The Writers Craft

Emily Dickinson says the experience of a good poem is like having the top of your head come off. The haiku master Basho says it’s like being alive twice. We all have a favorite book or poem, a piece of writing that has moved us to new ways of thinking, feeling, or living in the world. One of the best ways to appreciate such moving writing is to let it move us toward creating our own poems, stories, and essays. In this course, we will consider the possibilities and challenges of imaginative writing. We will explore the creative process, from generating ideas to shaping and revising, and we’ll seek to share our work with others—reading, performing, and publishing our collective and individual efforts. You will find out how your own writing process operates by learning how other writers work. Francine Prose says that literature “sets up a series of rules that the writer is instructed to observe, [and] reading will show how these rules have been ignored in the past and the happy outcomes.” We’ll spend our time recklessly learning and ignoring all the rules, remembering the poet John Ashbery’s advice to writers: “Let us leave the obedience school!” In addition to reading, writing, and work shopping, we’ll get out of the classroom to write with our feet, about the world, not as we’ve seen it on TV, but as we really find it, including both on-campus and off-campus explorations. Students who complete this course will grow as poets and storytellers, but also in their broader ability to communicate vividly, as they learn to think about audience and adapt expression to the reactions it provokes.