Courses: Fall 2024
All CWL courses are 4 credits unless noted otherwise. FLM courses 1-3 credits.
All classes are In Person unless noted otherwise.
NB: Fall semester begins Monday, August 26. Last day of regularly scheduled classes is Monday, December 9. Official end of term is Thursday, December 19. Full Academic Calendar.
GRADUATE COURSES IN SOUTHAMPTON (in-person)
CWL 500-S01 – 95360 - Intro to Graduate Writing: Christian McLean
Wednesday, 5:30-8:20 PM
Part ethics, part studio, part special guest appearances and craft conversations, this course is designed to get you thinking about how you would like to exist in the creative world, both in this program and beyond. You’ll explore recent and current events in writing, dig into literary magazines, spend time generating and sharing work. You’ll read craft books. You’ll meet MFA faculty. The course is designed with you and your MFA experience at the forefront. Please note that CWL 500 is a requirement and we encourage you to take this course in your first year. (Will be offered in Manhattan in Spring ’25).
CWL 510-S01 – 95366 - Forms of Fiction: Starting Your Novel: Susan Scarf Merrell
Tuesdays, 2:30-5:20 PM
What we’re not going to do: workshop pages that aren’t ready to be seen. What we are going to do: workshop your plan, your characters, your reasons for exploring the ideas you’re exploring. We’ll read some how-to guides on novel structure, and perhaps some contemporary novels. We’ll explore the many ways novels are shaped. We’ll talk POV, structure, voice, character. We’ll do some in-class writing and much in-class reading and talking. We’ll figure out how to break the Novel Monster down into manageable writing projects, and we’ll protect each other and our vulnerable manuscripts as they take shape. Requirement: A good idea for a novel.
CWL 540-S01 – 96906 - Forms of Creative Nonfiction: The Lyric Essay: Molly Gaudry
Thursday 2:30-5:20 PM
The lyric essay is a hybrid genre that accepts and rejects elements of both the personal essay and lyric poetry traditions. Blending nonfiction’s personal I and poetry’s lyric I, the lyric essay is (among other things) a highly performative genre especially well-suited for the dramatization of intense and particularly traumatic self-expression. But it is also flexible enough to allow for more playful, lighthearted subject matter and forms. As this course privileges generation over revision there are no formal workshops, but you will have time in class to share lyric essays-in-progress, to begin to compile these toward a possible memoir-in-essays, and to receive substantial feedback throughout the semester. Readings will include selections from the following:
- The Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth from the Margins, Zoë Bossiere & Erica Trabold
- A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry by Gregory Orr
- The Sound of Undoing: A Memoir in Essays by Paige Towers
- The Book of (More) Delights: Essays by Ross Gay
- The Loneliness Files: A Memoir in Essays by Athena Dixon
- Everybody Come Alive: A Memoir in Essays by Marcie Alvis Walker
- A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays, Randon Billings Noble
World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
CWL 565-S01 – 95361 - Special Topics in Writing: SF/Fantasy: Easy to Read, Not Easy to Write: Kaylie Jones
Thursday, 5:30-8:20PM
Those of us who avidly read Science Fiction and Fantasy have excellent ideas for the kind of book we’d like to write. We set out on this task, only to realize that creating a strange new world populated by alien laws, customs, and beings is so much more complicated and difficult than we at first thought. We will focus on this aspect of SF and Fantasy writing, looking at successful examples in these genres.
CWL 580-S01 – 95353 - Practicum in Arts Admin: Carla Caglioti
TBD
CWL 582-S01 – 95355 - Practicum in Publishing and Editing: Lou Ann Walker and Scott Sullivan
Tuesday, 11:00 AM-1:50 PM - In Person/Hybrid (This course will be taught jointly in both locations)
Under the guidance of editors and advisors, students will be exposed to the hands-on process of editing and publishing TSR: The Southampton Review. Yes, the P& E Practicum is designed to give you experience in editing a literary and arts review. But here’s the secret: This practicum also provides an excellent means for you to build your skills as a writer. For example, as you read submissions in Submittable, you’ll be seeing what works and doesn’t work in cover letters. You’ll be examining successful structures in fiction, non-fiction, memoir, and poetry. You’ll be acquiring editing diagnostic tools. And you’ll be drilling down to what works line by line throughout a creative piece. We’ll discuss word choices, juxtapositions, imagery, symbolism, all that good stuff.
GRADUATE COURSES IN Manhattan(in-person)
CWL 510-S60 – 95307 - Forms of Fiction: The Short-Short Story from Tolstoy to Today: A Workshop
Amy Hempel
Tuesdays, 5:30-8:20 PM
In this course we will read and discuss short-short stories and prose poems from several countries and centuries, drawing mostly from contemporary examples. Students will write frequently in one or both forms, after we look at the specific requirements of each, a variety of definitions, and differences, and similarities. As one practitioner noted, “The short-short is like a regular story, only more so.”
CWL 520-S60 – 95352 - Forms of Poetry: Questions of Travel
Julie Sheehan
Seven Saturdays (9/7, 9/21, 10/5, 10/19, 11/2, 11/16, 12/7), 11AM-4:50PM
This is a course in description, foundational to the lyric impulse, for both experienced poets and the poetry-curious. And, since we can't describe something without developing an opinion about it, it's also a course in point of view. From Brazil to Bronzeville, from islands to ideals, we'll explore the idea of place and journey as poetic tropes in both contemporary practitioners and their antecedents. We will read eclectically: William Shakespeare, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Bishop, Nate Marshall, Anthony DiPietro. We will investigate the settings around us. We will travel through food. And we will journey in our own poetry through prompts in the spirit of the readings. With luck, we’ll have a revelation or two, and, by semester’s end, a clutch of new poems.
CWL 535-S30 – 95310 - Writing in Multiple Genres: Guess the Genre: Fiction that Feels like Nonfiction and Nonfiction that Feels Like Fiction: Karen Bender
Thursday, 5:30-8:20 PM
How do authors get personal experience on the page, either through the vehicle of fiction or nonfiction? How do writers make their work feel immediate, urgent; what to leave in and what to leave out? How is curation of experience different in each genre, or is it? We will be reading work by Alexander Chee, Annie Ernaux, Carmen Maria Machado, Ocean Vuong, Patricia Lockwood, Eve Babitz, and others, looking at the way they craft their narratives. Students will be workshopping two pieces of fiction or nonfiction, and don't have to reveal what genre it is.
CWL 535-S60 – 95341 - Writing in Multiple Genres: Writing about Social Justice: Robert Lopez
Wednesday, 2:30-5:20 PM
In this workshop we'll ask and address questions--how do we derive the authority, expertise, and the imagination to write about social issues while maintaining our allegiance to the creation and manifestation of art? How can we contribute to the vital conversations of the day? We'll read writers such as Garnette Cadogan, Claudia Rankine, Valeria Luiselli, Hanif Abdurraqib, Eula Biss, and others to see how they go about this vital endeavor. We will look within and without to create work that is both artistic and impactful, personally and globally.
CWL 582-S01 – 95355 - Practicum in Publishing and Editing: Scott Sullivan & Lou Ann Walker
Tuesdays, 11AM-1:50 PM - In Person/Hybrid (This course will be taught jointly in both locations)
Under the guidance of editors and advisors, students will be exposed to the hands-on process of editing and publishing TSR: The Southampton Review. Yes, the P& E Practicum is designed to give you experience in editing a literary and arts review. But here’s the secret: This practicum also provides an excellent means for you to build your skills as a writer. For example, as you read submissions in Submittable, you’ll be seeing what works and doesn’t work in cover letters. You’ll be examining successful structures in fiction, non-fiction, memoir, and poetry. You’ll be acquiring editing diagnostic tools. And you’ll be drilling down to what works line by line throughout a creative piece. We’ll discuss word choices, juxtapositions, imagery, symbolism, all that good stuff.
GRADUATE COURSES IN virtually
CWL 560-S30 – 95367 - Topics Literature for Writers: The Glory of the Short Story: Susan Minot
Monday, 5:30-8:20 PM - Online Synchronous
Alice Munro recognized the short story is “an important art.” Jorge Luis Borges said, “I find that in a short story you get just as much complexity and you get it in a more pleasurable way as you get out of a long novel.” Focus in this seminar will be on the various modes of the short story as executed by its masters. Style, structure and content are handled differently by each artist and in class discussions, we will explore the varieties of storytelling and discover the many versions of the greatness of this form, with some attention to the short short, as well as to poetry. Students will write weekly assignments of the stories read, and submit work once. Reading will include: Anton Chekhov, Claire Keegan, Raymond Carver, Flannery O'Connor, James Baldwin, Anne Carson, Georges Saunders, Shirley Jackson, John Cheever, Samantha Hunt, Ernest Hemingway, Lorrie Moore, Jorge Luis Borges, Lydia Davis, Franz Kafka, Amy Hempel, Steven Millhauser, Gina Berriault,…
GRADUATE Film & TV COURSES open to CWL (in-person in Manhattan)
FLM 550.S60 (#) Teaching Practicum: Karen Offitzer
Thurs, 2:30-5:20 PM (3 cr.)
This is a weekly seminar in teaching at the University level, with special emphasis on teaching in the creative arts, specifically creative writing and filmmaking. Open to students in our Creative Writing, Film and TV Writing programs, this course plunges into the basics of pedagogy, exploring learning styles, discovering a teaching philosophy, designing syllabi for undergraduate courses, creating assignments and rubrics for grading assignments, and practicing these skills in a classroom setting. You’ll get hands-on experience and mentoring through visits to undergraduate classes and teaching opportunities, and will gain an understanding of what works best for helping undergraduate students learn. Particular focus will be on discussing issues that arise when teaching creative endeavors such as writing and filmmaking. OPEN TO FLM, TV AND CWL STUDENTS
Based on WS and classroom availability
FLM 650.S60 (#) The Advance Party: Lenny Crooks
Tues, 8:20-11:10pm (3 cr)
The Advance Party challenges all you know about screenwriting as you progress from a blank page to a short form screenplay. We start with a character - each student creates a single character and learns how to describe their character in an authentic way. If the class size is 10 then there will emerge 10 characters and you will choose which of these characters will interact with your own. We then focus on the natural story as an essential element in this organic approach to screenwriting. As we progress, each of your stories will evolve, not out of traditional plot driven characterization but out of the characters' authentic actions and reactions to situations created by you. Caps at 12 students. Priority will be given to those students on the writing track.
The Advance Party process was first utilized by Andrea Arnold to write her Cannes prize winning feature ‘Red Road.’
Based on WS and classroom availability:
FLM 652.S60 (#), Screenwriting III: Jim Jennewein
Wednesday 8:20-11:10 (3cr)
This is an intensive writing workshop designed to help students as they finish or revise feature length screenplays. Classes will be devoted to workshopping student ideas and scripts. Students must come in with clear goals for the semester. These goals must be approved by the instructor. In workshop we will consider emotional impact, visual storytelling force, dramatic structure, character, story arcs, scene construction, pacing, embedded values, the creation of meaning - or “What are we left with at the end?,” and all other aspects of screenwriting. You must present your work in class and be engaged with the work of your classmates. We will read and view produced screenplays to deepen our understanding of how these stories work on us - and how they are written on the page. OR SBSNC 9
TVW 525.S65 (#) Topics in Film: TV Guest Series: Alan Kingsberg
Mon, 7:30-9:20 pm (1 cr)
A moderated guest series featuring in-depth discussions with TV writers and producers about their scripts, series and careers. Meets four times during the Fall semester.
THESIS
CWL 599.V01 51933 Julie Sheehan
CWL 599.V02 51907 Matthew Klam
CWL 599.V03 51940 Christine Kitano
CWL 599.V04 51941 Kaylie Jones
CWL 599.V05 51942 Carla Caglioti
CWL 599.V06 51943 Genevieve Crane
CWL 599.V07 51944 Robert Lopez
CWL 599.V08 51945 Paul Harding
CWL 599.V09 51946 Susan Merrell
CWL 599.V10 51947 Susan Minot
CWL 599.V11 51948 Robert Reeves
CWL 599.V12 51949 Lou Ann Walker
CWL 599.V13 51950 Amy Hempel
CWL 599.V14 51951 TBA (Molly Gaudry)
CWL 599.V15 51953 Robert Reeves THESIS PLANNING
CWL 599.V16 51954 Magdalene Brandeis