Generous reviews make us do wild things. Brevity Magazine’s blog has been devoted to reviews of AWP panels these past few weeks. Sally Ashton wrote “Top Ten Reasons Why “Navigating Emptiness: Benefits and Drawbacks of Teaching the Lyric Essay” Was a Great Panel.” Kathleen Rooney, Julie Paegle, and I were happy to hear we served the audience and AWP well. We have been asked if the panels and handouts could be made available for those who couldn’t make it to the panel. We thought Bending Genre’s webiste would be a great place to reproduce them. Thanks again to Sally Ashton and Dinty Moore for bringing attention to our panel.
Kathleen Rooney
The Wilderness of Unopened Life: On Selecting and Working with Course Texts, or Reading List Assembly for the Open Form Essay
I have a terrible confession to make. I have never in my life taught “the lyric essay.”
And yet here I am, sitting on this panel on the “Benefits and Drawbacks of Teaching the Lyric Essay.”
So what am I doing here? Am I an impostor? Have you been punked? No. Here’s what I mean:
I have never taught a class whose title or subtitle contained the words “lyric essay,” although I have taught several classes in which what others might call “the lyric essay” has been studied abundantly.
I have three main reasons for not teaching “the lyric essay” in a way that uses that term. In a kind of lyric essay (or just HuffPo, I guess) move, I will put forth those reasons in a brief list form:
1) I don’t like the term “lyric essay” because it was never tremendously clear or helpful to begin with, and because of overuse and mis-application its meaning has become so vague as to be almost useless. It’s like the term “postmodernism” that way.
2) I am not comfortable with the ethical murkiness engaged in and promoted by one of the term’s biggest proponents. And here I mean John D’Agata, the lyric essay editor at Seneca Review since 1997 and the antagonist (depending on your point of view) in the book The Lifespan of a Fact where he was pitted against dogged fact-checker John Fingal of The Believer. In short, I prefer not to endorse such carelessness with the truth even tacitly or by implication.
3) Finally and probably most importantly—both for this panel and in general—I think that to name something that could be called a “lyric essay” too stringently and to define it too strictly is to fence that thing in before it has a chance to really be free. In other words, calling a “lyric essay” a “lyric essay” risks accidentally crushing it under the expectations of genre before it even gets built. I don’t want students to hear the term “lyric essay” and feel burdened with the idea that there’s a single correct format for that type of writing and god forbid they might be doing it wrong.
Before this panel motivated me to put down my pedagogical reasoning behind this instinctive avoidance of the term “lyric essay,” I didn’t really have an alternative term for it.
Now, though, I feel I should pause here and offer a substituitive name: the “open form essay.” I’ll say it again: “the open form essay.”
Giving credit where it’s due, I got this term from a briefly famous and now sort of obscure poetry anthology published in 1969 called Naked Poetry. The subtitle of this collection is “Recent American Poetry in Open Forms.” In their introduction, the editors Stephen Berg and Robert Mezey write:
There wasn’t even a satisfactory name for the kinds of poetry we were gathering and talking about, and still isn’t. Some people said “Free Verse” and others said “Organic Poetry” (and a few old ones said, “That’s not poetry!”) and we finally came up with Open Forms […] And we took a phrase from Jiménez [Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1956] for a title which expresses what we feel about the qualities of this poetry as no technical label could do.
I appreciate this term, “open form,” because it emphasizes that just because a form is not fixed, doesn’t mean it’s not a form. (I like the word “organic,” too, but feel like that sounds too much like fresh produce and ethically sourced whatever.)
The phrase “open form essay” seems to suggest that just because a student isn’t writing in a set structure doesn’t mean they’re structureless. Or just because many beginning writers consider structure to be secondary, invisible, or transparent—because that is how they approach a normal essay or a free verse poem or a traditional (whatever that means) story)—doesn’t mean that that structure is not there. The phrase “open form essay” implies that an essay might be better were the form or structure to become more primary, visible, and prominent, or at least not transparent.
I like the nakedness of the phrase “open form” here, too, as implied by the Naked Poetry anthology’s title because it suggests that neither students nor professional writers should shield themselves with or hide behind or just fall habitually into the neat strictures of poem/essay/story like they might be able to do on their own, without considering the phrase “open form.”
In other words, what I like about the implications of this name and this approach to a class is that it provides a way for a piece of writing’s form or forms to develop organically from the content. I like how the phrase “open form essay” encourages a higher degree of mindfulness about the way that content can inform the shape and even the sound of the piece and vice versa.
Now that I’ve offered this potential alternative name for the “lyric essay,” I’ll talk about how I’ve taught this form in the past, with a particular focus on how I’ve put my course texts together.
I have framed these workshops and their reading lists as either hybrid genre and/or cross-genre. I think that’s the best way to teach good “open form essay” writing both to undergraduates and to graduate students.
The way I learned to prefer this approach was at DePaul University, where we have a course whose number is 309 and whose placeholder title is “Topics in Writing.” Most people choose to design their 309s to be genre-specific: fiction, poetry, or nonfiction with little to no overlap. But thanks to the freedom given to professors for this course, that kind of genre division is not required, and so I never do that. Instead, I take a topical approach that is non-genre specific, but in doing so I hope to encourage the flexibility, formal experimentation, intellectual and creative expansion and rigor that are the trademarks of what a lot of people would call the “lyric essay” and what I like to call the “open form essay.”
I’ve given, as handouts, the front pages of the syllabi and the imitation assignment for two of the 309s I’ve created at DePaul so far.
One is for Writing the Body. The other is for Drift and Dream: the Writer as Urban Walker.
We can pause and walk through the reading lists now, and you can see what I mean about how genre distinctions are highlighted, but with an emphasis on juxtaposition and overlap rather than separation.
My reasoning in assigning such a generic array of books in these classes is that I think students should be thinking not just of content but of form, which perhaps is a contender for the Most Obvious Statement of the Year Award. But I trust that lots of other teachers besides me have found—more often than not—that students frequently have a good grip on what they want to “express” or the “story” they want to tell, but have a hard time thinking of the structure in which they can effectively express themselves or tell that story.
Thus, in a class like this, where one takes a hybrid, cross-genre, or open form approach, I’d argue that one invites and produces a greater range of lyric-ness and experimentation. I’ve also given you the Imitation Assignment that I build the first half of the class around, so we can look at that now, and also the Major Assignment prompt.
Of course, students are not taught that all genres are equivalent or the same. And especially for the major assignment, they are encouraged to pick an over-arching genre with the understanding that a poem is not a lyric essay is not a fiction. And they are also reminded that ethically, what you can do and say and cover and invent in fiction is different than what you can do or say or cover or invent in a nonfiction essay or poem.
But once they consider that macro-level genre decision, an open form approach to both a reading list, imitation exercise set, and major assignment leads to the freedom and joy and risk-taking necessary to create a good lyric essay or open form essay, if you will. (Let’s make this happen.)
In their intro to the Naked Poetry/Open Forms anthology, the editors quote D.H. Lawrence on Walt Whitman, in praise of setting out, as writers, into “the wilderness of unopened life.” (Which is where the title of this paper comes from.) By putting together my reading lists this way, and by structuring the assignments as I do, I try to encourage my students to study these formal armatures, and then discard them, employ them, or graft them to their own as they see fit.
Many students end up writing open form essays, and some have open form essay passages alongside fiction alongside prose poems alongside flash fictions alongside flash nonfictions alongside verse plays alongside whatever else you can imagine.
Does this lead, always, to “finished” or “publishable” works? NO, but in a single semester or 10-week quarter, maybe that’s not the point. This open form approach frees them to think outside parameters they might have thought were fixed and to carry this openness—both in the sense of form and often candor—on into their other work in other classes, other genres, and other settings altogether.
English 309: Writing the Body
Fall 2013: Tuesday-Thursday 11:20 am-12:50 pm (Lincoln Park Campus)
“I wish I was free / of that slaving meat wheel / and safe in heaven dead.”
~Jack Kerouac, “211th Chorus”
Instructor: Kathleen Rooney
Course Texts:
Conrad, CA. A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon: New (Soma) Tics. Seattle: Wave Books, 2012.
(ISBN: 9781933517599)
Manguso, Sarah. The Two Kinds of Decay. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008.
(ISBN: 9780374280123)
Glenum, Lara. The Hounds of No. South Bend: Action Books, 2005. (ISBN: 9780976569213)
Carson, Anne. Autobiography of Red. New York: Vintage, 1999. (ISBN: 9780375701290)
Yuknavitch, Lidia. The Chronology of Water. Portland: Hawthorne Books, 2011.
(ISBN: 9780979018831)
D2L Articles and packets:
Thek, Paul. “Teaching Notes.” 1978-1981.
Bordo, Susan. “Beauty (Re)discovers the Male Body.” 1999.
Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” 1984.
Weekly Creative Responses
The first six weeks of class, which we will dedicate to the reading and discussion of these texts, will also include a weekly writing assignment. Every week, you will hand in one page of writing that is inspired by the corresponding week’s text. This page should clearly show you, as a writer, interacting with and responding to both the subject matter and the structural features of the text under consideration; the page should also be typed, double-spaced (or single-spaced if it is a poem, or if single-spacing is part of your response), printed out, and handed in.
Please, please, please, do not hand in more than one page. If you do, I will not read it. I will, in fact, throw it away. If your page ends mid-sentence, so be it. Follow the rules. There is method in this madness. I urge you to take these page-long assignments seriously. Genius can be found in one page. It can be found in a few sentences, for that matter: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta” (Nabokov). Occasionally, but not as often, it can even be found in six words: “For sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn” (attributed to Ernest Hemingway). You should strive for such greatness.
We will not be able to workshop each of these one-page pieces by every author each week, but we will workshop 3 of them each week. I will ask for volunteers to sign up for these slots, and no one will be permitted to workshop a short piece more than once. Actual workshops will begin during week 7. Please note that if the class as a whole does not invest itself in the first half of the quarter (reading & discussing the required texts, taking seriously the writing assignments, etc.), then I will cancel workshops and we will re-read the texts and re-write the assignments.
The longer pieces you workshop during the second half of the quarter should (must!) come from the page-long pieces you wrote during the first half. These full-length stories should be not fewer than 12 pages, not more than 15.
Major Workshop Assignment of 12-15 pages
During the third week of classes, you will sign up for the dates on which your major assignment will be due to be handed out, and the subsequent date on which it will be workshopped by the entire class, starting in Week 7.
On the day it is due to be handed out, you will bring in 16 copies (including one for me, and one for yourself) to pass out to every member of the class. On the day it is due to be workshopped, you will be in attendance to receive your classmates’ verbal and written critique.
The only other requirements are that this piece:
a) deal, in some way, with the body, and
b) be inspired by/based on 1 of the 5 one-page responses to the texts.
Please ask me if you have any questions, or would like further constraints or prompting.
English 309: Drift and Dream: the Writer as Urban Walker
Winter 2015: Monday-Wednesday 4:20 am-5:50 pm (Lincoln Park Campus)
“One day this love will all blow over. / Time for leaving the parade. / Is there a place in this city? /A place to always feel this way?” ~“Tinsel Town in the Rain” by the Blue Nile, 1984
Instructor: Kathleen Rooney
Course Texts:
Baudelaire, Charles. Paris Spleen: Little Poems in Prose. Trans. Keith Waldrop. Middletown:
Wesleyan UP, 2009. (first published in 1869) ISBN: 9780819569097
Katchor, Ben. Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: Stories. New York: Little, Brown, &
Company, 1996. ISBN: 0316482943
Mueller, Cookie. Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black. New York:
Semiotext(e), 1990. ISBN: 978-0936756615
O’Hara , Frank. Lunch Poems. San Francisco: City Lights, 2001. (first published in 1964)
ISBN: 9780872860353
Cole, Teju. Open City: A Novel. New York: Random House, 2012. ISBN: 9780812980097
D2L Articles and packets including:
Chtcheglov, Ivan. “Formulary for a New Urbanism” 1953.
“Street Haunting” by Virginia Woolf. 1930.
DeQuincey, Thomas. An excerpt from Confessions of an English Opium Eater: Being an Extract
from the Life of a Scholar. 1821.
513-02 Come Together: Presentation on a Piece and on a Literary Device/Convention Sign Up Sheet:
Presentation Date: Thursday 4/7
Presentation Piece: Borges, “Dialogue on a Dialogue” (25)
Device: Dialogue Name___________________________________________
Presentation Piece: Borges, “Dialogue on a Dialogue” (25)
Device: Meta-fiction Name___________________________________________
Presentation Piece: Borges, “Argumentum Ornithilogocum” (29)
Device: Argument; Rhetoric Name____________________________________________
Presentation Piece: Walker, “Winter Trees” (57)
Device: Image Name____________________________________________
Presentation Piece: Walker, “Live a Long Time” (58)
Device: Direct Address Name_______________________________________
Presentation Date: Tuesday 4/12
Presentation Piece: Borges, “The Captive” (30)
Device: Narrative Epiphany Name___________________________________________
Presentation Piece: Borges, “The Captive” (30)
Device: Captivity Narrative Name___________________________________________
Presentation Piece: Borges, “The Captive” (30)
Device: Lyrical Ecstasy Name___________________________________________
Presentation Piece: Walker, “The Unlikely Origin of the Species” (59-70)
Device: Narrative Structure Name___________________________________________
Presentation Piece: Walker, “Nor Do I Know The Ways of Birds Clearly” (71)
Device: Volta (Sonnet turn) Name____________________________________________
Presentation Date: Thursday 4/14
Presentation Piece: Borges, “The Plot” (36)
Device: Plot Name_________________________________________
Presentation Piece: Borges, “The Plot” (36)
Device: Archetype Name________________________________________
Presentation Piece: Gonzales, “The Black Torso of the Pharaoh” (103)
Device: Metaphor Name_______________________________________
Presentation Piece: Walker, “Quetzaltenango” (47-48)
Device: Metaphor, Setting Name____________________________________
Presentation Date: Tuesday 4/19
Presentation Piece: Borges, “Parable of Cervantes and Don Quixote” (42)
Device: Parable Name________________________________________
Presentation Piece: Borges, “Parable of the Palace” (45)
Device: Nestedness Name___________________________________________
Presentation Piece: Walker, “Psalm” (45)
Device: Psalm Name___________________________________________
Presentation Piece: Walker, “Fall Service” (42)
Device: Elegy Name________________________________________
Presentation Piece: Mullen, “Dim Lady” (224)
Device: Turn on Stereotype Name_____________________________________________
Presentation Piece: Mullen, “Free Radicals” (223)
Device: Concrete Detail Name______________________________________________
In your brief (10-15 minute) presentation, you should:
- Read aloud to the class, the piece in its entirety
- Broadly define (on the board or on a handout, and orally) the convention or device, citing your source
- Locate the convention or device within the piece
- Describe both a. how the piece engages the device in a conventional, traditional way and
- how the piece makes the device or convention new, fresh, turned, or different.
Full points for the presentation involve all four elements, as well as staying within your 10 to 15 minute time limit.
Julie Paegle’s paper has been infected with a virus. We’ll bring it to you as soon as it is less contagious. For now, here are Paegle’s attendant handouts.
Navigating Emptiness:
Painting Hunger, Echoing Astonishment, and Coining Argument in the Lyric Essay
The Notion of Emptiness Engenders Compassion.
—Jetsun Milarepa, 1135; trans. Gary Snyder
1. Painting Hunger
An ancient Buddha said “A painted rice cake does not satisfy hunger.”
Dōgen comments:
There are few who have even seen this ‘painting of a rice cake’ and none of them has thoroughly understood it.
The paints for painting rice cakes are the same as those used for painting mountains and waters.
If you say the painting is not real, then the material phenomenal world is not real, the Dharma is not real.
Unsurpassed enlightenment is a painting. The entire phenomenal universe and the empty sky are nothing but a
painting.
Since this is so, there is no remedy for satisfying hunger other than a painted rice cake. Without painted hunger you
never become a true person.
—Dōgen, “Painting of a Rice Cake”≈1240; trans. Gary Snyder
2. Echoing Astonishment (for advanced
students)
THE SONNET
A Sonnet is a moment’s monument,
— Memorial from the Soul’s eternity
To one dead deathless hour. Look that it be,
Whether for lustral rite or dire portent,
Of its own intricate fulness reverent:
Carve it in ivory or in ebony,
As Day or Night prevail; and let Time see
Its flowering crest impearled and orient.
A Sonnet is a coin: its face reveals
The soul,–its converse, to what Power ’tis due:
— Whether for tribute to the august appeals
Of Life, or dower in Love’s high retinue It serve;
or, ‘mid the dark wharf’s cavernous breath,
In Charon’s palm it pay the toll to Death.
—Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
The House of Life, 1881
Why I Skip My High School Reunions
Because the geeks and jocks were set in stone,
I, ground between. Because the girls I ate
lunch with are married now, most out of spite
—because the ones I spurned are still alone.
Because I took up smoking at nineteen, late,
and just now quit—because, since then, I’ve
grown
into and out of something they’ve never known.
Because at the play, backstage, on opening night
she conjured out of the vast yards of her dress
an avocado and a razorblade,
slit the one open with the other, flayed
the pebbled skin, and offered me a slice
—because I thought that one day I’d say yes,
and I was wrong, and I am still afraid.
—Craig Arnold, Shells, 1998
May Morning
Deep into spring, winter is hanging on. Bitter and
skillful in his hopelessness, he stays alive in every
shady place, starving along the Mediterranean:
angry to see the glittering sea-pale boulder alive
with lizards green as Judas leaves. Winter is
hanging on. He still believes. He tries to catch a
lizard by the shoulder. One olive tree below
Grottaglie welcomes the winter into noontime
shade, and talks as softly as Pythagoras. Be still,
be patient, I can hear him say, cradling in his arms
the wouned head, letting the sunlight touch the
savage face.
James Wright, found among his few new poems
after his death in 1980, as anthologized in The
Next American Essay, edited by John D’Agata, 2003
III. Coining Argument
(for beginning students); adapted from an exercise by Garrett Hongo in The Practice of Poetry,
edited by Robin Behn and Chase Twichell:
I ask the students to write, anonymously, two sets of secrets:
In the first set, they confess or reveal two secrets using the first person point of view. One
secret is true. One secret is invented. Examples range from the predictable (I spent all the
money in my father’s wallet to take out and sleep with my best friend’s girlfriend) to the
quixotic (I helped thirty illegal iguanas cross the border into the country in exchange for a
rare edition of an old Crass album). The writer is to hide the identity of the real secret, using
literary and poetic strategies.
In the second set of secrets, students relate two secrets using the third person point of view
“a friend of mine” or “my brother” or an “acquaintance.” Again, one secret is true, and one
is invented. The two sets of secrets may be similar, save the pronoun; to the first set of
secrets; but most differ quite radically, beginning with the amount of detail and figurative
language the writers naturally use. Again, the writer is to hide the identity of the real secret.
The students anonymously hand in their secrets and I redistribute them, keeping the sets together.
I invite the students to identify which of the secrets they have received is true, and which
character they find most compelling, and why.
From here, the students used their received essays write two brief lyric essays, many which
take an Apologia form (along the lines of William Carlos Williams’ “This Is Just To Say”);
or a Confessional format; or a Justification (“Why I Skip My High School Reunions”).
Regardless, something about the pressure of the hidden, “real” secret results in coinages of
new argumentations and expositions, while the attempt for verisimilitude employs a variety
of figurative, poetic, and lyrical devices.
513-02 Come Together: Presentation on a Piece and on a Literary Device/Convention Sign Up Sheet:
Presentation Date: Thursday 4/7
Presentation Piece: Borges, “Dialogue on a Dialogue” (25)
Device: Dialogue Name___________________________________________
Presentation Piece: Borges, “Dialogue on a Dialogue” (25)
Device: Meta-fiction Name___________________________________________
Presentation Piece: Borges, “Argumentum Ornithilogocum” (29)
Device: Argument; Rhetoric Name____________________________________________
Presentation Piece: Walker, “Winter Trees” (57)
Device: Image Name____________________________________________
Presentation Piece: Walker, “Live a Long Time” (58)
Device: Direct Address Name_______________________________________
Presentation Date: Tuesday 4/12
Presentation Piece: Borges, “The Captive” (30)
Device: Narrative Epiphany Name___________________________________________
Presentation Piece: Borges, “The Captive” (30)
Device: Captivity Narrative Name___________________________________________
Presentation Piece: Borges, “The Captive” (30)
Device: Lyrical Ecstasy Name___________________________________________
Presentation Piece: Walker, “The Unlikely Origin of the Species” (59-70)
Device: Narrative Structure Name___________________________________________
Presentation Piece: Walker, “Nor Do I Know The Ways of Birds Clearly” (71)
Device: Volta (Sonnet turn) Name____________________________________________
Presentation Date: Thursday 4/14
Presentation Piece: Borges, “The Plot” (36)
Device: Plot Name_________________________________________
Presentation Piece: Borges, “The Plot” (36)
Device: Archetype Name________________________________________
Presentation Piece: Gonzales, “The Black Torso of the Pharaoh” (103)
Device: Metaphor Name_______________________________________
Presentation Piece: Walker, “Quetzaltenango” (47-48)
Device: Metaphor, Setting Name____________________________________
Presentation Date: Tuesday 4/19
Presentation Piece: Borges, “Parable of Cervantes and Don Quixote” (42)
Device: Parable Name________________________________________
Presentation Piece: Borges, “Parable of the Palace” (45)
Device: Nestedness Name___________________________________________
Presentation Piece: Walker, “Psalm” (45)
Device: Psalm Name___________________________________________
Presentation Piece: Walker, “Fall Service” (42)
Device: Elegy Name________________________________________
Presentation Piece: Mullen, “Dim Lady” (224)
Device: Turn on Stereotype Name_____________________________________________
Presentation Piece: Mullen, “Free Radicals” (223)
Device: Concrete Detail Name______________________________________________
In your brief (10-15 minute) presentation, you should:
- Read aloud to the class, the piece in its entirety
- Broadly define (on the board or on a handout, and orally) the convention or device, citing your source
- Locate the convention or device within the piece
- Describe both a. how the piece engages the device in a conventional, traditional way and
- how the piece makes the device or convention new, fresh, turned, or different.
Full points for the presentation involve all four elements, as well as staying within your 10 to 15 minute time limit.
ENGLISH 513-02 Hybrid Forms–Where Poetry and Prose Meet: Prose Poetry, Flash Fiction, Lyrical Essay,
Poetic Parable, Narrative Verse
Spring 2011 TR 2:00-3:50 p.m. (UH 060) Professor: Julie Paegle
Office: UH 301.42 Phone: (909) 537-5053
Office Hours: Thursdays 9:00 a.m. to noon and by appointment Email: jpaegle@csusb.edu
Required Texts (available at the Coyote Bookstore)
Dreamtigers, Jorge Luis Borges, University of Texas Press, ISBN # 978-0-292-71549
No Boundaries: Prose Poems by 24 American Poets, Ray Gonzales, ed. ISBN # 1-932195-01-7
Flash Fiction Forward: 80 Very Short Stories, James Thomas; Robert Shapard, eds. ISBN # 9780393328028
This Noisy Egg, Nicole Walker, Barrow Street Press, ISBN # 978-0-9819876-1-3
Required Materials
A notebook/journal for invention
Sufficient typed copies of your creative work for workshop for every student in the class and for me
Typed copies of response letters for workshop, for the writer and for me
Course Description
Some of you may have noticed, in your campus emails today, this call for submissions from the literary journal Carolina Quarterly: The literary icebreaker: “Hey, I’m Bill. I’m a poet.” “Nice to meet you, Bill. I’m Rachel. I’m a fiction writer.” Sigh. The editors of The Carolina Quarterly have grown weary of such small talk. Yearning for a post-genre world, we seek writing that cannot be described in an elevator talk, and yet could be delivered in one. Thus, we are unveiling an experiment in Show, Don’t Tell. The Riding a Gradient Invisible Contest. Send us your poetic flash fiction, your flashy prose poetry, your twitter operetta, your post-pre-neo-un-oeuvre by June 1st to be considered for publication. No more than 500 words per experiment. We’ll give you up to 4 shots per person to get our attention.
These kinds of calls for submissions have become increasingly popular. In this class, we’ll explore the “post genre” world where poetry and prose meet, through our readings, writings, and class discussion. Because of the workshop size, each participant will workshop a chunk of writing twice in the quarter. To help spur invention, the bulk of our writings will occur in a process journal. These journal entries make up the bulk of your writing grade for the course, and are designed to give you time and credit for invention; however, I will not be giving written feedback on the journal entries. You will receive (and give) written feedback on your writings for workshop.
Course Requirements:
Journal: 30 points
Presentation on Convention or Device: 5 points
Pieces for Workshop: 15 points (including workshop logistics)
Workshop Paragraphs: 30 points
Attendance and Participation in Class Discussion: 20 points
Attendance and Participation in Class Discussion: 20 points
The success of creative writing workshops is largely determined by their participants. Attendance is mandatory. You must complete every iota of reading and writing before class. Each absence after two reduces your final grade. PARTIAL ABSENCES WILL RESULT IN PARTIAL PARTICIPATION POINTS. If you anticipate a difficult quarter in which it will be hard/less useful for you to engage the class and its many assignments in an energetic, disciplined, and consistent way, I strongly urge you to take the course a different quarter. Your participation will be evaluated in terms of preparedness, courtesy, and your comportment in workshop—how well you follow the Workshop Rules (please see final page of syllabus) and the points below:
*It is expected that students enrolled in this course will be willing to engage and carefully consider a range of materials and subject matter. Several texts contain adult language.
PAGE TWO
*All your writing for the class is public. In order to create and maintain a safe and respectful workshop space, your writing and participation in class must not target, name, or discriminate against any workshop member or participate in hate speech of any kind (including racism, misogyny and homophobia). Campus wide sexual harassment policies apply in this classroom.
*If you suspect your writing is a message to people in the classroom rather than a serious effort to write a piece, you are probably right and should not submit it.
With this in mind, please take a moment to consider your enrollment in this course. If your behavior in the classroom violates the safe workshop space it will, at a minimum, hurt your final workshop grade.
Special Needs
If you are in need of an accommodation for a disability in order to participate in this class, please contact Services to Students with Disabilities at UH 183, (909) 537-5283 within the first week of class.
COURSE SCHEDULE 1
Please note: this schedule is subject to change in class, on short notice. Also, to allow me to best respond to your own imaginative processes, some assignments will be modified or specified in class. If you miss class, please be sure to check with a fellow student whether such a change was announced.
T 4/5: Syllabus, Student Surveys, Devices/Conventions/Genres/On the Kindness and Unkindness of Kinds
R 4/7: On Flight, Weight, and Counting I: Thermals Ridden by Poetry and Prose
Reading: Dreamtigers, pages 21-29; This Noisy Egg, pages 22-26; pages 54-58.
Journal 1: A. Climb a Tree (or at least ten flights of stairs, or go onto a roof or a fire-escape).
B. There or elsewhere: build a Nest (or a collage, but something gathered that you touch, and whose textures might beckon birds). C. Write a dialogue (Borges, page 25; Walker, pages 54-56) between two characters, one who climbs and one who nests. Let the lines/exchanges fall as they will, where they may. Your dialogue should include materials (words, gestures, leaps) from the pages you’ve read for today, AND from your own experience of taking flight/s, and of the materials you gathered for that nest.
T 4/12: On Flight, Weight, and Counting II:
Reading: Dreamtigers, pages 30-35; This Noisy Egg, pages 59-71.
Journal 2: Return to your dialogue from Journal 1. Introduce two new characters: one should be a historical character you can quote in your dialogue (as Walker does with Darwin, or Borges with Eva Duarte); one should be the personification of an abstraction (Walker’s Birdman of the Black Plague; Borges’s Someone). Your new characters might comment on the exchange in the first dialogue; they might directly join the dialogue; they might attack or romance the old characters. When introducing the new characters, pay particular attention to the forms in which they speak. Riddles? Questions? Critiques?
R 4/14: On Flight, Weight, and Counting III: Reading: Dreamtigers, pages 36-37; This Noisy Egg, pages 47-48; No
Boundaries, pages 99-108 (Ray Gonzales).
R 4/14: On Flight, Weight, and Counting III:
Reading: Dreamtigers, pages 36-37; This Noisy Egg, pages 47-48; No Boundaries, pages 99-108 (Ray
Gonzales).
Journal 3: Return to your dialogue on a dialogue (from Journal 2).
- Consider a plot, or a problem (as in Borges) that emerges from your dialogues, or that is perhaps hidden therein. B. Explore a setting, exotic, strange, dream-like (Quetzaltenango, or Atlantis, or a world of petroglyphs or pyramids or a “valley known for its simple cures”).
C. Introduce the plot or problem AND the setting to your characters/dialogues.
- Bring to class a one paragraph piece in which the plot or the problem urges the language forward AND
PAGE THREE
E. a one paragraph piece in which the setting urges the language forward. Please be ready to share.
T 4/19: On Flight, Weight, and Counting IV, and also On Psalms and Parables:
Reading: Dreamtigers, pages 42, 44-45; This Noisy Egg, 42-45; No Boundaries, 220-229 (Haryette Mullen).
Journal 4: Write a short series of psalms or parables, working in part from your partner’s input in class.
Include a deep image that mutates throughout your series.
R 4/21: Visit from Nicole Walker
Reading: This Noisy Egg, pages 7-19; 25-40.
Journal 5: Come to class with at least THREE excellent questions about Nicole Walker’s work.
FIRST PIECES DUE FOR WORKSHOP (5-10 pages) from three folks.
F 4/22: CENSUS: Last day to add or drop classes. Extra Credit Opportunity: Come to reading by Nicole
Walker and me at Beyond Baroque at 7:00 p.m.
T 4/26: Reading: Dreamtigers, page 51; No Boundaries, 241-251 (Charles Simic).
FIRST WORKSHOPS. WORKSHOP PARAGRAPHS DUE to your peers and to me.
R 4/28: Reading: No Boundaries: 120-132 (Juan Felipe Herrerra).
WORKSHOP
T 5/3: Reading: No Boundaries: 87-97 (Amy Gerstler).
WORKSHOP
Journal 6: Write a prose poem in which you give an archetypal character or urban legend a secret identity
(Herrerra, “La Llorona Power Woman Confidential;”) AND in which you give that character an unusual
occupation (Gerstler, saints, beekeepers, doctors). Include at least three onomatopoeias and one language not English. VISIT FROM POET LORNA DEE CERVANTES AS THE VALDEZ FEATURED POET
R 5/5: Reading: No Boundaries: 65-75 (Linda Dyer).
WORKSHOP
T 5/10: Reading: No Boundaries: (77-86) Russell Edson).
WORKSHOP
Journal 7: Write a prose poem in which 77-86 (Russell Edson). Write a confessional prose poem in which
you list the Seven Anxieties of _________(a la Linda Dyer) involving at least two dysfunctional family
relationships (Edson).
R 5/12: Reading: No Boundaries: Introduction by Ray Gonzales, xiii-xvi. IN CLASS WORKSHOP.
T 5/17: Reading: Flash Fiction Forward: Introduction IN CLASS WORKSHOP
Journal 8 Working from your class notes, our discussions of the prose poem, and the two anthology
introductions, list at least 3 differences you expect to find between prose poetry and flash fiction. Using
these, revise ONE of your prior prose poems as a flash fiction piece.
PLEASE NOTE: Detailed Reading, Journal, and Workshop Schedule TBA for R 5/19-R 6/9
Bending Genre 
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