How do we approach the concept of the aural in our poetry? How does the creative process become a collective of both writing and hearing our own art? This course is designed to develop your creativity and fluency in identifying, writing, and reading toward an attuned awareness of beats, tone, voice, and sounds that find their way to the page; we will also discuss how these same utterances transform when read aloud by poet or reading audience.
In this course, students are invited to develop an acute awareness of their senses in order to write more visceral, striking poems. We will discuss examples, contemporary and ancient, to initiate a practice that draws on figurative language, synesthesia, and the disavowed parts of self to plunge beneath the bland methods that tend to preempt or deplete many poems of our era.
Starting a novel is hard. Finishing a novel seems nearly impossible. And the middle, well, the middle is a thousand years long. But! But! There are things you can do to turn walls into doorways and keep you moving forward. Join award winning novelist, Ramona Ausubel, in a course on discussing strategies for survival in writing your novel and for keeping the process fun, inventive and full of life. This workshop consists of both moments of lecture and exercises, so be prepared to learn, talk, engage, and put your thoughts and ideas on the page!
How do you approach creative writing in a multilingual landscape? Join critically acclaimed author, translator, and educator, Achy Obejas, to explore how authors use codeswitching, bilingualism and multiple languages in the same text to highlight culture, the necessity of home languages, and to demonstrate new creative paths for their writing. When and how do we codeswitch? To what to end do we use codeswitching in our art? What does it mean for our single language readers when these techniques are employed?
How do we summon creative power in the face of our personal and/or global demons? How can we speak of beauty when our world seems full of loss, grief, climate change, and political turmoil? Thich Nhat Hanh says that the work of meditation is to transform “compost into flowers”; that is also the work of poetry. This generative workshop will help you to re-see your demons as a form of poetic compost.
We too often rely on a “good/bad” binary to shape our characters and considerations in our stories. How do our complexities as human beings find their way to the page? In this generative workshop, join poet, essayist, and cultural critic, Hanif Abdurraqib, on an exploration on empathy and the dynamics of character in popular culture. The group will use an empathy tree in which participants figure out which characters in popular culture they find empathetic or non-empathetic.
The goal of this course is to give you a basic understanding of the publishing industry: how it is structured, how to navigate it, and how to make the best choices for your writing life and the life of your books. You are a writer, an artist—the most important thing you can do is focus on your work. But when the time comes to bring your writing to an audience, a host of other skills and knowledge come into play. While it’s true that the publishing world exists to support and promote art, it is also a business; agents, editors, and publishers must be mindful of the market and of money.
Through video lectures, activities, discussions, video conferences, peer reviews, and direct feedback from your instructor, you will learn new tools and methods for tackling a deep and intensive revision, gain knowledge on how to work with edit letters from publishing professionals, leave this course with revised pages from your own novel, and create a solid plan for moving forward to complete a full revision.
