023 Winter,  LC, LT

ENGL 15004 War, Culture, and Imperialism: Russia and the West from the 19th Century to the Present

This course will survey literature shaped by the history of imperial conflict between Russia and “The West,” ultimately with a view to better understanding our current geopolitical situation and mediascape. The course will be anchored in the nineteenth century, focusing on writing related to the Crimean War (1853-6) and the long contest between Britain and Russia for domination in Central Asia and India known as “The Great Game,” but it will also provide a snapshot of Cold War cultural production, with an emphasis on ideological dissent among Black radicals and Russian emigres, before turning finally to our contemporary moment.

Kevin King ,  2022-2023 Spring

ENGL 15600 Medieval English Literature

Crosslistings  GNSE 15600

A course on experimental poetry of the late 14th century, with special attention to how formal techniques of disorientation and discontinuity are related to the philosophical, ethical, and political ambitions of poetry.

Mark Miller

2022-2023 Spring,  LG-P, LC

ENGL 17002 Early Modern Love: Eros in British Literature 1500-1700 

Crosslistings  GNSE 17002

This course examines an age-old problem of erotic love: how can love be a chief component of the well-lived life, when at its most celebrated it departs from reason, even to the point of madness? We will consider the challenges that love presents to human knowledge and ethics through the lens of early modern English literature, where the theme of love was at the center of aesthetic creativity, but our discussion will also draw on the philosophy of love, the history of emotions, Christian theology, and psychology. With these resources at hand, we will explore the phenomenon of erotic love, the relation of Eros to self and identity, and the reasons for love, finally leading up to the question: what does it mean to love well? Readings will include poetry, drama, and prose by prominent sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors such as Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, and John Milton, as well as less studied voices in the period, alongside theoretical works by thinkers throughout the ages, from Plato and Augustine to Harry Frankfurt and Lauren Berlant. Students will have an opportunity to approach the topic through analytic and creative assignments.

Michal Zechariah   2022-2023 Spring,  LG-P, LG-F, LC

ENGL 17501 Milton  Crosslistings  RLST 25405, FNDL 21201

A study of John Milton’s major writings in lyric, epic, tragedy, and polemical prose, with particular emphasis upon his evolving sense of his poetic vocation and career in relation to his vision of literary, religious, political, and cosmic history.

Joshua Scodel ,  2022-2023 Spring,  LG, LC

ENGL 19500 Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley

Crosslistings  FNDL 29501, GNSE 19500

This course examines the major works—novels, political treatises, letters, travel essays—of two of Romanticism’s most influential women writers. We will attend to historical, intellectual, and cultural contexts as well as matters of literary concern, such as their pioneering development of modes like gothic and science/speculative fiction, Wollstonecraft’s stylistic theories, and Shelley’s scenes of imaginative sympathy.

Alexis Chema

2022-2023 Spring  LC, LG-F

ENGL 19960 Comedy from the Margins

This course examines the centrality of normativity to our conceptions of funniness, reading theories of comedy alongside stand-up, sitcoms, dramedy, and romantic comedy. We will ask: in what ways do comedic formulas establish ideas of the “normal” in order to subvert (or perhaps reinforce) them? How, does comedy about the “strange”—as the foreign, the queer, the excessive or the abject—reframe structures of sociality often taken for granted, forcing us to grapple with questions of citizenship and belonging, gendered and sexual norms, racialization and power? In addition to theories of comedy and joke theory, students will analyze theoretical works on race, gender and sexuality alongside popular television series, talk shows, and comedy specials. Possible texts and comics include: Chewing Gum, Fleabag, Insecure, Reservation Dogs, Ramy, Atlanta, Awkwafina is Nora from Queens, Julio Torres, Hasan Minhaj, Ali Wong, Jacqueline Novak, Dave Chappelle, Hannah Gadsby, and Ronny Chieng.

Shirl Yang   2022-2023 Spring,  LT

ENGL 19970 Organized Crime Fiction 

This course takes up cultural representations of organized crime in literature, film, and television as loci for thinking about intersections of capitalism, globalism, migration, violence, and family. Texts may include My Brilliant Friend, The Godfather, Infernal Affairs, The Wire, Eastern Promises, and Shark Tale.

Jennifer Yida Pan ,  2022-2023 Spring,  LG-F, LT

ENGL 20140 London Program: London: From Industrial City to Financial Center

Over the last two centuries, London has undergone two “revolutions,” the industrial revolution and the financialization revolution, both of which have had significant impacts on the built landscape and residential patterns of its neighborhoods. Some of the materials we will look at are Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, George Gissing’s The Netherworld, Mike Leigh’s High Hopes, John Lanchester’s Capital, among other supporting texts (on urban globalization, the poverty maps of Michael Booth).

Elaine Hadley ,  2022-2023 Autumn,  LG-F

ENGL 20156 London Program: Staging Identity in the Eighteenth Century  Crosslistings  GNSE 22156

This course will consider connections between theatre, performance, and identity in the eighteenth century, a time when selfhood is everywhere depicted as both metaphorically and literally theatrical. We will ask: How does actual theatrical practice shape the way that identity was understood in this period?  What components of identity, particularly in terms of race, class, gender, and sexuality, are privileged or destabilized by the eighteenth-century stage? Course reading will focus primarily on Restoration and eighteenth-century British drama, but may also include short works of eighteenth-century fiction and philosophy, as well as selected secondary readings in theatre history, performance studies, and gender and sexuality studies. The final syllabus will be shaped by what’s on in London in the fall; we will hopefully be able to attend a performance or two, and consider how recent playwrights look back to the eighteenth century in their own work.

Heather Keenleyside ,  2022-2023 Autumn,  LC

ENGL 20212 Romantic Natures

Our survey of British Romantic literary culture will combine canonical texts (especially the major poetry) with consideration of the practices and institutions underwriting Romantic engagement with the natural world.  We will also address foundational and recent critical-theoretical approaches to the many “natures” of Romanticism. Our contextual materials will engage topics such as the art of landscape, an influx of exotic and dangerously erotic flora, practices of collection and display, the emergent localism of the naturalist Gilbert White, the emergence of geological “deep time,” and the (literal) fruits of empire and vegetarianism.

Timothy Campbell ,  2022-2023 Winter,  LG, LC

ENGL 20360 Shrews! Unladylike Conduct on Stage and Page in Early Modern England

Crosslistings,  GNSE 20126, TAPS 20360

This course will move between three sites of inquiry to investigate the social and material history of an evergreen trope: the domestication of a refractory servant or wife. From rare book libraries and museum collections, we will track the common features of popular entertainments that traffic in this scenario. We will then bring our findings to bear in a theatre lab environment, where we will assay scenes from The Taming of the Shrew, The Tamer Tamed, and the City Madam.

Ellen MacKay ,  2022-2023 Winter,  LC

ENGL 20720 Film and Fiction

Crosslistings  CMST 25820

This course addresses three distinct but related critical problems in the contemporary understanding of film and fiction. The most general is the question of how we might go about linking the practice of criticism in the literary arts with that of the screen arts. Where are the common issues of structure, form, narration, point of view management, and the like? Where, on the other hand, are the crucial differences that lie in the particularities of each domain--the problem that some have labeled “medium specificity” in the arts? The second problem has to do more specifically with questions of adaptation. Adaptation is a fact of our cultural experience that we encounter in many circumstances, but perhaps in none more insistently as when we witness the reproduction of a literary narrative in cinematic or televisual form. Adaptation theory has taught us to look beyond the narrow criterion of “fidelity” as far too limiting in scope. But when we look beyond, what do we look for, and what other concepts guide our exploration? The third and final problem has to do with the now rampant genre of the “film based on fact,” especially when the facts derive from a particular source text, as in the recent case of Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman? Why has this genre become so popular? What are its particular genre markings (e.g., excessive stylization, the use of documentary footage of the actual persons and events involved)? How does fictionalization operate on the facts in particular cases?

James Chandler ,  2022-2023 Autumn,  LG-NF, LC

ENGL 21785 Black in Colonial America: Three Women

Crosslistings  CRES 21785, GNSE 21725, SIGN 26076

Through a survey of texts by and about Sally Hemings, Phillis Wheatley and Tituba, “the Indian,” we will consider the lives of three black women in colonial America. In this period of expansion and contraction of the concepts of race and bondage, what kind of “tellings” were possible for these women? By reading texts written as early as 1692 and as late as 2008, we will also consider how representations of these women have changed over time.

SJ Zhang ,  2022-2023 Spring,  LC

ENGL 22322 Introduction to Game Design  Crosslistings  MAAD 22322

This course introduces students to the theories and processes underlying game design for both analog and digital projects.

Patrick Jagoda , Ashlyn Sparrow,  2022-2023 Winter

ENGL 24252 Black Quietude

This course considers modes of quietude as they intersect experiences of blackness. What can be conveyed or contained in moments of stillness or quiet? Is black quietude a moment of universalism that transcends the determinations of race? Or do black subjects carry or project the experience of racialization into their spaces of quiet? Do we define quiet for the black subject on the same terms as for other racial categories?

Tina Post ,  2022-2023 Winter,  LT

ENGL 24400 Brecht and Beyond

Brecht is indisputably the most influential playwright in the 20th century, but his influence on film theory and practice and on cultural theory is also considerable. We will explore the range and variety of Brecht's work, from the Threepenny hit to the agitprop film Kühle Wampe) to classic parable plays, as well as Brecht heirs in German theatre and film (RW Fassbinder & Peter Weiss) theatre and film in Britain (Peter Brook & John McGrath), African theatre and film influenced by Brecht, and the NYC post-Occupy adaptation of Brecht’s Days of the Commune. This course also includes a weekly screening session.

Note: This is not a basic introductory course. Students must have completed HUM Core and one or more of the following: International Cinema or equivalent and/or TAPS and/or working German. Please ask about other courses you have taken that may count as PQs.

Loren Kruger ,  2022-2023 Winter

ENGL 25232 Reading Nineteenth Century Feminisms Crosslistings  GNSE 23144

Disputes about sexual difference set feminist factions against each other during the nineteenth century, as in the present; and, like the feminisms of our own moment, nineteenth-century feminisms diverged sharply on questions about race and racism. This course reads US and British prose from 1850-1915 in order to study the debates that shaped feminist thought during that period. Considering a range of varied feminisms (among them: liberal feminism, difference feminism, eugenic feminism, white feminism, etc.), we'll encounter conflicting arguments about the right to vote, access to education, marriage, mothering, and sex. Authors may include: Anna Julia Cooper, George Eliot, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Emma Goldman, Frances E.W. Harper, John Stuart Mill, Lucy Parsons, John Ruskin, Mary Arnold Ward, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett.

Emily Coit   2022-2023 Spring

ENGL 25262 Global Feminist and Queer Aesthetics  Crosslistings  GNSE 20125

This course examines ways of seeing, or representation, in the making of gender and sexuality across time and place. We will study feminist and queer literature and arts, and theories of representation across disciplines, on questions from migration and borders to care. For example, how do practices of mapmaking, or narratives of crossing, help us understand intimacy or estrangement? And how might visualizing care move us toward repair or a new world? In taking this lens, we will also consider how gender and sexuality are co-constituted with race, the nation-state, and labor. Through a workshop model, we will build on these foundational and new approaches to representing gender and sexuality together. Participants are encouraged to bring in supplementary texts to build out our archive of transnational gender and sexuality. Our class will culminate in a glossary, made up of short essays by participants on aesthetics, interpretative approaches, and imaginaries.

Kaneesha Parsard ,  2022-2023 Winter,  LG-NF, LT

 25805 Popol Vuh: Epic of the Americas,  Crosslistings  FNDL 25805, LACS 25805

One of the oldest and grandest stories of world creation in the native Americas, the Mayan Popol Vuh has been called “the Bible of America.” It tells a story of cosmological origins and continued historical change, spanning mythic, classic, colonial, and contemporary times. In this class, we’ll read this full work closely (in multiple translations, while engaging its original K’iche’ Mayan language), attending to the important way in which its structure relates myth and history, or foundations and change. In this light, we’ll examine its mirroring in Genesis, Odyssey, Beowulf, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Diné Bahane’ to consider how epics struggle with a simultaneity of origins and historiography. In highlighting this tension between cosmos and politics, we’ll examine contemporary adaptations of the Popol Vuh by Miguel Ángel Asturias, Ernesto Cardenal, Diego Rivera, Dennis Tedlock, Humberto Ak’ab’al, Xpetra Ernandex, Patricia Amlin, Gregory Nava, and Werner Herzog. As we cast the Guatemalan Popul Vuh as a contemporary work of hemispheric American literature (with North American, Latin American, Latinx, and Indigenous literary engagement), we will take into account the intellectual contribution of Central America and the diaspora of Central Americans in the U.S. today. As a capstone, we will visit the original manuscript of the Popol Vuh held at the Newberry Library in Chicago, thinking about how this story of world creation implicates us to this day.

Edgar Garcia ,  2022-2023 Spring,  LG-P, LC

ENGL 26210 The Roaring Twenties: Then and Now 

As we begin to get a feel for the aesthetic, social, and political moods and modes that will come to be the hallmarks of the 2020’s, critics have begun turning back to the 1920’s and its uncanny historical similarities to our current decade—both being preceded by pandemics and eruptions of racial violence, for instance— to think the present. In studying the aesthetic responses of individuals and movements in and to the 1920s, this class will also ask students to consider the utility and limits of this lens in helping us make sense of our emerging now.

Adrienne Brown ,  2022-2023 Autumn,  LG

ENGL 26312/36312 Worlding Otherwise: Speculative Fiction, Film, Theory  Crosslisting: CMLT 26311/36311

This course examines literary and cinematic works of speculative fiction in a comparative context. An expansive genre that encompasses science fiction, fantasy, magic realism, horror, as well as utopian and dystopian literature, speculative fiction envisions alternate, parallel, possible or imagined worlds. These worlds often exhibit characteristics such as: scientific and technological advancements; profound social, environmental, or political transformations; time or space travel; life on other planets; artificial intelligence; and evolved, hybrid, or new species. Speculative works frequently reimagine the past and present in order to offer radical visions of desirable or undesirable futures. We will also consider how this genre interrogates existential questions about what it means to be human, the nature of consciousness, the relationship between mind/body, thinking/being, and self/other, as well as planetary concerns confronting our species. Fictional works will be paired with theoretical readings that frame speculative and science fiction in relation to questions of gender, race, class, colonialism, bio-politics, human rights, as well as environmental and social justice. In addition to studying subgeneres - such as Afrofuturism - we will explore speculative fiction as a critical mode of reading that theorizes other ways of being, knowing, and imagining.

Hoda El Shakry ,  2022-2023 Autumn, LG-F, LG-NF, LT

ENGL 26907 American Culture During World War II

With the mass mobilization of the US following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, artists of all kinds served in the armed forces or in the war bureaucracy. That doesn’t mean that cultural production stopped. It did, however, mean drastic changes the kind of art that was produced and the ways in which it was disseminated. In short, World War II instigated a dramatic change in the relationship of art to the state. For example, the Library of Congress was established; American publishing was completely overhauled (the first volume of the redoubtable Viking Portable, for instance, was an anthology issued to soldiers); Japanese internment camps had as one of their unintended consequences the opportunity for a new generation of Nisei writers to share and publish their work; American theater saw its boundaries stretched to embrace a wider cross section of the US public; Hollywood and the war department enjoyed a collaboration on mass market as well as training films; refugee intellectuals from Europe congregated in New York and had a remarkable reshaping effect on American culture. The course will follow various streams—mass culture and high culture, film and literature, drama and the visual arts—to explore how new institutions, new cultural producers, and new audiences transformed US culture during the war years.

Deborah Nelson ,  2022-2023 Winter

ENGL 27250 Wealth, Democracy, and the American Novel

Numerous commentators have remarked on similarities between late 19th-century Gilded Age America and turn-of-the 21st-century neoliberal America. By focusing on several American novels, beginning with the late 19th- and early 20th-century decades, we will explore the way that US novelists sought to understand the political, social, and imaginative challenges presented by the concentration of great wealth in fewer and fewer hands.

Kenneth Warren ,  2022-2023 Autumn

ENGL 27500 Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance: Issues and Methods

Crosslistings  CRES 27520

In this course we will examine that period known as the Harlem Renaissance, partly as an exercise in literary criticism and theory, partly as an exercise in literary and intellectual history. Our objectives will be to critique the primary texts from this period and at the same time to assess the efforts of literary scholars to make sense of this moment in the history of American cultural production.

Kenneth Warren ,  2022-2023 Spring,  LG, LT

ENGL 20228/30228 William Blake: Poet, Painter, Prophet

Crosslistings  ARTH 20228, ARTH 30228, FNDL 20228

A survey of the major poetic and pictorial works of William Blake, centrally focussed on his illuminated books, from the early Songs of Innocence and Experience to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and the books of the revolutionary period of the 1790s: Europe, America, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, and The Book of Urizen. We will also consider the later prophecies, Milton: A Poem and Jerusalem, along with Blake’s work as an illustrator of Milton, Chaucer, and the Bible. Blake’s engagement with the political and religious controversies of his time will provide context, along with his pioneering exploration of dialectical modes of thought and radical forms of humanism.

W. J. T. Mitchell ,  2022-2023 Spring,  LG-P, LT, LC

ENGL 20230/30230 Iconology East and West

Iconology is the study of images across media and cultures. It is also associated with philosophical reflections on the nature of images and their relation to language—the interplay between the “icon” and the “logos.” A plausible translation of this compound word into Chinese would describe it as “Words in Pictures, Pictures in Words”:   诗 中有画，画中有 诗 . This seminar will explore the relations of word and image in poetics, semiotics, and aesthetics with a particular emphasis on how texts and pictures have been understood in the Anglo-European-American and Chinese theoretical traditions. The interplay of painting and poetry, speech and spectacle, audition and vision will be considered across a variety of media, particularly the textual and graphic arts. The aims of the course will be 1) to critique the simplistic oppositions between “East” and “West” that have bedevilled intercultural and intermedial comparative studies; 2) to identify common principles, zones of interaction and translation that make this a vital area of study. This course will be coordinated with a parallel seminar at Beijing University.

W. J. T. Mitchell ,  2022-2023 Winter,  LT

ENGL 20250/30250 The Means of Production: Contemporary Poetry and Literary Publishing

This course will introduce students to the editorial principles and collaborative practices of literary evaluation in the making of contemporary American poetry. How does a poem 'make it' into the pages of Chicago Review . . . or The Paris Review? How do individual readers and editorial collectives imagine the work of literary assessment and aesthetic judgment in our time? We will begin the term with a survey of new directions in Anglophone poetry (and poetry in translation) as a preparation for weekly editorial exercises in the evaluation and assessment of literary manuscripts. We will 'simulate' editorial deliberations at contemporary literary periodicals like Poetry magazine and book publishers like the Phoenix Poets book series at the University of Chicago Press. The course will include visits from contemporary literary publishers at Chicago-area magazines and presses.

Srikanth (Chicu) Reddy ,  2022-2023 Autumn,  LG-P

ENGL 32104 Hymns  Crosslistings  RLVC 32104

The course will track hymns from the early modern period through the late eighteenth century. We’ll examine the evolution of the hymn as a literary form, focusing on obsolescence and adaptation in literary transmission. We’ll start with the Psalms of the Hebrew Bible, and analyze psalters (such as the one produced by Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, and her brother, Sir Philip Sidney) and the metrical psalms of Sternhold and Hopkins that were used in Anglican services. We’ll then take up the development of congregational hymns, hymns sung by everyone in a congregation, to track the way that literary adaptation among Dissenters became both common and controversial. We’ll look at Isaac Watts’s multiple hymns for each of the Psalms, his later Hymns and Spiritual Songs, and his Divine Songs for children to get at the importance he and other Dissenters (such as Anna Letitia Barbauld) attached to supplying words to all who could sing or say them. We’ll end with a discussion of “Amazing Grace” and its use in the British abolition movement, and with a discussion of the movement of the literary hymn away from religion altogether in literary hymns, Shelley’s and Keats’s odes.

Frances Ferguson ,  2022-2023 Winter

ENGL 32312 Virtual Theaters,  Crosslistings,  TAPS 32312

This course probes the nature and limits of theater by exploring a range of theatrical texts whose relation to performance is either partially or fully virtual (philosophical dialogues, closet dramas, novel chapters in dramatic form, twitter theater, digital theater, algorithmic theater, transmedia games, remote theater.) One unit attends to experiments in remote theater since the COVID-19 pandemic. 

John Muse ,  2022-2023 Winter

ENGL 25970/32314 Alternate Reality Games: Theory and Production,  Crosslistings  BPRO 28700, ARTV 20700, ARTV 30700, CMST 25954, CMST 35954, MAAD 20700, TAPS 28466

Games are one of the most prominent and influential media of our time. This experimental course explores the emerging genre of "alternate reality" or "transmedia" gaming. Throughout the quarter, we will approach new media theory through the history, aesthetics, and design of transmedia games. These games build on the narrative strategies of novels, the performative role-playing of theater, the branching techniques of electronic literature, the procedural qualities of video games, and the team dynamics of sports. Beyond the subject matter, students will design modules of an Alternate Reality Game in small groups. Students need not have a background in media or technology, but a wide-ranging imagination, interest in new media culture, or arts practice will make for a more exciting quarter.

Third- or fourth-year standing. Instructor consent required. To apply, submit writing through online form at  https://www.franke.uchicago.edu/big-problems-courses ; see course description. Once given consent, attendance on the first day is mandatory. Questions: [email protected] .

Patrick Jagoda , Heidi Coleman,  2022-2023 Winter,  LT

ENGL 24528/34528 Seeing Ourselves: Photography and Literary Non-Fiction

What knowledge about ourselves can photographs provide? Can photographs change the way we see ourselves--collectively, individually? Photography has been around for almost 200 years, yet its dominance in our lives seems only to increase. This course examines photography’s influence on our everyday lives, particularly on conceptions and portrayals of the self. We will see how theorists have grappled with the phenomenon of photography, engaging the written word to address its conundrums, dangers, and attractions. With the help of these theorists, we will question the promises that photographs seem to make about representing the world. The purpose of this course is also, however, to take seriously the affective, documentary power of photography. We will thus analyze the creative use of photographs in the non-fiction (or nearly non-fiction) of major 20th- and 21st-century writers (philosophers, critics, journalists, essayists, poets, novelists, activists). Photography will emerge as a productive medium for navigating issues of memory, identity, race, gender, authenticity, agency, publicity, and art. With keen attention to the different capabilities of writing and photography, we will explore the dynamics of self-expression, the ethics of representing others, and the politics of image-text depictions.

Christine Fournaies,  2022-2023 Winter,  LT

ENGL 34800 Poetics  Crosslistings  MAPH 34800

In this course, we will study poetry ‘in the abstract’. We will study various efforts on the part of philosophers, literary critics, and poets themselves to formulate theories of poetic discourse. We will examine a range of historical attempts to conceptualize poetry as a particular kind of language practice, from Greek, Chinese, and Indic antiquity to the present.

David Wray,  2022-2023 Autumn,  LG-P

ENGL 24960/34960 California Fictions, 1884-2018  Crosslistings  MAPH 34960

This course will consider works of literature and cinema from 1884-2018 that take place in Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, the Inland Empire, and rural California to offer a case study for everyday life and critical space theory. Beginning with Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona and ending with Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother you, we will also consider how “the west” provides an opportunity for reconsidering canon formation and genre.

Open to MAPH students: 3rd and 4th years in the College email 2-3 sentences about why you want to take the course for consent.

Megan Tusler,  2022-2023 Autumn

ENGL 35700 Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in the Middle Ages

Crosslistings  GNSE 35700

The field of gender and sexuality in medieval Western Europe is both familiar and exotic. Medieval poetry is fascinated by the paradoxical inner workings of desire, and poetic, theological, and philosophical texts develop sophisticated terms for analyzing it. Feminine agency is at once essential to figurations of sexual difference and a scandal to them. Ethical self-realization gets associated both with abstinence and with orgasmic rapture. This course will examine these and other topics in medieval gender and sexuality through reading a range of materials including poetry, theology, gynecological treatises, hagiography, and mystical writing.

Mark Miller ,  2022-2023 Spring,  LC, LG-P

ENGL 26250/36250 Richer and Poorer: Income Inequality,  Crosslistings,  LLSO 26250, SIGN 26004

Current political and recent academic debate have centered on income or wealth inequality. Data suggests a rapidly growing divergence between those earners at the bottom and those at the top. This course seeks to place that current concern in conversation with a range of moments in nineteenth and twentieth century history when literature and economics converged on questions of economic inequality. In keeping with recent political economic scholarship by Thomas Piketty, we will be adopting a long historic view and a somewhat wide geographic scale as we explore how economic inequality is represented, measured, assessed and addressed. Charles Dickens, Richard Wright, HG Wells, will be among the writers explored.

Elaine Hadley ,  2022-2023 Winter,  LG-F, LT

ENGL 28230/38230 Fashion and Change: The Theory of Fashion  Crosslistings  GNSE 28230, GNSE 38230

This course offers a representative view of foundational and recent fashion theory, fashion history, and fashion art, with a historical focus on the long modern era extending from the eighteenth century to the present. While engaging the general aesthetic, sociological, and commercial phenomenon of fashion, we will also devote special attention to fashion as a discourse self-reflexively preoccupied with the problem of cultural change—the surprisingly difficult question of how and why “change” does or does not happen. We will aim for a broader appreciation of fashion’s inner workings—its material processes, its practitioners—but we will also confront the long tradition of thinking culture itself through fashion, to ask how we might productively do the same.

Timothy Campbell ,  2022-2023 Spring

ENGL 28290/38290 Samuel Richardson's Clarissa,  Crosslistings  FNDL 28290

This course will examine the very long and possibly—very probably—the greatest novel in the English language. We’ll consider the effect of Richardson’s decision to conduct his novel as a series of letters, and we’ll pay particular attention to his extraordinary effectiveness in creating complexity in a fairly simple plot and in tracking an ever-expanding cast of characters. The Penguin edition we’ll be using comes to 1499 pages, and they are over-sized pages. This is a course for committed readers!

Frances Ferguson ,  2022-2023 Autumn,  LC

ENGL 18860/38860 Black Shakespeare   Crosslistings  CRES 18860, TAPS 20040, TAPS 30040

This course explores the role played by the Shakespearean canon in the shaping of Western ideas about Blackness, in long-term processes of racial formation, and in global racial struggles from the early modern period to the present. Students will read Shakespearean plays portraying Black characters (Othello, Titus Andronicus, The Tempest, and Antony and Cleopatra) in conversation with African-American, Caribbean, and Post-colonial rewritings of those plays by playwrights Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, Bernard Jackson, Djanet Sears, Keith Hamilton Cobb, Aimé Césaire, Derek Walcott, Lolita Chakrabarti, and film-makers Max Julien and Jordan Peele. This course is open to MAPH students and to PhD students upon request.

Noémie Ndiaye   2022-2023 Spring,  LC

ENGL 20161/40161 21st Century Ethnic American Literature  Crosslistings  AMER 40161, CRES 22161, CRES 40161, MAPH 40161

This class will read US novels and short stories by African-American, American Indian, Asian-American, and Latinx writers from the last twenty years to conceptualize the shifting categories of race and ethnicity, paired with critical and theoretical works in critical cultural race studies.

Megan Tusler,  2022-2023 Winter

ENGL 20180/40180 Women Writing God

Crosslistings  GNSE 25180, GNSE 45180, MAPH 40180

This course examines imaginative works by women that take on the task of representing divine or supernatural being from the medieval era to the present. Drawing on the work of critics such as Luce Irigaray, Caroline Walker Bynum, and Judith Butler, we explore what strategies these writers employ to depict an entity simultaneously understood to be unrepresentable and to have a masculine image. Texts range from premodern mystics such as Julian of Norwich and Teresa of Avila to Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.

Instructor consent required for first and second year undergraduates.

Sarah Kunjummen,  2022-2023 Winter,  LC

ENGL 20260/40250 Housekeeping: Domestic Drama and Material Culture 

The theatre represents a new and wildly successful commodity in the early modern English market. Yet it is often kept separate from other fashionable goods of the period by virtue of its intangible form. This course overturns the orthodoxy that an early modern play was a co-imaged event and the early modern theatre was an “empty space” by attending to the Renaissance theatre's frequent recourse to household stuff. We will read plays designed for private performance, that use the fixtures of the household to build theatrical worlds. We will investigate dramatists who liken the playhouse to key venues of commodity culture, including the pawnshop, the Exchange (the precedent of the shopping mall), and the fairground. We will draw from Henslowe's Diary to recover the business of theatrical property-making and the allure of a company as disclosed by its holdings. All the while, we will question how the fiction of emptiness takes hold in theatre history, and how plays that depict a furnished world are relegated to second-class genres like domestic tragedy and city comedy.

Ellen MacKay ,  2022-2023 Autumn

ENGL 40260 Writing in the Humanities: Genres of Literary Scholarship

What kinds of writing can literary scholars use to share their discoveries? What new audiences can they reach? How can we best communicate with those audiences, and how can we spark broad and enduring interest in humanities subjects? Taking the changing landscape of academic publishing as a point of departure, this course offers students opportunities to develop writing skills for a variety of academic and professional contexts. Guided by their own individual interests, students will work with primary sources from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, completing three linked projects over the course of the term. This progressive sequence will invite them to look beyond the conventional journal article: we'll consider how to convey humanist ways of thinking and scholarly insight across a range of genres, including podcasts, videos, teaching resources, book and film reviews, book-club presentations, academic conference talks, and annotated transcriptions of finds from the digital archive as well as the library's Special Collections.

Emily Coit ,  2022-2023 Autumn

ENGL 20464/40464 The Lives of Others,  Crosslistings  MAPH 40464

How much can you ever really know someone else? In this course, we take up the inscrutability of others through a range of narratives about - politically, socially, and geographically - distant others from the early 20th century. Texts include fiction, documentary film, and critical theory around transnationalism, contact zones and ethnography). Some of these texts meditate on the general problem of living with others. Others take on the limits of empathy, access, and friendship whether explicitly or in their formal arrangement. Specifically, we focus on works that engage with an ethics or “work on the self” as a preliminary to having knowledge of others. We will be guided by readings that likely include Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives, E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, Victor Segalen’s Essay on Exoticism, Levi-Strauss’ Tristes Tropiques, Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate, Amitav Ghosh’s In An Antique Land and J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello.

Darrel Chia,  2022-2023 Autumn

ENGL 20562/40562 Renaissance Freedoms,  Crosslistings  MAPH 40562

This course explores early modern debates about human agency across multiple registers: political, philosophical, religious, erotic. Texts include selections from the writings of Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza, William Shakespeare, Elizabeth Carey, Margaret Cavendish and John Milton.

Sarah Kunjummen,  2022-2023 Autumn,  LG, LC

ENGL 20565/40565 Postcolonial Aesthetics,  Crosslistings  MAPH 40565

What do we mean by the “postcolonial aesthetic”? In this course, we read and think through the literary and conceptual resources that might help us reconstruct this notion – from Deepika Bahri, to Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. Our goal is to attend to “the aesthetic” as an experience that reshapes subjectivity in terms of our relation to ourselves and others. By engaging with twentieth-century novels, memoir, and film, we consider how this postcolonial aesthetic might function. What habituated forms of perception or common sense notions does it seek to interrupt? What ways of sensing and living does it offer? Readings will likely include Ashis Nandy, Deepika Bahri, Theodor Adorno, Derek Walcott, Frantz Fanon, Arundhati Roy, and Jean Rhys.

Darrel Chia,  2022-2023 Spring

ENGL 21360/41360 Gender, Capital, and Desire: Jane Austen and Critical Interpretation

Crosslistings  GNSE 21303, GNSE 41303, MAPH 40130

Today, Jane Austen is one of the most famous (perhaps the most famous), most widely read, and most beloved of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novelists. In the two hundred years since her authorial career, her novels have spawned countless imitations, homages, parodies, films, and miniseries – not to mention a thriving “Janeite” fan culture. For just as long, her novels have been the objects of sustained attention by literary critics, theorists, and historians. For example, feminist scholars have long been fascinated by Austen for her treatments of feminine agency, sociality, and desire. Marxists read her novels for the light they shed on an emergent bourgeoisie on the eve of industrialization. And students of the “rise of the novel” in English are often drawn to Austen as a landmark case – an innovator of new styles of narration and a visionary as to the potentials of the form. This course will offer an in-depth examination of Austen, her literary corpus, and her cultural reception as well as a graduate-level introduction to several important schools of critical and theoretical methodology. We will read all six of Austen’s completed novels in addition to criticism spanning feminism, historicism, Marxism, queer studies, postcolonialism, and psychoanalysis. Readings may include pieces by Shoshana Felman, Frances Ferguson, William Galperin, Deidre Lynch, D.A. Miller, Edward Said, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Raymond Williams.

Tristan Schweiger, 2022-2023 Autumn LG-F, LC, LT

ENGL 21370/41370 Ships, Tyrants, and Mutineers

Crosslistings  MAPH 41370

Since the Renaissance beginnings of the “age of sail,” the ship has been one of literature’s most contested, exciting, fraught, and ominous concepts. Ships are, on the one hand, globe-traversing spaces of alterity and possibility that offer freedom from the repression of land-based systems of power. And they are Michel Foucault’s example of the heterotopia par excellence. From Lord Byron to Herman Melville to Anita Loos, the ship has been conceived as a site of queerness and one that puts great pressure on normative constructions of gender. At the same time, the ship has been a primary mechanism for the brutality of empire and hegemony of capital, the conduit by which vast wealth has been expropriated from the colony, military domination projected around the world, and millions of people kidnapped and enslaved. Indeed, the horror of the “Middle Passage” of the Atlantic slave trade has been a major focus of inquiry for theorists like Paul Gilroy and Hortense Spillers, interrogating how concepts of racial identity and structures of racism emerge out of oceanic violence. In the 20th and 21st centuries, science-fiction writers have sent ships deep into outer space, reimagining human social relations and even humans-as-species navigating the stars. While focusing on the Enlightenment and 19th century, this course will examine literary and filmic texts through the present that have centered on the ship, as well as theoretical texts that will help us to deepen our inquiries.

Tristan Schweiger  2022-2023 Winter

ENGL 26002  Literature and Hunger

Crosslistings RLST 26002

This undergraduate course pursues themes of hunger, the consumption of food, the formation of community, and relation to the sacred, through a sequence of readings in the Western tradition. By reading classic works (The Odyssey, selections from The Hebrew Bible and Christian Scriptures, selections from The Divine Comedy, the Letters of St. Catherine of Siena, sonnets of Shakespeare, Paradise Lost), and modern works by Kafka, Simone Weil, Louise Glück, Frank Bidart, we will examine how different philosophies have imagined the acceptance or rejection of love, life, and the sacred in terms of the symbolism of food. Class work will involve close analysis of literary works, even those in translation; intensive critical writing and revision; and secondary readings in literary criticism, anthropology, theology, and psychology. Undergraduate Seminar.  

R. Warren 2022-2023 Autumn

ENGL 27703/47703 Queer Modernism  Crosslistings  AMER 27703, AMER 47703, GNSE 23138, GNSE 47702, MAPH 47703

This course examines the dramatic revisions in gender and sexuality that characterize Anglo-American modernity. Together, we will read literary texts by queer writers to investigate their role in shaping the period's emergent regimes of sex and gender. We'll consider queer revisions of these concepts for their effect on the broader social and political terrain of the early twentieth century and explore the intimate histories they made possible: What new horizons for kinship, care, affect, and the everyday reproduction of life did modernist ideas about sex and gender enable? At the same time, we will seek to “queer” modernism by shifting our attention away from high literary modernism and towards modernism’s less-canonical margins. Our examination will center on queer lives relegated to the social and political margins—lives of exile or those cut short by various forms of dispossession. This class will double as an advanced introduction to queer theory, with a particular emphasis on literary criticism.

Agnes Malinowska  2022-2023 Winter

ENGL 27714/47714 Race, Reproduction, and Modernism

Crosslistings  CRES 27714, GNSE 27714, GNSE 47714, MAPH 47714

In this class, we focus on the centrality of debates around women’s reproductive capacity in shaping the culture of modernity in the U.S. around 1900. We look at the way that feminist politics, in conjunction with broader developments in industrial capitalist society, disrupted traditional pathways of reproduction, as these have revolved around woman’s crucial role in sustaining the biological family and the home. We will read fiction, essays, and political tracts around the birth control movement, free love, sex work, the figure of the “new woman,” the politics of the home, the rise of consumer culture, and the demands placed on both Black and white women during this period in reproducing “the race.” Most generally, we will focus on texts that both trouble and shore up bourgeois motherhood as the central means of reproducing the biological life and social fabric of American culture. And we will likewise be interested in writers and political figures that imagine and advocate for non-reproductive intimacies that would dismantle this social reproductive order altogether.

Open enrollment for all graduate students, as well as 3rd- and 4th-year undergraduate students with majors in the Humanities and Social Sciences. All others, please email  [email protected]  to request permission to enroll.

Agnes Malinowska  2022-2023 Spring

ENGL 50250 Moving and Being Moved

This course considers the significance of mobility, migration and migrancy in the context of concepts of 18th- and 19th century-modernity, and explores some of their legacies especially in relation to literature.  We will focus on migration in and from Britain mainly in the nineteenth century, and consider, inter alia, how literary and other printed texts intersect with the practices and fantasies of moving and staying still.    Key terms are mobility and stability or stagnancy, emigration and settlement, colonization and decolonization, empire, eviction, dispossession, hospitality, refuge and asylum, and ‘being moved’ in all its senses.

Josephine McDonagh   2022-2023 Autumn,  LT

ENGL 50622 Creations: the Popol Vuh and Paradise Lost *

Crosslistings  CDIN 50622

While apparently worlds apart, John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) and the K’iche’ Maya story of creation the Popol Vuh (1702) are historically adjacent works of world creation that remind us that world creations happen in historical circumstances, that creation itself is nothing if not historically, socially, and critically tensioned. This class thinks with and between these works to ask conceptual questions about creation and its relationship to myth and history. What are creations for? What kinds of thinking and feeling do they enable? And how should we understand the framework of comparability itself? At the same time, we will rethink the global historical currents within which the texts were written: the early modern anglophone, hispanophone, and indigenous worlds whose interconnections bind together the creation stories told by Milton and the anonymous K’iche’ Maya authors. Listening closely for shared engagements with colonialism, race, religion, political power, historical experience, pedagogy, intellection, imagination, critique, and social crisis, we will look for through-lines between these works but also for distinct points of departure and incommensurability.

This is a Ph.D.-level course, but spaces may be made available for MA or BA students who provide a note describing their interest and readiness for the course.

Edgar Garcia ,  Timothy Harrison ,  2022-2023 Spring

ENGL 53103 The Uses of Fiction: Poetry and Philosophy in Early Modernity

This course attempts to unpack the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy by examining how each discourse draws on the power of poiesis in different ways. We will approach this topic by examining four discourses: first, formal treatments of poetry and poetics from antiquity (Plato, Aristotle) through the late Renaissance (Sidney, Tasso, Milton); second, explicitly fictional thought experiments employed by philosophers (Avicenna, Ibn Tufayl, Descartes, Locke, Condillac); third, poetry explicitly invested in the making of fictional worlds (Spenser, Milton, Cavendish); and fourth, recent scholarship on poetry’s relationship to philosophy (Stanley Rosen, Victoria Kahn, Ayesha Ramachandran, Russ Leo, Guido Mazzoni, and others.

Timothy Harrison ,  2022-2023 Winter,  LC

ENGL 53450 Enlightenments and Romanticisms

This seminar will develop research projects around the topics of Enlightenment(s), nationalisms, and transnationalisms in the Romantic era. Some of the categories for the course will come from traditional faculty psychology (reason, memory, imagination). Some will come from criticism and theory that are sometimes tinged with aesthetic and philosophical ambitions. Our primary emphasis will be on literature, but questions about romanticism in music, the visual arts, and the historical disciplines will be in play. The main focus will fall on English-language literary materials produced in England, Scotland, Ireland, and America, but the course may also engage texts by non-British writers such as Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Kant, Herder, Schiller, and the Saint Simonians.

2022-2023 Winter

ENGL 53580 Debates and New Directions in Black Feminisms  Crosslistings  GNSE 53580

Following Jennifer Nash’s charge for Black feminists to “let go” of tightly held intellectual genealogies (intersectionality) and postures (defensiveness), this doctoral seminar takes up new directions and debates in the study of Black feminisms. We’ll study institutional debates and tensions between Black and transnational feminisms (where do we mean when we say Black, and who do we mean when we say transnational), the agonistic relationship between Afropessimism and Black feminisms, among others. Alongside these new works in Black feminisms, we’ll consider the foundational works of Black feminist thought, literature, and art they’re reimagining. Scholars, writers, and artists under consideration include Jennifer Nash, Katherine McKittrick, Jennifer Morgan, Simone Leigh, Saidiya Hartman, Patrice Douglass, Torkwase Dyson, and Canisia Lubrin.

Kaneesha Parsard ,  2022-2023 Autumn,  20th/21st

ENGL 53590 Archival Methods: Race, Indigeneity, and Gender Before 1900  Crosslistings  GNSE 53590

This class offers an in-depth introduction to archival theory and research methodologies that attend to colonialism and slavery between 1650 and 1865. With a focus on how scholars have used the analytics of race and gender to examine this history, our class will examine foundational primary materials and the bodies of scholarship that have grown up around them. We will read the work of Olaudah Equiano, Matthew Lewis, Phillis Wheatley, Mary Prince, Samuel Occom, Venture Smith, Black Hawk, Harriet Jacobs, as well as Salem Witch Trial transcripts. In addition, the class will visit UChicago’s Special Collections and the Newberry Library. Students will write on an archival object of their choosing from the period that is relevant to their individual research interests.

SJ Zhang ,  2022-2023 Spring

ENGL 54332 X Before X: Historicist Method and Concepts Across Time

This course explores the methodological friction between present-day concepts and the archives of the past. In particular, we look at instances when an organizing concept is arguably anachronistic to the cultural milieu in question. The class will be divided into several units, like “race before race,” “lyric before lyric” “trans before trans,” and “literature before literature.” Readings will include both primary and secondary sources. Along the way, we will also consider different paradigms for understanding literary history, cultural history, and the history of ideas (e.g., Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, Quentin Skinner, Arnold Davidson, Hans Robert Jauss, Sheldon Pollock).

Julie Orlemanski ,  2022-2023 Winter,  18th/19th

ENGL 20566/TAPS 20420 Performing Skateboard Poetics: Style, Motion, and Space Wed : 01:30 PM-04:20 PM Midway Studios 112 This Gray Center Fellowship course considers the social poetics of skateboard culture, with special attention to style, motion, and physical space. Co-taught by Kyle Beachy, Tina Post, and Alexis Sablone, the course will feature film screenings and panels on embodied style, narrative, time, and the built environment, along with skateboarding's anti-scarcity and communal structures that both subvert and reframe capitalist competition. Students will produce a short performance work as the culminating project of the class.

Tina Post, Kyle Beachy, and Alexis Sablone

ENGL 65008 Materialities

In the first instance, this course surveys a range of thinking (by Elizabeth Grosz, Karen Barad, and Rosi Braidotti, among others) that has gone under the banner of ‘new materialism,’ emphasizing the vitality of matter and working to reject anthropocentrism. In the second instance, the course focuses on textual materialism within literary studies (both Susan Howe and Derrida, for instance), ultimately asking how we might begin to understand material texts within a new materialist frame. The widest frame for the course, though, will be provided by the question of how the materialisms of our moment (across fields and disciplines) can be understood through the analytics provided by historical materialism. We will read literary texts from different periods, and we will conduct at least two sessions in Special Collections.

Bill Brown ,  2022-2023 Spring,  20th/21st

HIST 27006/37006 (AMER 27006/37006, LLSO 25411) Not Just the Facts: Telling About the American South (J. Dailey)  This course engages the various ways people have tried to make sense of the American South, past and present. Main themes of the course include the difference between historical scholarship and writing history in fictional form; the role of the author in each, and consideration of the interstitial space of autobiography; the question of authorial authenticity; and the tension between contemporary demands for truthfulness and the rejection of "facts" and "truth." We will read across several genres, including historical scholarship, biography, and fiction.  (LG-NF)

CMLT 26311/36311 Worlding Otherwise: Speculative Fiction, Film, Theory  Crosslisting:  ENGL 26312/36312

Hoda El Shakry ,  2022-2023 Autumn, LG, LT

PHIL 23401: Philosophy and Science Fiction

How do we know whether our perceptual experiences really are of a real world outside of us? What determines the identity of a person over time? What does it take to be conscious, and how can we tell whether someone or something is? Could radically different languages lead to radically different forms of experience and thought? These are key questions in the philosophical fields of epistemology, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind, and Philosophy of Language. In this course, we’ll explore these questions (and more) as they arise in works of science fiction and consider the main philosophical proposals for tackling them with an eye to these works. The main works with which we’ll engage will be the films “The Matrix,” “Moon,” “Ex Machina,” and “Arrival,” though there will be many supplementary works of science fiction. Philosophical readings will be drawn from both historical and contemporary sources. 

Ryan Simonelli, 2022-2023 Autumn, LT

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The Home of Creative Writing

Festival of writing.

Arvon is a charity that runs creative writing courses, events and retreats both in-person and online. Our courses are tutored by leading authors and include a powerful mix of workshops and individual tutorials, with time and space to write, free from distractions of everyday life. Grants and concessions are available to help with course fees.

ARVON COURSES & RETREATS

Masterclass: historical fiction.

Inhabiting the past in your writing

Theatre , Other

Masterclass: How to Teach Creative Writing – Theatre

Raise the curtain on teaching creative playwriting

• Non-Fiction

Online Writing Week: Memoir

Translate your experience into memoir and bring your stories to life

Apr 8-May 6

Online 5-Week Evening Course: Non-Fiction

Creating compelling worlds in your non-fiction

Masterclass: Poetry and Dictionaries

Chasing new meaning into the light

How I Write: Ciaran Thapar

Q&A and Reading

Online Writing Day: Short Story

Liberation through constraint

Online Writing Week: Historical Fiction

Retrieving histories

“Every time I’ve taught at Arvon - going back over fifteen years now - I’ve seen how much difference just a handful of days can make in the life of writers. There’s a perfect mix of tutorials, writing time, socializing, and discussion - all those elements come together to create an atmosphere in which writing projects move in that longed-for but often unattainable direction: forward.”

— Kamila Shamsie

ARVON AT HOME

Our online programme of courses, events and writing support

Virtual versions of our famous Writing Weeks, plus Masterclasses, free How I Write events, Online Writing Weekends, Writing Days and more . . . all accessible from the comfort of your sofa.

SUPPORT ARVON NORTH

Arvon North is an ambitious capital project to adapt Lumb Bank into a beacon of creativity for the North

Help us transform Lumb Bank into an engine-house for creative writing development in the North of England, connecting the rich literary collateral of the region with a community of writers locally, regionally, nationally and globally.

CLOCKHOUSE WRITERS' RETREAT

Give your writing the time and space it deserves with Arvon’s dedicated Writers Retreat at The Clockhouse

The Clockhouse is specifically designed for writers on retreat. It has four apartments for writers, each with bedroom, study-lounge and bathroom. All food is provided for you, so you can spend your time as you please.

DONATE TO ARVON

Do you believe that everyone should have the opportunity to unlock their creative potential?

Arvon is a charity that believes everyone deserves the freedom to imagine, write and explore ideas regardless of their age or financial background.

OUR SCHOOLS & GROUPS WORK

We offer residential weeks for schools, young people and adult groups.

Our weeks for schools and groups follow the same pattern as our adult course programme – led by two professional writers, with tutorials, group workshops, and time and space to write.

ARVON BLOGS

SI Leeds Literary Prize 2024

07 Mar 2024 / General

A writing prize that helps discover exciting new talent from underrepresented groups will be accepting entries again next month. The SI…

Arvon and Creative Minds Calderdale to Develop Writing for Change Project

28 Feb 2024 / News

Arvon and Creative Minds Charity, hosted by South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, are embarking on an exciting project aimed…

My Arvon Journey: Gráinne O’Hare

27 Feb 2024 / My Arvon Journey

When I logged on to my first online Arvon workshop, it was autumn 2022 and already chilly at my writing desk;…

My Arvon Week: Debi Barry

27 Feb 2024 / My Arvon Week

Friendships are formed over food, (or a glass of wine in my case!) and cemented over shared life experiences – so…

JOIN OUR MAILING LIST

Want to know what's coming up in the next week? Arvon’s newsletter is the best way to avoid missing out on anything - from new and upcoming courses, to Arvon giveaways and writing and self-development opportunities.

FIND A COURSE OR RETREAT

• Inua Ellams' Spring Season
• Residential Writing Week
• Online Writing Week
• Masterclass
• Masterclass Recording
• How I Write
• Online Five Week Course
• Residential Tutored Retreat
• Online Writing Day
• Residential Retreat
• Children and Young People's Events
• Starting to Write
• Children & YA
• Screenwriting
• Short Story
• Totleigh Barton

Privacy Overview

• UC Berkeley
• Letters & Science

Creative Writing Minor

APPROVED CREATIVE WRITING COURSES OFFERED DURING FALL 2023 – Look up courses in CalCentral. Check notes section in Schedule and departmental websites to see if the course has an application process. This page was updated April 14, 2023.

African American Studies 164: Spoken Word: Oral Tradition & Transformation from Poetry to Hip Hop, Standup & Beyond Asian American Studies 173: Creative Writing: “Writing: Fiction and Nonfiction in Asian America” College Writing Programs: 130: Introduction to the Craft of Creative Writing East Asian Languages and Cultures 125: The Art of Writing: Writing the Limits of Empathy English 141: Modes of Writing (Exposition, Fiction, Verse, Etc.) English 143A: Short Fiction * English 143B: Verse * English 143C: Long Narrative * English 143N: Prose Nonfiction* English 243A: Fiction Writing Workshop (graduate level)* Film and Media 180: Introduction to Screenwriting Film and Media 182: TV Writing Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies: 139A. Fundamentals of Playwriting

* The deadline to apply for English 143A, 143B, 143C, 143N, and 243A is APRIL 24, 2023. The application link is in the class description for each course in the Schedule of Classes . If you have questions regarding applying, contact the relevant instructor.

TO FIND APPROVED LITERATURE COURSES OFFERED DURING FALL 2023, compare the approved list of literature courses on the Creative Writing Minor website with the Fall 2023 Schedule of Classes in CalCentral.

Found an upper-division, three- or four-unit course you would like reviewed as a creative writing or literature course for the minor?  Make sure the course is clearly creative writing (not expository writing) or literature focused. Then, send your documentary evidence, often a course description and syllabus, to  [email protected] .

Remember all courses you take for the minor must meet the  minor requirements  too. 

Questions regarding a course?  Contact the department offering the course or the instructor teaching the course.

Questions regarding the minor program? Email Laura Demir at [email protected] , schedule an appointment, or come to drop-in advising .

Announcements

• Summer 2024 Course List
• Spring 2024 Course List
• Berkeley Holloway Poetry Series – Fall 2023
• UC Berkeley Lunch Poems 2023-24
• Minor Declaration Form – Must declare no later than term before EGT.
• Completion of L&S Minor Form – Must complete during EGT.

Writers' Workshop

Creative writing for undergraduate students.

Undergraduate Creative Writing

The University of Iowa ranks among the top universities in the U.S. for undergraduate writing across the curriculum.

The Undergraduate Creative Writing Major

The English Department houses the undergraduate major in English and Creative Writing, with a growing faculty that has counted multiple Writers' Workshop alumni among its ranks. The Magid Center for Writing, established in 2011 with the support of a generous donor, offers undergraduates the opportunity to integrate writing into other disciplines and bring a love for the written word to projects like student literary magazines and hosting workshops at local schools.

The Writers' Workshop offers a range of classes for both majors an non-majors taught by a diverse group of graduate students and recent graduates, all terrific up-and-coming writers in their own right. We host undergraduate events in the Frank Conroy Reading Room and organize a reading series that brings some of today's most distinguished writers to campus.

Writers' Workshop Undergraduate Courses

Introductory writing classes courses.

CW:1800 Creative Writing Studio Workshop

CW:2100 Creative Writing

CW:2870 Fiction Writing

CW:2875 Poetry Writing

Introductory classes are designed to give students the experience of thinking as writers. Students will engage with writing exercise and with published literary works, then try their hand at longer pieces of writing. These classes are open to writers of all levels and serve as an introduction to one or more genres and forms.

Special Topics in Creative Writing

CW:2600 Special Topic Workshops

CW:3002 Writing and Reading Young Adult Fiction

CW:3003 Writing and Reading Science Fiction

CW:3004 Writing and Reading Fantasy Fiction

CW:3107 Creative Writing for the Health Professions

CW:3400 Working Writers in Conversation

CW:4751 Creative Writing for the Musician

Topic-specific creative writing classes introduce and develop foundational writing skills in a more specific context or genre. Students can expect to do writing exercise and produce longer creative works, while getting a lens into a more specific branch of writing.

Writing Form and Formats

CW:3215 Creative Writing and Popular Culture

CW:3218 Creative Writing for New Media

CW:4745 The Sentence: Strategies for Writing

CW:4760 The Art of Revision: Writing for Clarity

These creative writing classes approach writing from the point of view of form, whether focusing on the meaty parts of sentences, zeroing in on areas for improvement, or thinking about media and audiences. Students can expect to produce and revise work through the additional lens of technical skill and media format.

Undergraduate Writers' Workshop in Fiction and Poetry

CW:4870 Undergraduate Writers' Workshop: Fiction

CW:4875 Undergraduate Writers' Workshop: Poetry

Undergraduate Writers' Workshops in Fiction and Poetry are smaller classes for writers with some experience. Students are admitted on the merit of their manuscripts and the class strives to create as much as possible the experience of a graduate-level workshop. Students can expect to receive feedback from the instructor and to read and engage deeply with both published work and the work of their peers.

Create your academic path

Learn more about the English and Creative Writing major academic requirements and possible course plans

Majors Course Catalog

The MyUI Schedule displays registered courses for a particular session and is available to enrolled students. The list view includes course instructors, time and location, and features to drop courses or change sections.

Upcoming Events

Mission creek festival | critical hits: writers playing video games with carmen maria machado, larissa pham, and j robert lennon, live from prairie lights | dan beachy-quick, live from prairie lights | sarah braunstein in conversation with rachel yoder.

(2023-24 SP) WRIT 200 A - Introduction to Creative Writing

Enrollment options.

• Teacher: David Brennan
• Teacher: Rebecca Dodson
• Teacher: Chad Gusler
• Teacher: Emily North
• Teacher: Kevin Seidel

• Post published: March 26, 2024

WRAC Faculty and Graduate Students Collaborate to Teach Undergraduate Writing Courses

Before enrolling in a writing course at MSU, undergraduates might view writing as a solitary act: performed alone by a creative professional, or as a one-way conversation between an author and invisible readers. But across the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Cultures (WRAC), faculty invite their students to challenge these traditional notions. 

In both graduate and undergraduate settings, WRAC courses push beyond one-dimensional conceptions of writing in favor of collaboration and community-building. Whether they’re pursuing a Minor in Writing (MiW), a Professional and Public Writing (P2W) degree, or simply fulfilling a writing requirement, students from all majors have the opportunity to develop their definitions of writing and apply them to their professional aspirations. 

In the spirit of collaboration, Assistant Professors Dr. Margaret Morris and Dr. Bree Straayer teamed up with Ethan Voss and Mary Murdock , both graduate students in the Master of Arts (MA) in Rhetoric and Writing program , to teach two P2W courses this spring semester: 

• Writing in Corporate Contexts (WRA 333), taught by Dr. Morris and Voss
• Writing in the Public Interest (WRA 331), taught by Dr. Straayer and Murdock

These graduate-faculty partnerships enrich the experiences of undergraduates and the learning outcomes of all involved. 

WRA 333: Writing in Corporate Contexts

In WRA 333, Dr. Morris and Voss invite students to read, analyze, and produce the kinds of writing that function as “glue” in corporate communications: from public-facing messages and crisis response to business emails and even group chats. 

Through a series of four projects, students reflect on prior experiences and apply their unique knowledge sets to their future roles, professional contexts, and responsibilities. Together, Dr. Morris and Voss engage students in a mixture of audience analysis, writing production, and presentations, with a continual emphasis on professionalism and corporate leadership.

Dr. Morris frames conversations about corporate work with Dare to Lead , written by researcher, professor, and storyteller Brené Brown . After reading Brown’s book, students are asked to present core concepts from the text and articulate their strengths and opportunities for leadership development. Through this work, “students begin to take on their own markers of leadership, and hopefully begin to understand that leadership – and writing – isn’t about being perfect, but rather vulnerable and self-correcting,” Dr. Morris said. 

These aims are reinforced by the students’ final two projects, which ask them to create plans for success as future leaders and writers in corporate environments. Each student reflects on the course in a letter, in which they articulate their intentions as young writers entering a fast-changing workforce.

A Partnership Built on Past Experiences

Dr. Morris brings real-world corporate experience and over twenty years of teaching experience to her classroom. This is her second time teaching WRA 333 as well as collaborating with Voss; last fall, the duo co-taught WRA 370, an introductory course in grammar and editing.

As an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota, Voss’ two favorite courses were “Technical and Professional Writing” and “Editing, Critique, and Style.” In addition to sharing relevant knowledge from his undergraduate years, Voss offers his perspectives as a young adult and current student to connect with undergraduates in WRA 331, many of whom are seniors. 

“I was in their position not too long ago, so I’m often asking: ‘How can we prepare these students to launch into the next phase of life?’” Voss said. 

As a former writer in a corporate setting, Dr. Morris also understands the particular nature of corporate environments that many of her students will enter after graduating this spring. 

“When students get to the workplace, they’re going to be writing a lot,” Dr. Morris said. “In a corporate setting, you have to be in good relationships with people across the organization, so you can gather the information you need and write it up in a way that meets the needs and expectations of your audience.”

In anticipation of these demands, Dr. Morris and Voss ask their students to write across different modes of writing while attending closely to their audiences, which involves analysis and research to better understand the needs of hypothetical readers. In the classroom, peers function as readers and supporters, so Dr. Morris and Voss strive to foster a communal space where students feel comfortable sharing, brainstorming, and writing together. 

“One of my primary aims as a P2W Professor is to create a small community in every classroom where people really know each other, their strengths and weaknesses, and trust in the process of sharing their writing,” Dr. Morris said. 

Intentional community-building is especially vital in classrooms with varied academic interests. In WRA 333 alone, represented majors include Neuroscience, Textile and Apparel, Japanese, Communications, Political Science and Theory, and Experience Architecture. Students often enroll in P2W courses like WRA 333 to fulfill requirements for the MiW or complete a writing elective, so P2W faculty – and teaching assistants like Voss – work with students from diverse backgrounds.

By getting to know these students “on a more granular level,” Dr. Morris said, she can tailor their activities and teams to align with their educational goals and personal needs. “Every class, we check in and try to be honest with each other. We share a lot of laughter, and then we forge forward.”

Co-Teaching = Co-Learning

Collaborating with Voss – who will complete his MA in Rhetoric and Writing this spring and begin a Ph.D. program next fall – “lets me perceive new ways to come into the classroom and infuse it with life and knowledge,” Dr. Morris reflected. She attributes the success of their collaboration to shared pedagogical values, enthusiasm, and overall “synergy.” 

“Ethan and I have complementary values of building community, listening to students, and centering students in our pedagogy,” Dr. Morris described. She contends that the students in WRA 333 also benefit from their collaboration, as they get to work with both a long-time professor and former corporate professional and a younger educator with newer theory and praxis. 

Both Dr. Morris and Voss bring their enthusiasm for relationship-building via writing, as well as their shared belief in the value of pedagogical partnerships in higher education. “In teaching settings, there’s so much value in observation, but even more in the process of actively engaging your ideas and putting them into practice,” Dr. Morris said. “Most of the time, students are so eager to learn that they’re forgiving about your learning process as a teacher.” It can take years to develop one’s “teacherly identity,” Dr. Morris noted – and she’s still doing it alongside Voss. 

Preparing Students for Future Work – and Future Writing

The impending job search can feel daunting for many students, so Voss and Dr. Morris take measures to ground their class in the present moment with supportive check-ins and a “Dumb Question of the Day” – usually supplied by Voss – that imbue the classroom with honesty and a therapeutic dose of humor. 

These pedagogical moves support the professional and personal success of undergraduates, as well as Voss’ personal journey as a graduate student. After completing his Ph.D., Voss sees himself teaching in a First-Year Writing Program and eventually working as a Director. From there, he plans to eventually transition into other leadership roles, but always circling back to his original love for higher education, classroom community, and the students who define this work.

In this specific course and across his pedagogy, Voss views the classroom as a space to gather and “foster the development of genuinely good people: ones who can leave as leaders and understand the importance of engaging with other people, exactly as they are.” 

“Regardless of whether they go into a corporate setting or somewhere else, we want students to make genuine changes in the spaces they enter,” Voss said. 

Voss and Dr. Morris recently submitted a presentation proposal to talk about their co-teaching experience at the Spring 2024 Teaching and Learning Conference , hosted by the Center for Teaching and Learning Innovation. They look forward to completing the semester together and sharing about their collaboration with a larger community of teachers, researchers, and writers.

WRA 331: Writing in the Public Interest

Across the hall, Murdock and Dr. Straayer teach undergraduates about nonprofit writing in WRA 331. While acknowledging their roles as teachers first, they also wear “the hats of clients, such that students are creating deliverables that would be used in a nonprofit communications strategy or a real community,” Murdock reflected. 

Dr. Straayer offered a similar sentiment. “As a class, we’re really invested in understanding what reading and writing look like in community spaces, and not just in higher education.” 

In keeping with this community-centric vision, Dr. Straayer and Murdock incorporate a mixture of projects and learning modalities into WRA 331. Across assignments, they emphasize hands-on creation and thinking about the complexities of writing for nonprofit organizations, especially compared to corporate settings. 

The course is structured around five assignments, beginning with an introductory project that asks students to analyze and adjust an example of nonprofit communication with significant room for improvement. Students get a chance to play with design in a low-stakes environment, familiarize themselves with writing in the nonprofit sphere, and “make constructive changes and see what challenges arise in the process,” Dr. Straayer described. Students find that while “it’s easy to critique a writing sample, it’s much harder to make it ‘right,’” she said.  

This foundational assignment prepares students for the remaining four projects, which collectively ask them to consider the role of audience, storytelling, and personal values when communicating on behalf of a nonprofit organization. The course simulates the challenges and affordances of writing for nonprofits, whether on a freelance or in-house basis: through case studies, rhetorical analysis of common documents, project management, and ongoing reflection. 

In the students’ third project, which explores the role of storytelling in the nonprofit world, Dr. Straayer asks students to consider the ethics of communicating other people’s stories. “We consider what it looks like to give others agency in the composition practice – because in the nonprofit world, so much of writing is storytelling,” Dr. Straayer said. In this specific project but also throughout the course, Dr. Straayer and Murdock focus on preparing students to enter a nonprofit setting with care and intention. 

“We want to prepare students to listen and understand their own positionality and lens through which they view the world, so when they’re working with communities, they understand how to work with a certain kind of sensitivity and thinking,” Dr. Straayer described. “When we tell stories in nonprofit spaces, we want to honor the people we’re working with and show them in the fullness of who they really are, and ensure that we’re not just shedding one light.”

Replicating Community Work in the Writing Classroom

Prior to teaching in WRAC, Dr. Straayer worked for three years at the Literacy Center of West Michigan and oversaw their program for parents learning English. As a graduate student at MSU, Dr. Straayer worked with English Language Learners at Bethany Christian Services; and during the summers, she taught at Grand Rapids Community College as an English Fast Track Instructor. These highly immersive experiences – centered around one-on-one relationships – continue to inform Dr. Straayer’s teaching philosophy in WRA 331.

Dr. Straayer also has ample experience mentoring younger professionals like Murdock, who originally got involved in WRA 331 to fulfill the internship requirement for her MA concentration in Professional Writing and Technical Communication. On a more personal level, Murdock views this internship as an opportunity to expand the definition of teaching, particularly as it relates to her professional interests in nonprofit work.

“Teaching happens everywhere,” Murdock said. “Even though I’m not currently interested in classroom teaching as a career, I find that teaching happens across professional spaces and roles: in nonprofit leadership, project management, even user experience and design work.”

Murdock incorporates various pedagogical tools and experiences from her work in the Cube – a publishing and user experience research center in WRAC – to give undergraduates in WRA 331 an experience she called “workplace-light.” 

“When you’re presenting something to a client, explaining ‘here’s what we did, and here’s why,’ or running workshops to get feedback on a prototype – these conversations are pedagogical in a lot of ways,” she said. 

Collaboration, Community, and Cross-Cultural Communication

This Spring semester, the majority of students in WRA 331 are non-writing majors, ranging from Studio Art to Political Science. The course bridges a range of learners and experiences, enhancing the relevance of collaboration and cross-cultural understanding in the classroom. 

Outside the classroom, Dr. Straayer and Murdock collaborate regularly to plan for their next class and reflect on the last. “We’re both learning to teach this class for the first time,” Murdock explained. “It’s been really cool to bring my knowledge and experiences to this setting and see students practice project management, especially since undergraduates don’t usually get asked to take on these roles in their classes.”

As she looks forward to graduating in the spring, Murdock is actively applying to communications roles in mission-driven organizations. Reflecting on her development as a writer and professional, she loves helping undergraduates recognize and honor their passions, interests, and abilities. “A lot of this co-teaching experience has involved confidence-building: helping students recognize their own affinities and leverage them for class projects,” Murdock said. 

Dr. Straayer plays a parallel supportive role for Murdock and other young professionals. As a former graduate student, Dr. Straayer was recognized for her mentorship of new teaching assistants ; and now, as a working teacher, she maintains her commitment to advising new educators. “I want to help them develop curriculum, see their strengths as teachers, and ultimately lean into what they’re good at and not try to be something they’re not in the classroom,” she shared. 

Figuring out “your window into pedagogy” takes time, Dr. Straayer said, but these semester-long collaborations give graduate students like Murdock and Voss the time, space, and community to explore their pedagogical values – and, perhaps most challengingly, how to translate them into structured classroom activities. “How do you funnel all of your teaching values into one moment?” Dr. Straayer mused. “It’s a tough question.”

Dr. Straayer makes time at the end of each day to sit with this question, reflect on what went well in the classroom, and consider which areas might call for revision or more structured collaboration with Murdock or other teachers in the department. “It’s so fun and helpful working with Mary, getting to know the students, seeing their energy, and hearing their discussions,” Dr. Straayer said. 

In both WRA 331 and WRA 333, the lines between teacher, learner, and writer are productively blurry – and in these collaborative communities, moments of teaching and learning are always unfolding. 

For more information about the MiW, P2W major, and the graduate program in Rhetoric and Writing, please visit the WRAC website . 

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2024 -“Juried Undergraduate Exhibition,” Ridenbaugh Gallery, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID -At Invitation, University of Idaho’s President’s House, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID -“In Medias Res,” Ridenbaugh Gallery, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID (Forthcoming)

2023 -At Invitation, “Painting Show,” Ridenbaugh Gallery, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID -“VAC is Back!”, Reflections Gallery, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID -“Pens, Pencils & Paint,” Ridenbaugh Gallery, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID -At Invitation, University of Idaho’s President’s House, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID. 2023-2024 -“Palouse Plein Air,” Moscow City Council, Moscow, ID. (Winner: City Purchase Award) -“Mirage,” Reflections Gallery, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID. -At Invitation, “Painting Show,” Moscow City Council, Moscow, ID. Fall 2023-Spring 24

2022 -“Figures”, Downtown Arts Center, Honolulu, HI -“Palouse Plein Air”, Moscow City Council, Moscow, ID. (Winner: Best Watercolor) -At Invitation, “Student Painters,” Moscow City Council, Moscow, ID. -At Invitation, “Student Printmakers,” Ridenbaugh Gallery, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID. -“Clay?!”, Ridenbaugh Gallery, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID.

2021 -At Invitation, “Student Show”, Iolan’i Gallery, Windward Community College, Kaneohe, HI.

2020 -“Foundations Juried Exhibition”, The Looking Glass Gallery, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC.

2019 -“Student Show”, The Arts Center, Carrboro, NC.

2024 Bachelor of Fine Arts with an emphasis in Painting and Ceramics, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID. (Forthcoming)

Extracurriculars and Honors

2022-2024 President of Visual Arts Community (VAC), University of Idaho President of Vandal Print Guild (VPG), University of Idaho Volunteer Artist, Vandaljacks, University of Idaho Dean’s List, University of Idaho Alumni Award for Excellence, University of Idaho

2019-2020 Resident Artist, Cannon Hall, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC.

Work Experience/Training

2021-2022 Gallery Attendant, Iolan’i Gallery, Windward Community College, Kaneohe, HI.

Studied Under: Kelly Oakes, Durham, NC. 2019-2020. William Zwick, Honolulu, HI. 2020. Mark Brown, Honolulu, HI, 2020-2022. Daunna Yanoviak, Kailua, HI. 2021- 2022. Mark Norseth, Honolulu, HI. 2021-.

Art: “Introduction to Figure Drawing,” Stacey Leanza, Class, The Arts Center, Carrboro, NC. 2018. “Printmaking; Mono-prints,” Stacey Leanza, Class, The Arts Center, Carrboro, NC. 2018. “Mixed Media,” Stacey Leanza, Class, The Arts Center, Carrboro, NC. 2018. “Introduction to Portrait Drawing,” Kelly Oakes, Class, The Arts Center, Carrboro, NC. 2019. “Painting Portraits in Alla Prima,” Kelly Oakes, Workshop, The Arts Center, Carrboro, NC. 2019. “Demystifying the Modern Portrait,” Marie Rossettie, Class, The Arts Center, Carrboro, NC. 2019. “Intuitive Painting,” Heather Gerni, Workshop, The Arts Center, Carrboro, NC. 2019. “Oil Painting Crash Course,” Vanessa Murray, Workshop, The Arts Center, Carrboro, NC. 2019. “Live Portrait Sessions,” Alla Parsons, Downtown Arts Center, Honolulu, HI. 2023. “Introduction to Watercolor,” Dwayne Adams, Class, Downtown Arts Center, Honolulu, HI. 2023.

Creative Writing: “Writing the Killer Mystery,” C1121, Central Carolina Community College, 2019. “Flash Fiction Made Easy,” C1058, Central Carolina Community College, 2019. “Charting Your Path To Publication,” C1060, Central Carolina Community College, 2019.

Newspapers and Articles

Long, Maryanne, “Windward Artists Turn Impression Into Expression,” Windward O’ahu Voice, February 9th, 2022