Introductory Courses

This course gives students the opportunity to get to know the work of the authors who are visiting campus as part of the Poetry and Fiction series in a given semester. Course work includes attending the authors’ four public readings, as well as the afternoon master classes offered by each writer, and one preparatory session on each writer, for which students read one of the writer’s works. Students write responses to each of these sessions and complete a final project, which might be a review for the newspaper, an analytical paper, or a story, personal essay, or poem in imitation of one of the writers. No prerequisites.

This course offers students the opportunity to write personal essays about the natural world while also studying some classic and contemporary nature writers. Regular writing assignments and activities will be complemented by discussion of selected readings by classic and contemporary nature writers. In the tradition of many nature writers, we will occasionally make use of our own “backyard” (in this case, the College campus) as a source for observation, writing, and reflection. At the end of the module, students will submit a portfolio of their work that includes both the informal and formal writing done during the course, a nature journal, a major revision of an earlier piece, and a substantial self-evaluation. Students interested in the sciences as well as the humanities are encouraged to enroll. No prerequisites.

Following a strong resurgence in the use of formal strategies by numerous poets in recent years, this course will explore the uses of meter and rhyme as inventive tools for both reading and writing. Students will learn how to scan metrical poetry in order to appreciate the complex relationship between deviation and adherance to rhythmic structure, as well as to see how metrical underpinnings of a poem can help to convey its meaning. We will also discuss the many uses of full rhyme, slant rhyme, consonance, assonance, and sight rhyme. In addition to the discussion and analysis of the meter and rhyme in published poems, students will also be asked to write poems that also employ meter and rhyme in order to facilitate their appreciation for the subject and expand the range of their own sense of style and voice. No prerequisites.

Creative nonfiction is sometimes called “the fourth genre,” or the literature of reality. It includes various forms of writing based upon personal experience, including personal narratives, personal essays, memoirs, literary journalism, and more experimental lyric or hybrid essays. During the term, students write a series of working drafts, which are then read and discussed in class. In addition, students read and discuss the work of published authors in the field and engage in informal exercises that help to expand their awareness of style, content, structure, and point of view. At the end of the module, students submit a portfolio of their work that includes all of the working drafts, a major revision of one of these drafts, a write-up of an oral presentation on at least one of the assigned writers, a writer’s journal, and a substantial self-evaluation. No prerequisites.

The course will explore the challenges posed by different forms of creative expression, especially, but not limited to, fiction, poetry, and essays. Students will be introduced to the repertoire of strategies—voice, irony, metaphor, style—available to creative writers as they choose a medium in which to express themselves. By looking at selections of contemporary writing in a variety of genres, the students will deepen their critical abilities as well as sharpen their own skills as writers. Unlike more advanced workshops, this course is open to all students, and does not require submission of writing samples.

This is a creative writing workshop that uses some of the techniques and strategies of translation to provide students with a unique means of generating material for their writing. While students with at least a year of foreign language study will be encouraged to work directly from the original, no prior knowledge of a foreign language is required. Exercises will include the adaptation of a classical poem to a more contemporary idiom, work on new versions of previously translated poems or stories, the alteration of a text’s voice and imagery to affect its dramatic context, and the creation of original works through imitation. Specific emphasis will be given to stylistic and tonal choices made in the translation process. Completion of the course serves as a prerequisite for advanced writing workshops. No prerequisites.