Creative Writing Courses: Fall 2026

Course	Course Description
ENGL 3420: Fiction Writing (Caron: In-person)	This writing workshop is designed for undergraduates who are new to fiction writing. Together, we’ll study a broad range of short stories and learn how to write them. As the writer William Trevor said, the short story is “the art of the glimpse. If the novel is like an intricate Renaissance painting, the short story is an impressionist painting. It should be an explosion of truth.” In this workshop, students will be guided through each step of the writing process—from inspiration to final draft. Among other things, students will learn how to find inspiration for their stories, how to create compelling characters, how to choose the right point of view, manage time, and write sharp dialogue. Students will apply this new knowledge to their own stories to create an “explosion of truth.” Writing prompts and exercises will push students to take literary risks, and workshops will help them revise their work. Students will also have an opportunity to participate in the USU creative writing community more broadly by attending faculty readings, as well as participate in the annual Brewer Festival of Writing events. All students welcome!
ENGL 3420: Fiction Writing (Waugh: In-person)	This introduction to short story writing will help you see all the many things a story is besides what happens. Plot may be “the soul of a tragedy,” according to Aristotle, but it certainly won’t keep your readers if that’s all there is. We will examine why character matters, as well as imagery, description, setting, time, point of view, and sparkling prose, among many other things. By taking this course, you will fill your writing toolbox with tools that will help you construct stories that keep your readers reading, all while participating fully in a supportive writing community.
ENGL 3420: Fiction Writing (Olsen: Virtual)	This course will introduce specific concepts of fiction writing, including character-building, plot and story, and description, and will discuss a variety of fiction, depending on student interests. These various concepts of fiction will be learned through the study of published texts and in-depth discussions of craft. We will read each other’s work both to improve our ability to discuss the work of others and to improve our own work. This class will be a collaborative space to share work, take creative chances, and forge the building blocks that will be necessary to help a writer grow into their potential. Successful fiction writing is about observing the world and understanding the many stories that we can find around us—it’s also about trying many different things to see what works for us and what doesn’t. Good writing doesn’t come out of nowhere—this class will help you on the journey to achieve it.
ENGL 3430: Poetry Writing (Gunsberg: In-person)	This introductory poetry writing course is designed to help you become better writers and readers of poetry. We’ll focus our attention on both free and formal verse, discussing student work as well as poetry written by established authors. Our efforts will revolve around craft, which means we’ll practice time-honored techniques that have strengthened poets’ efforts for thousands of years as well as more recent poetic innovations. This approach begins with close attention to the language that moves us and, moreover, careful consideration of why it moves us. In short, we’ll read well to write well. This writing will be supplemented by your efforts to develop a literary vocabulary, one that broadens your understanding of published poetry and enlivens your responses to your classmates’ work.
ENGL 3430: Poetry Writing (Grimmer: Online)	In this workshop-based course, we will explore poetry’s role in developing durable skills through writing and art. To support creative risk-taking, assignments will focus on completing creative writing prompts and responding to classmates’ creative work, with an emphasis on showing the process of creating art itself over the product of a perfect work of art. Our guiding questions include: How does poetry interact with and create effects across different modes of art, including music and visual arts? What processes and prompts do artists and writers use to generate creative work? How do artists and writers provide feedback that supports innovation and creative risk-taking over perfection? This course will be a workshop-style exploration of these questions, through reading and experimenting with poetry and art in various formats and settings. Students can expect a combination of individual writing exercises, arts-based experiments in local museums and cafés, and online workshopping of creative projects in small groups. Students will learn durable skills for exploring the effects of text-based poems; they will also experiment with translating those effects into audio and visual media. Students are expected to attend visiting author readings on Zoom or in-person, write outside the classroom in libraries, cafés, and museums, and practice navigating the dynamic between individual writing, digital content, and community-based arts.
ENGL 3440: Creative Nonfiction Writing (Wells: In-person)	Michel de Montaigne says, “Every man has within himself the entire human condition.” By fairly and astutely investigating the larger meaning of a personal experience, a nonfiction writer can speak to the universal. The nonfiction writer is, therefore, tasked with honesty in their pursuit of discovery and greater knowledge. Often, we hear this described as a pact formed with the reader. However, we also know that memory can be fallible. David Lazar asserts that “Nonfiction blends fact and artifice in an attempt to arrive at truth, or truths.” And he is not alone in making the claim that literary nonfiction requires some invention. Calling on memory for meaning may, at times, involve some imagination. What obligation does the nonfiction writer have to the reader? How does structure and form provide fruitful ground to explore personal experience and memory in compelling ways? To join the conversations surrounding truth, insight, and meaning-making in nonfiction, we must first understand what others are saying. In order to do this, we will read and analyze texts that inform our understanding of creative nonfiction as a genre. While investigating these texts, we will examine the choices each writer makes and consider why they might have made them. In this class, students will learn and explore techniques for developing successful creative nonfiction essays, particularly memoir and personal narrative. We’ll examine voice, vivid detail, narrative arc, active scenes, and observation. Together, we’ll look closely at compelling personal essays, analyze craft elements, engage in writing exercises, and workshop student essays with a focus on learning practical and helpful revision strategies.
ENGL 3440: Creative Nonfiction Writing (Beck: In-person)	English 3440 will be a mix of lectures, workshops and out-of-class assignments that will focus on crafting new nonfiction projects. Few parameters will be placed on the subjects of the writing projects, but the class will emphasize narrative and personal writing. Course materials will mostly consist of contemporary essays in both audio and traditional formats. The class will be a safe place to hone existing skills and experiment with form and medium.
ENGL 4420: Advanced Fiction Writing (Caron: In-person)	In the words of twentieth-century author Zora Neale Hurston, “Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.” Our purpose in this class is to use research to create believable fictional worlds. Together, we’ll read a variety of fiction that incorporates various kinds of research, studying these works to better understand how writers move between fact and imagination. Anthony Doerr builds stories around surprising details of the natural world. Julie Otsuka uses historical research to give voice to silenced communities. Andrea Barrett leans on nineteenth-century science to tell fictional stories of doctors, sailors, and marine biologists. Other writers find inspiration in myths, maps, photographs, museum exhibits, and many other sources. As we study these writers and their stories, we’ll ask: How can our curiosity help us push beyond the old adage “write what you know”? How might research help us create compelling characters, meaningful settings, and interesting plots? How can we integrate the language of our research to help write sentences that surprise and delight a reader? And, most importantly, how do we do all of this without ever losing sight of the stories we most want to tell? Writing prompts will help jumpstart stories; research notebooks will help track new knowledge; class presentations will generate useful feedback; and workshops will help students revise and plan next steps.
ENGL 4430: Advanced Poetry Writing (Grimmer: In-person)	In this workshop-based course, we will explore poetry’s role in developing durable skills through writing and art collaborations. To support creative risk-taking, assignments will focus on completing creative writing prompts, responding to classmates’ creative work, and collaborating with students in arts-based disciplines in hybrid forms. The course backbone emphasizes the fun, messy, imperfect, often collaborative process of creating poetry-based art over the product of a perfect poem or art piece. Our guiding questions include: How do poets interact with and create effects through different modes of art, including music and visual arts? What processes and prompts do artists and writers use to collaborate in generating creative work? How do artists and writers provide feedback that supports innovation and creative risk-taking over perfection? This course will be a workshop-style exploration of these questions. Students can expect a combination of individual writing exercises, arts-based experiments at local museums and cafés, small-group workshopping, and opportunities to collaborate with students in other arts disciplines. Assessment will foreground a transparent process over an ideal product, and students are expected to attend visiting author readings on Zoom or in person, write outside the classroom in libraries, cafés, and museums, and practice navigating the dynamic between individual writing and collaborative arts practices.
ENGL 5450: Special Topics in Creative Writing: How to be a Writer (Sinor: In-person)	Do you want to live the dream? Do you want writing to be at the center of your life and yet have health insurance? Do you want to be part of the conversation? Publish? Build your reputation as a writer? Sadly, no course can guarantee that will happen, but this course will give you the tools that you need. In this class, we will create Linked-in profiles so you can start building a network; create Substack posts so you can start building a platform; talk with writers so you can understand how they arrived where they have; produce resumes and apply for jobs; draft statements of purpose for graduate school; develop conference proposals, grants, and book reviews; send out work for publication. If writing is a house, this course offers you the hammer and nails.