Domenica Ruta

In this generative creative-writing class, we will study the way child narrators and child protagonists are made real on the page through a close reading of authors like Jesamyn Ward, Jeanette Winterson, Joy Williams, Ha Jin, Mariana Enriquez, Sandra Cisneros, Truman Capote, and others. Through experimentation and play, we will write short fiction featuring different child narrators and protagonists. A portfolio of exercises, including at least one completed story, will be our output. This course is great for students curious about creative writing and fiction but don't know where to start, as well as committed creative writers looking for a laboratory to try something new and outside-the-box of a traditional workshop.

In this course, we will examine and experiment with all of the craft tools of dynamic writing—scene, setting, characterization, dialogue, mood, and voice—to tell our own (mostly) true stories. If you are an ambitious writer with a life goal to become a published author, this course is for you. If you have never written creatively, never written about yourself, never written for fun, this course is equally for you. We will spend the first half the of the semester building our strength and stamina as writers through generative exercises and close readings of published works, as well as building a safe artistic community within the classroom; the second half of the semester will be a nontraditional writing workshop based on antiracist, anticolonial practices.

What special value does the child protagonist have in literary fiction? What can an author say through the child narrator that they cannot say with an adult one? How do authors create this voice in the first person and make it believable? What advantages and pitfalls does a third-person perspective have when writing a young protagonist? How can we, ourselves, capture this energy on the page? In this generative craft class, students will read closely from the works of Jesamyn Ward, Jeanette Winterson, Ha Jin, Mariana Enriquez, Toni Cade Bambara, Louis Sachar, Anton Chekhov, Elena Ferrante, Joy Williams, Angela Carter, Henry James, and more to explore modes of dramatic irony, psychic distance, and ingenuity in prose.

In this craft class, we will explore the different ways in which authors of creative nonfiction inhabit their texts; the pleasures (as both readers and writers) of such embodiment; and the aesthetic, emotional, and political pitfalls of such deep immersion into the characters, landscapes, and experiences of supposed subjectivities. Through generative exercises, meditation, experimentation, and play, we will inhabit new and, hopefully, exciting spaces in our writing. Close reading of authors such as Marlon James, Louise Erdrich, Michael Twitty, Barbara Demmick, Lydia Yuknavitch, Katherine Raven, Melissa Febos, and others will inspire and instigate us.

This memoir workshop will follow the traditional format of manuscript exchange and evaluation with a particular emphasis on Kaula, or community building. Constructive criticism is not constructive; the only helpful "critiques" meet each individual author exactly where they are, on their own unique terms, and offer support and encouragement of what we, as readers, perceive, from our highest selves, are the author's intentions for the work. This can only be achieved in a safe and mutually respectful community. In conference, students will complete an intensive structural analysis of a book-length, published work of personal narrative (either memoir or "collected essays," aka memoir) and will take turns presenting to the class an excerpt of the book that they have chosen for conference study. Please come to the first class with a vague idea of which book you are interested in studying on a deeper level this semester.