English: Intro to Creative Writing

Introductory course on techniques of writing poetry, short prose fiction, and creative nonfiction. Classes organized around discussion of student work; weekly writing assignments.

Open to degree and PACE students

In this course, you’ll join a community of student writers in discovering how nonfiction, fiction, and poetry can shape memory and imagination into literature. It’s a workshop class, which means that first we’ll read and discuss work by published authors, and then we’ll read and discuss your stories and poems with the same care and scrutiny. Over the semester, we’ll examine the engines that drive narrative: i.e., character, conflict, emotional truth, and the lyric engines that deepen meaning, i.e. sound, image, syntax, form. We’ll also explore how writers get inspired, using writing exercises, improv, and surrealist games in class to generate new material and revise our work.