ENGL 280 Creative Writing: Introduction to Fiction Writing
The focus of this course is writing, and developing a relationship with, short fiction, with the aim of making it a fluid manifestation of the way we process and transform memory and experience. We will play into and take seriously Toni Morrison’s conception of memory as a form of willed creation, in an ongoing attempt to reanimate forgotten or unrealized aspects of our histories and ourselves. Students will generate new work constantly—in sketchbooks, exercises, and story drafts—paying attention to the honing of various craft elements (description, dialogue, character and plot development), and in correspondence with texts by a variety of exemplary practitioners of fiction and prose writing (Venita Blackburn, K-Ming Chang, Fleur Jaeggy, Jamaica Kincaid, Maxine Hong Kingston, Li-Young Lee, Clarice Lispector, Scholastique Mukasonga, Nhã Thuyên, among others). Students will share and discuss their work in a workshop format, the orientation of which will be based, in part, on each student’s specific intentions. The discussions will be supportive, inquisitive, and constructive, and will be oriented towards helping to introduce each other—and ourselves—to what is most compelling and imperative about what we are doing, what it is that we want to be doing, and how we might get there. Open to first- and second-year students. May be repeated once for credit.
Prerequisite
One First Year Seminar,
CWP 201 (formerly WRD 201), or permission of instructor