Courses

WRI 600e
Literature Seminar: Midnight Angels (3)
This course covers the history of the Beat Generation with special emphasis on the writings the writers this phenomenal era produced. Students use as models Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Peter Orlovsky, Diane Di Prima, John Wieners, Amiri Baraka, Joanne Kyger, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Lew Welch, Lenore Kandel, Philip Whalen, Bob Kaufman, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder and others. Students come to understand the provocative nature and durability of Beat literature. They write poems and short fiction; complete reading assignments; participate in discussions; write in-class assignments; and critique other students' work.

WRI 618
Practice of Poetry: Migrant Metaphors (3)
The page as territory and the problem of entry/re-entry. In this class, we invent a language to speak about passage: how will we cross into the world we've yet to write? How does a line embody the kind of travel that's not certain? What really happens at a border site, and how can we translate that “event” to the activity of writing? What will you carry with you, writing? This is an effort both transparent (decaying photographs) and solid (objects confiscated in airports): the work of transit. Central to this work: the poetry workshop, augmented by poetics discussions and the occasional experiment. Open to W&P students only.

WRI 619
Practice of Fiction: Narration/Transition (3)
TRANSITION is the carrying agent within Prose. It gets the story and the protagonist elsewhere in time and geography. Sometimes it is foreshadowed, as if one hears music before entering the room, sometimes it hovers like an aftertaste. But it is ALWAYS significantly linked with the tempo and moving of the story line. In this class, we do exercises in and out of class based on understanding assorted transitional modes. We also write stories in which the transitions are given in-depth attention. Open to MFA Prose students only, others by permission of department. Required reading is announced in the first class.

WRI 620
Practice of Poetry: Composition and Critique (3)
This class focuses on the participants' own poems, their intentions and realizations, triumphs, disappointments and creative mistakes. It also attempts to examine and clarify the traditions of which these poems partake, and we read texts pertinent to such an investigation. All This Everyday by Ted Berrigan and Caws & Causeries: Around Poetry and Poets by Anselm Hollo are required reading. Highly recommended is the anthology Postmodern American Poetry, edited by Paul Hoover. Open to W&P students only.

WRI 621
Practice of Fiction: Monologue/Characterization (3)
Arriving at character is one of the skills a writer must gain. The commonplace speaking voice that delineates character and determines character development is the basis for the writing in class. Monologues are a classic learning mode for characterization. Students read writing by writers/performers including Alan Bennett, Eric Bogosian, Whoopi Goldberg and others. The focus is not the dramatic/playwriting aspect but the character/voice speaking itself onto paper. Open to MFA W&P students only. 

WRI 623
Creative Reading and Writing: Writing with Shakespeare (3)
In this reading and writing course, students read a selection of the poems and plays of William Shakespeare while keeping an ongoing dialogic writing project going throughout the semester. This project can take any number of possible forms and styles, and can pick up on infinite clues, character facets and dramatic-linguistic stimuli as it grows. Plays include Antony and Cleopatra, MacBeth, Pericles, Twelfth Night, King Lear and Cymbeline. Poems include “Venus and Adonis,” “The Phoenix and the Turtle” and a selection of sonnets. Open to W&P students only.

WRI 625
Creative Reading and Writing: Dramatic Measures (3)
For prose writers who want to achieve familiarity with dramatic structure, and for dramatists looking to infuse more lyricism into their work. The course explores the singular demands of dramatic writing; determining the form in which a story can be most effectively presented. Revealing character through action and the dynamics of dialogue, as well as what constitutes a scene. There are five weeks devoted to writing for the stage and ten weeks on writing for the screen. At the end of the course, each writer possesses a much stronger command of their craft.Open to W&P students only.

WRI 632/632e
Literature Seminar: The Feeling Tone (3)
This course involves reading and writing about the work of exceptional writers: discussing writing, approaches to writing and what the writer is capable of disclosing in the individual mode. We read the work as writers examining other writers in order to understand how they achieve their tone and diction, and to investigate how techniques used in the writing can be brought to our own work. Students write three papers, one on each writer, and also compose “in-class” exercises, participate in threaded discussions, add to the “Webliography” and improve editing skills on their own work as well as that of fellow students. WRI 632e is open to MFA Creative Writing students only.  

WRI 664
Practice of Poetry: The Poetic Journal (3)
A writing workshop. Participants keep daily entries of thoughts, experimental writing, observation, conversation, readings, dreams and study. Readings in an array of chronicles: Japanese writers including Basho, Sei Shonagon  and Masaoka Shiki; contemporary Americans who have published poetic journals: Joanne Kyger, Hannah Weiner, Lorine Niedecker, Gary Snyder and others. Questions: What makes a journal shapely? How have others composed cross-genre work on the edge of poetry, essay, fiction and autobiography? What does it mean to write with Time as the key element? Is revision of journal entries a crime or a necessity? Students submit an edited final project of twenty pages, with an introduction. Open to MFA W&P students only. 

WRI 668e
Practice of Fiction: Toward Accumulating a Larger Text (3)
The focus of this class is on accruing, through episodes and exercises, the first draft of a larger text, a novel or novella. The work begins in this class and moves through outlines and specifics toward the first draft of a book length manuscript. Note: we will not be working with novels you may already have in progress. It is essential that everyone in the class be working simultaneously with the same specific underlying principles. Required books will be on the syllabus and announced at the first class.

WRI 670
Practice of Poetry: Word for Word, Line by Line (3)
While this workshop focuses on the participants' own poems, it also attempts to examine and clarify the traditions of which these poems partake, and to that end we read texts by practicing poets who have written about their work and the work of others in useful ways. These include All This Everyday by Ted Berrigan, Other Traditions by John Ashbery and selections from the critical writings of William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley, Charles Bernstein and others. Open to MFA W&P students only. 

WRI 671
Practice of Fiction: Building Blocks (3)
This course concentrates on short works/passages from various authors and/or short video segments for assignments on specific skills: dialogue, characterization, scene work, narration and point of view during the first half of every class. For the second half, students bring their writing for comments and/or critiques. Work by Alice Munro, QuentinTarrantino, Lorrie Moore, David Mamet, Jhumpa Lahiri and others used. Critique skills are taught and honed. Written critical feedback is required from students and instructor on student writing. Goals: Get past second drafts; 35 pp. or 1/3 of your final ms. Recommended for first semester students. Open to MFA W&P students only. 

WRI 673 
Creative Reading and Writing: Food as Metaphor (3)
So much depends upon dinner, either the lack of it or its inclusion. Food brings characters around a table. In fiction, Virginia Woolf has rhapsodized about pyramids of fruit, as has Joyce about hot potatoes. We write stories incorporating food in some manner, as a metaphor and as a catalyst for action. Writers we look at may include Hemingway, Stein, Colwin and Fisher. Open to MFA W&P students only, others by permission of the department. 

WRI 675
Creative Reading and Writing: Memory and Matter (3)
This class works toward developing a conversation about virtual time. What is it? Where is it? Is it in the body, in writing, or is writing a network that is able to connect with it? Is virtual time a streaming thing or particulate, an exploded dot that we track for an originating image? How can we fold, break open or provide our work with the new encounters that access time? From Proust’s encounter with the Madeleine to Renee Gladman’s new work at the conjunction of duration and hypnotherapy, we engage with works that access/fold time in interesting ways. Discussions toward a discourse of virtual time alternates with workshops in which work of any genre is welcome. Open to MFA W&P students only, others by permission of the department. 

WRI 688e
Literature Seminar: Kerouac’s Road (3)
In this class, we examine selected, primary texts of Kerouac’s narrative canon (what he called the Vanity of Duluoz), as well as his first novel; plus primary critical and personal biographies and oral history. His letters and journals are also included. Through these varied filters we come to a better understanding of his compositional techniques, spiritual and emotional make-up, and ultimately Kerouac’s place in the context of his time and in the gallery of American letters. We probe beyond the myth of the namesake of the Kerouac School, until he reveals himself through his multidimensional life and work.

WRI 700
Writing Pedagogy Seminar: Composition and Writing Center Theory (3)
This seminar is required of graduate students selected to staff the Naropa Writing Center. In this course, we study composition and writing center theory and develop techniques to put that theory into practice through hands-on work with papers. We approach consulting from a multisensory perspective, designed to activate the learning process through engaged reading and writing. The course also focuses on the particular needs of our center by introducing strategies for curriculum development and principles of Writing Across the Curriculum. Successful completion of this course enables Writing Fellows to begin staffing the center in the spring and throughout their graduate program if they maintain their level of commitment.

WRI 710
Practice of Poetry: Your Works (3)
This writing workshop focuses on the participants' own poems, their intentions and realizations, triumphs, disappointments and creative mistakes. We bear in mind John Ashbery's remark: "It's rather hard to be a good artist and also be able to explain intelligently what your art is about. In fact, the worse your art is, the easier it is to talk about it. At least, I'd like to think so." Open to MFA W&P students only.  

WRI 718
Literature Seminar: The Cantos of Ezra Pound (3)
“All times are contemporaneous in the mind.” Like no other poem before or after, The Cantos has followed this thought as a beacon. The class studies what critic Hugh Kenner calls “the Pound era,” including its literary movements of Imagism and Vorticism and those writers in dialogue with whom Pound developed his verse: H.D., William Carlos Williams, W. B. Yeats, Marianne Moore. Then to ancestral presence: troubadours of Provence, lyre players of Greece, poet-exiles of Tang Dynasty China, dancers of Japanese Noh. With Homer and Dante as guides, we set sail through time and space, visiting the planet’s verse traditions the politics, the economies, reading the entire Cantos and a great deal of Pound’s prose. Please bring the Cantos to the first class. Open to W&P students only.

WRI 731
Creative Reading and Writing: Sequences (3)
Sequences studies how to build longer works. We read, analyze and discuss books that have issues, problems and solutions in composition: Fitzgerald, Brautigan, Acker, Erdrich and Dagoberto Gilb. From the non-narrative, non–character driven Japanese renku, we proceed through modernist to postmodernist to tribal solutions for serial, character-based or experimental works. Two editorial assignments of entire books are required, and marketable skills stressed. Students write, revise and/or complete 65 pages of work. This course offers new ways to think about the ms., preparing students for their ms./thesis semester. Open to MFA W&P students only. 

WRI 756
Mind Moving (3)
Mind Moving explores contemplative practices in prose and poetry. Philip Whalen and Gary Snyder’s experimental verbal collages, montages and mobiles with multiple points of view are investigated along with the compassionate characterization used by prose writers. The Buddhist appropriations and assimilations of Whalen, Kerouac and Snyder’s early artistic processes are primary. Mind Moving covers relevant American Buddhist and cultural history connected to Whalen, Snyder and Kerouac’s art. A critical response essay and artistic portfolio required. Guided meditation is provided. This course serves for contemplative credit. Open to MFA W&P students only.  

WRI 763
Creative Reading and Writing: Notes on Architecture (3)
In this class, we read works inspired by the experience and imagining of architecture: the passage, the corridor, the underground tunnel, the corner of a city perpetually turning. How does architecture inspire writers to imagine narrative and poetic structures, whether virtual or real, and how can we, writing, enter into the space continually opening out from the one preceding it: or not—what is it like to enter a sequence of rooms that is already there, furnished by the previous occupant? Readings include Elizabeth Grosz’s writings on architecture, as well as selections of contemporary and modernist poetry and prose. Open to W&P students only.

WRI 765e
Practice of Fiction: Flash Fiction, Make It New (3)
The spirit of the experiment has been central to American literature. In this workshop on flash fiction, we examine some unusual structures and approaches for writing short-shorts. There are many techniques and approaches from poetry that can be applied to writing micro-fiction. We experiment with some of these.

WRI 770
Practice of Poetry: Hybrid Forms (3)
Let’s make our flour meal and meat in Georgia. Is that prose or poetry and why.—Gertrude Stein
It seems we’re obsessed with labels—with naming texts and categorizing them. In “Narration: Lecture 2,” Stein challenges traditional notions of poetry and prose. She asks, “does it really make any difference if you do or do not know. This.” We examine writing that problematizes the binary and creates a simulacrum of conventional forms. We isolate the techniques and discuss the theories involved in pressing on the boundaries of genre—mixing and matching, cross-talking our way through. The culmination is a final manuscript of cross-genre, hybridized work. Open to MFA W&P students only.  

WRI 771
Practice of Fiction: Postmodern Prose (3)
What is called postmodern is an old and honorable tradition: bringing active intelligence to shaping and perceiving forms which enhance and amplify the text and context of the piece being written. The form is significant to the ‘adventure’ that writing is, and to the mind’s need for a more demanding structure. We work with texts that deal with a variety of approaches and we write a minimum of three stories based on models. There are also in-class exercises and assignments. Open to MFA W&P students only.  

WRI 773
Creative Reading and Writing: Cross-cultural Writing Practices (3)
This class focuses on transnational works to explore the ways in which writers who cross between the spaces of different cultures are (sometimes) also working towards transformations of deep structure in the writing. Does this happen as an action of form (how does form migrate?) or aesthetics (what kinds of complex choices are available to language when the body that speaks the language is no longer in the same place as the language itself?). How do figures in these works emerge/cross from one frame to another? These discussions develop a conversation about hybridity and transformation in your own work, which is work-shopped on alternate weeks. This class is open to any genre and authors we read include W.G. Sebald, Monica Ali and Kamau Braithwaite. Open to MFA W&P students only.  

WRI 781/481
Project Outreach (2–3)
Project Outreach places students in local schools and other institutions to encourage creative compositions through writing exercises that inspire and instruct participants in making works out of words. Students go out into the world as literary activists, sharpening and extending their own teaching skills. Open to W&L and W&P students only, others by permission of the department.  

WRI 793/793e
Special Topics in Writing and Poetics (3)
Study and analysis of selected literary and compositional issues and elements. Topics cover a wide range of subject matter and methods and vary from semester to semester. These may include, but not be limited to: works of literature, forms of composition, literary history, writing practice (including prose, poetry and translation), literary criticism, as well as film and media studies.