Creative Writing

Undergraduate / Graduate

Building directly on best practices developed at the College over the spring quarter, this remote learning workshop helps students find a voice and develop a sustainable writer's practice through a series of creative exercises in fiction, essay, and poetry. By the end of the course, each student will have revised and completed several significant pieces of writing. This course integrates lively videoconferences with sustaining written feedback, collaborations, and rich readings and discussions in creative literature. We'll toggle between full-class discussions and small group work, leveraging the small group to foster strong working relationships across time zones. Like writers throughout history, we'll inspire and push each other by correspondence, and we'll celebrate the ways in which writing is the long-distance medium par excellence. Daily sessions will include one or more live conferences, scheduled written exercises with rapid instructor feedback, and structured online discussions. In directed exercises you'll practice classic and experimental techniques, and in longer pieces you'll create original work, to be revised after intensive peer workshopping. Students will have the opportunity to meet several working writers through live conferences with the class. Students write in and out of class-time hours and complete nightly reading assignments. Active class participation is required.