Faune Albert 02F

This course will explore the work of scholars, essayists, and creative writers in order to use their prose as models for our own. We will analyze scholarly explication and argument, and we'll appreciate the artistry in our finest personal essays and short fiction. Students will complete a series of critical essays across the curriculum and for varied audiences and purposes. Students will have an opportunity to submit their work for peer review and discussion. Students will also meet individually with the instructors. Frequent, enthusiastic revision is an expectation. Limited to Division I Students.

Ambiguity. A meeting of past and future selves. Visions of a different world. Our daily lives are suffused with magic, the unknown, infinite potentialities. We just have to know how to see. Nonfiction writing is generally considered as writing about the actual or verifiable. But what happens when we bring a consciousness of the possible, even impossible, into this writing? How might it expand and enrich, rather than negate, our notions of truth? Through readings and a variety of our own short pieces, this course will explore why and how nonfiction writers use speculation. And we'll consider the implications and politics of mixing the 'real' with what exists beyond, in our dreams and imaginations Keywords:writing, creative, imagination, nonfiction, seminar

Creative Nonfiction magazine describes the genre as "true stories, well told." As Lee Gutkind writes, "creative non?ction is like jazz-it's a rich mix of ?avors, ideas, and techniques, some newly invented and others as old as writing itself." In this course, we'll take a broad look at creative nonfiction, exploring its many possibilities and the questions it raises-about truth and facts, memory and its malleability. Moving from personal essays to food writing, travel writing, multimedia journalism, and more, we'll experiment with language and form as we find new ways to tell compelling stories about the world around us and our place within it. Keywords:Writing, creative, nonfiction, journalism, essay

How can we translate the lived experiences of difference, disability, and illness, variously defined, to the page, rendering in language what necessarily exceeds it? What are our ethical imperatives when writing about these topics? In this course, we will think, write, and talk about what it means to inhabit the world in ways that situate one outside of an imagined norm. Together we'll explore the complex connections between the body and mind and the relationship of trauma to difference, disability, and illness. We'll consider the place of science in these conversations: what does it illuminate and what are its limitations? And we'll approach the challenges, and the pain, of writing about difference, disability, and illness while also opening ourselves to the possibilities of transformation and joy that these experiences give to us, not only on the personal but on the societal level, too. This is a workshop course and a Race & Power-affiliated course; as such, we will spend time exploring the intersections between the movements for disability justice and racial justice and the ways in which issues of race, gender, and power inflect lived experiences of difference. Keywords:Disability, illness, writing, workshop, body The content of this course deals with issues of race and power.

Introduction to Writing: This course will explore the work of scholars, essayists, and creative writers in order to use their prose as models for our own. We'll analyze scholarly explication and argument, and we'll appreciate the artistry in our finest personal essays and short fiction. Students will complete a series of critical essays across the curriculum and for varied audiences and purposes. Students will have an opportunity to submit their work for peer review and discussion. Students will also meet individually with the instructors. Frequent, enthusiastic revision is an expectation. Limited to Division One Students. KEYWORDS:Writing program, writing

What does it mean to write well? How do you craft a compelling sentence? Or structure a strong paragraph from beginning to end? What the heck is a comma splice, and why does it matter? Writing is a field of infinite possibilities; it's all about the choices you make. In this introductory college-writing course, we'll explore the building blocks of writing from the ground up. We'll get funky with grammar and punctuation-not as rules but as tools for making meaning. And we'll read and write in various genres, paying special attention to the sentence level of texts while considering audience and purpose. This is a slow-writing course, focusing more on quality than quantity. The goal is to help students develop their distinctive voices while learning the basics of effective writing. It is an ideal course for English-language learners and those who would like more practice writing in English, as well as critical and creative writers from all backgrounds seeking to build their skills and enhance their writers' toolboxes. KEYWORDS:Writing, creative, reading, craft, English

Audre Lorde writes that all knowledge is mediated through the body. We all have bodies, but what does it actually mean to exist in a body? Is the body a vessel, a discursive construction, our essential self? This course will explore writing about the body as a means of critical reflection on the self and the world and as a practice of cultivating creativity and compassion. We will read and discuss published work-history, critical theory, personal essays, fiction, and poetry-that engages the complexities of inhabiting a body marked by discourses of race, class, gender, age, ability, ethnicity, etc., in our modern world. And we will write and share our own pieces exploring how bodies, as political sites, both enable and limit our ability to navigate public and private spaces; how they function as sources of pain as well as pleasure; and how they can serve as contradictory sites of oppression and liberation. This course is open to both new and experienced writers in all genres. In addition to regular, short reflections on the readings and creative exercises inspired by the texts, participants will produce 1-2 longer works engaging critically and/or creatively with the course content. This course is affiliated with the Time and Narrative LC and the Race and Power throughline. Keywords:Body, affect, emotion, writing, creativity

The US South is both a geographical region and an imaginative construct-a landscape, as Patricia Yaeger writes, of 'dirt and desire.' Southern narratives reveal an obsession with bodies, with racial and gender politics, and with what Yaeger calls the 'unthought known.' In this course, we'll explore a diverse array of queer and feminist Southern narratives from the mid-twentieth century through the present. Considering these narratives within the South's long legacy of slavery and segregation, we'll examine what they show us about the complex intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the US South and the nation more broadly. In doing so, we'll interrogate the ways in which voices from the margins of the South have used writing and creative practice as a way of locating themselves within this space and history, bringing to light both the 'monstrous intimacies' and radical forms of connectedness that have long existed in the South, and imagining new ways of being and belonging. This course is affiliated with the Time and Narrative LC and the Race and Power throughline. Keywoards:queer, feminist, literature, South, writing