History

Summer Writing Progam 2004
Week One: July 7 —July 13

Course #: Non-credit: WRI 051, tuition: $375 per week
Course #: BA: WRI 451, undergraduate tuition: $856 per week
Course #: MFA: WRI 751, graduate tuition: $1,168 per week

Please Note: The tuition rates for credit students have changed. These tuition rates replace the old tuition rates listed in the SWP 2004 catalog and previously listed on this website. The tuition rate for non-credit students has not changed.

Please note that a new workshop "The Poet as Subject and Suspect: How Can We Trust What We Write?" by Jo Ann Wasserman is now being offered.
Please note that a new workshop by David Henderson is now being offered. Lorenzo Thomas's workshop has been cancelled.

Borders: Literary, Ethical, Geographical & Personal
This week we will focus on borders - literary, ethical, geographical, ecological and personal. How do we, as writers, interact with the locations at which actions and ideas begin and end? How far does one's personal ethics enter into the work? How far do you stretch your boundaries? Do you represent a continent? How do you investigate what lies beyond your own borders without engaging in colonialism, imperialism or appropriation?

Zones of silence / meaning at full speed
Nicole Brossard
How do we cross the borders between silence and language for ideas, thoughts and emotions to appear and take shape in a written way? What are the zones of silence made of: unspeakable, inavouable, stream of consciousness, void? How silence is affecting meaning? What do we take for granted in a sentence and what surprises us? Meaning is a construction made out of implicit narratives; since our relation to time and space has changed, shouldn't we now be talking ironically of meaning as a de/sign in language (a line, a gesture, a profile) and if so, what benefit do we gain from it?

What's Funny?
Jack Collom
Philosopher Henri Bergson said what's funny is always "something mechanical encrusted upon the living." Hmm. Tim Dlugos wrote: "I take incredible / risks with my poems, / which is why they / always turn out / so fine." What's it all about? We'll write, discuss, and study this stuff.

War: The Ultimate Border Crossing
George Evans
Living in a country that exists in a perpetual state of war, what poetry and creative prose can record and address war without adding to the violence? In a society that doesn't grapple publicly with the results of its martial engagements, denies all but its own side of military events, and tolerates an uncritical media that travels with the military in times of crisis or invasion, how can poetry or creative prose cross the border of silence between war and its reality? We'll look at what some writers have done in the past, what some are doing now, and produce new texts on the subject.

Breaking Borders but Staying Narrative
Brian Evenson
This class begins with the assumption that fiction can learn from, borrow from, and collaborate with other arts while still maintaining a sense of narrative form, structure, and story. How does one shake up one's own literary practices and still maintain a commitment to certain elements of genre? What can fiction writers learn from film, from poetry, from visual art, and from collaboration that will make them better (and more open) writers of fiction?

"Who Are 'Those People'? Writing/Imagining the So-Called 'Other'"
Thomas Glave
The "other"? But who is that, and why? And when, and how? Does/Must narrative language shift in crafting a character distinctly different from oneself? How does one truly, imaginatively enter the skin, mind, heart of another who is popularly perceived as an "other"? In this course, students will be asked to write one fiction in either 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person, centering on characters who differ (or on a single character who differs) from the author in at least four of the following ways: gender, sexuality, race, class, national orgin, age, ethnicity, religion, etc. At the same time, writers should strive for subtlety and the achievement of a smoothly crafted, nuanced tale which doesn't hit us over the head with the results of its forays into this thing we call "difference." Writers will also be responsible for a one- to two-page summary on the questions and challenges encountered in their work. All members of the class will have read by the first class' meeting, and be expected to discuss in terms of craft and architecture, the following books: My Son's Story (Gordimer), Blindness (Saramago), The Drifting of Spirits (Pineau), and The Emigrants (Sebald). These books must be brought to class for the 1st day's discussion.

Geography of War
David Henderson
The emotional geography of war between us and against an external enemy. Between individual hearts and the national, international heart. Between our home town and Baghdad. Especially the language of war: their language, our language, the other's language. We will explore via discussion, reading and writing our particular and current war. Military-speak, government press relations speak. What is being said by the poets we know and don't know. We will monitor and attempt to reflect our feelings and the feelings of others using the language of poetry and often methods of investigative poetics. Explore ways of using poetics in ways that could possibly convey information and points-of-view to a public of which we are an element. All this as territory to explore geo-politically plus.

And for those who desire to follow their heart and write about something else --- they are welcome and need have no reason for their choice.

Poetry and prose --- neither fear of the other.

Formal Borders: Reading & Writing Poet's Prose
Harryette Mullen
Exploring a porous border between verse and prose, we will read prose poems and practice turning verse and prose into prose poetry.

Borders Worth Crossing
Maureen Owen

Myself, I'll act more wisely toward the world:
I'll place my eyes right at my fingertips
and only see what my two hands can feel. -Sor Juana

Transreal Fiction
Rudy Rucker
Think of your daily life as science fiction. Mind control, robots, time warps, aliens and the wonders of futuristic technology are everywhere. This is transrealism: a way to see the world, a way to write fiction. You'll start a Notes document for a short story or novel between mainstream science fiction and experimental literature. Includes lectures, Q&A, field trips, and discussions of students' work. See http://www.mathcs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker/writerstoolkit.htm.

The Word on the Page
Julia Seko
Print presents words through a visual filter--one that can enhance or hinder transmission of the ideas expressed. In this hands-on introduction to letterpress printing, students will explore the relationship between text and the visual/tactile design of the printed page.

Borderlands / Hinterlands
Eleni Sikelianos
Looking at works that inhabit border territories, such as visual poems and walking art pieces, we'll play with notions of crossings and marginalia in our own works, in an attempt to expand the field of "translation". We will also look at points of contact between frontiers, historical and territorial, animal and human, as well as the very real national borders this country touches upon. Texts / authors we might examine include A Humument, Christian Bök's Eunoia, Renee Gladman's The Activist, Paul Celan, W.G. Sebald, Sin Puertas Visibles: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by Mexican Women, and so on.

Crossing The Borders Between Poetry And Society
Daisy Zamora
This workshop will focus on poetry as a means of empowerment, comparing the very real influence Central American poets have on political, social, artistic and literary development in their societies with the ostensibly limited role of poets in US society. Examining poetry in societies where poets are viewed as indispensable thinkers, witnesses and prophets whose lives, works and ideas can (and do) inspire social and political movements of major importance, we'll discuss why that is the case, and create new work that attempts to cross the borders between poetry and society.

The Poet as Subject and Suspect: How Can We Trust What We Write?
Jo Ann Wasserman
This class will examine the various depths and dimensions of language; its potential for expression, discovery, autobiography and sentimentality. By the process of poetic invention we will investigate how forms, artifice, rules, and rule-breaking both create and deconstruct the frontier-land of writing and thinking, imagining and living. In looking closely at our own and assigned work, we will raise questions about how poems coming out of intimate experience and learned language can remain surprising enough to avoid cliché and dogma. We will scrutinize writing as a vehicle and/or container of the self which can trigger the losing of that same self. How is the "failure" of writing, at times, like the failure of the body when the body refuses to fully represent "I"? Can the body be written out of? We will find ways to help each other move both beyond and towards the boundaries of our own skin in order to write more freely; specifically; and, paradoxically, more personally.

Week One | Week Two | Week Three | Week Four

Previous Summer Writing Program Information

2006
2005
2004
2003