English Major: Core Courses

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:

1. How does poetry interact with and create effects across different modes of art, including music and visual arts?
2. What processes and prompts do artists and writers use to generate creative work?
3. 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.

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.