MLA Practicum Workshop: The Art and Craft of Creative Writing

Catalog description

This multi-genre workshop course will investigate strategies for writing poems, short fiction, and personal essays. As creative practitioners, we'll learn to make use of our own memories and imaginations by considering the questions we have about ourselves, our fundamental beliefs, and our relationships to storytelling and language. We'll consider how we might find forms for our material and structure creative work in ways that will generate surprise and excitement for our readers. In the first half of the course, we'll study the art of poetry, investigating craft topics such as image; figurative language; meter and rhythm; free verse, including lineation and enjambment; and formal structures, including a study of received forms that make use of rhyme and refrain. In the second half of the course, topics in prose will include syntax; narrative and lyric strategies; characterization; world-building; and perspective, persona, and voice. In each class, students will discuss published work and participate in short-form, generative writing exercises so that they may begin to inhabit a sustaining creative practice of their own. Students will also have the opportunity to develop some of this writing to submit for workshop critique. The course will close with a discussion of revision strategies necessary to deepen, complicate, and polish drafts-in-progress. By the end of the course, students will have accumulated starts for poems, stories, and essays, some of which will have been developed, workshopped, and revised. They will come away with a better understanding of their own creative process, a strong foundation in craft that will serve their future writing, and a new creative community that they have built together.