UNDERGRADUATE WORKSHOP

Climate disaster, killer robots, zombies, oh my! The genre that we call speculative fiction can involve a lot of wild and dystopian premises that draw upon the imagination of the real to construct an original world. In this time of constant global emergency and crisis, and where apocalypse is no longer myth but a true reality, how do we write the fictions of wreckage when the end of time is not of the distant future but taking place right now? In this fiction workshop, students will read and examine different examples of the world’s end and write their own stories that envision the past, future, and every urgent present. On the craft level, students will work with the forms of flash fiction and short story, and hone various elements of world building that include finetuning the rules of a story’s speculative premise, character development, and plot development. Together, our stories will create a tapestry of answers to the questions: What, in fact, does it take to survive the end of the world? And what stories might emerge from the dredge and debris?

GRADUATE COURSE

“Exit Strategies” is exactly as it sounds—a set of tools and skills one needs to exit one place and enter another. The entry, in this case, refers to any number of possibilities and paths for the writer seeking to develop the longevity of their writing life beyond this institution. In this course, we will treat the typical approach to “professionalization” with the appropriate scrutiny it deserves—by acknowledging the obstacles that writers (particularly those of us who are historically disadvantaged) face under the current market economy’s valuation of writing and the arts while also not allowing ourselves to be beholden to these limitations. This class will operate with the understanding that every exit is accompanied by many entry points, and each student will learn how to determine the appropriate path they must take to assure the length, breadth, and health of their artistic practice. In short, to hold every door and window open for themselves.

UNDERGRADUATE COURSE

The pathway from adolescence to adulthood in narratives of girlhood always seems to be exceptionally brutal. From stories of girls and femmes in red who fight the wolves of temptation to other moral-bound tales of what distinguishes a “good girl” from a bad one, we see over time reflections of societal attitudes towards a period of coming of age that is ladened with gender, sexual, and cultural expectations. In this course, we will look at nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and film portrayals of girlhood that invite us to think about this period of coming of age across global and diasporic contexts, coloniality and settlerism, cisgender and transgender identities, and the intersection of these issues represented through specific genres and media. This course will lead to a final creative project where students will rewrite—through either video/film, short story, photo series, etc.—a common narrative or story about girlhood.  

GRADUATE COURSE

While we may be accustomed to working on a poetry book one single lyric poem on a page at a time, this course will invite us to look at the enduring long poem, one that spans multiple pages, and which may transform the trajectory of a larger poetry project. Drawing from Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative, we will consider “text as texture,” approaching our writing across multiple pages with curiosity about shape, movement, and feeling. We will look at book-length experimentations with poetic form such as Wanda Coleman’s sonnet series in Mercurochrome, Mita Mahato’s hybrid poetic collages in Arctic Play, and fictional ethnographic prose poems in Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers. These writers and their accompanying works will be the inspiration point for students looking to reinvigorate writing projects that might feel stuck or looking to expand existing work beyond its current form. In addition to generative writing, this course is also part workshop where students will learn to critically engage with their peers’ respective projects through constructive feedback and find appreciation for different styles of writing approaching the same aims.

UNDERGRADUATE COURSE

AESTHETICS OF VENGEANCE. From the longstanding revenge concocted by the wrongly convicted teen girl of Park Chan-wook’s Lady Vengeance (2005) to the “nightmare of a woman” in poet Dorothy Chan’s Revenge of the Asian Woman, the desire for and cost of revenge haunts Asian women and femmes in poetry, prose, and film. In response to extreme and patterned racial and gender violence, vengeance becomes a motivating force for Asian women and femmes seeking justice when the state or systems in place cannot provide a reparative answer. Rather than debate the morality of vengeance as a response to racial and gender violence, this course looks at the ways in which vengeance as affect moves, activates, agitates, and subverts notions of appropriateness, respectability, and other feminized values specifically attributed to Asian women and femmes.  

We will look at text and media that dance between sardonic humor to the most abject renditions of blood, guts, and gore (it’s revenge, after all). We will apply affect and critical race theory from Sianne Ngai and Ann Anlin Cheng to readings that may include Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, Vivek Shraya’s Revenge of the Racoons, Marjorie Liu’s Monstress, Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl, Isabel Yap’s Never Have I Ever alongside viewings of the acclaimed Lady Vengeance (2005), Faster, Pussy Cat! Kill! Kill! (1965) and the popular anime Hell Girl (otherwise known as Jigoku Shōjo: Girl from Hell).  

GRADUATE COURSE

In the “POV Experimental Lab,” we will embark on a wild test of navigating multiple points of view in the writing of fiction. Writers in this class will come in with a piece of original fiction that they are looking to revise, reinvent, and expand through experimenting with a range of perspectives—first person singular to plural, epistolary second to the reader’s address, grounded to all seeing third, animal, book, object, angel, or some mysterious unknown entity that only the writer can imagine. True to the course’s name, this is a generative workshop where we will write deeper into the world of our project’s imagination, drawing inspiration from the young boys of Justin Torres’s We the Animals, a Black community seeking the healing properties of salt in Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters, the labyrinthine story within a story in which we (the reader) follow along in Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, and the talking book of Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness.