ADVANCED PROSE WORKSHOP
PAM HOUSTON
This course will be an intensive prose workshop. We will
focus on what I believe to be the real artistry of prose writing: the
translation of the emotional stakes of the story onto its physical landscape;
the way we dip our ladles into the bottomless pot of metaphor soup of our
lived and witnessed experience and pull out what we need; the way we pick up
hunks of the physical world and bring it back to the page, translated into
language. I feel that it is my job as workshop leader to create and hold
a space in which students feel free to take stylistic, artistic, and emotional
risks. We will be aiming for stories and essays in which the language is always
working in at least two ways at once, where metaphors dance between meanings
like beads of water on a too hot grill. We will work toward demystifying some
of the essential components of fiction (image, metaphor, structure, dialogue,
character, scene, among others) and turning them into comprehensible tools that
are at our disposal. At the same time we will honor (and hope for) the
inexplicable flights of creativity (and madness?) that take a good story and
make it great.
We will also have the opportunity to participate in a joint
storytelling exercise with photographer David Hilliard’s class (check out his
course description) and will be talking about storytelling across genre and
form. I am particularly excited about this collaboration after our
accidental co-teaching moment last year, and am reminded that these sorts of pairings
are what makes the Fine Arts Work Center both unique and great.
Biography
Pam Houston is the Director of Creative Writing at
University of California, Davis. She is the author of three books of fiction,
Cowboys Are My Weakness (winner of the Western States Book Award), Waltzing the
Cat (winner of the WILLA Award for Contemporary Fiction), and Sight Hound; a
play, Tracking the Pleiades; and a memoir titled A Little More About Me. Her
stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Awards Prize
Collection, and Best American Short Stories of the Century. Her latest book,
Contents May Have Shifted, was published in February, 2012, by W.W. Norton.
Students in this class (click on a name to see an example
of their work):
Sarah Hov
Lisa Gruenberg
Linda Burke
Alison James
Laura Hoffman
Deborah Fleischman
Jonathan Marks
Eve Becker
Thomas Atkinson
Karen Watkins
POETRY AS BEWILDERMENT
NICK FLYNN
Frost would sometimes say at his readings that "poems
are about what you don't mean as well as what you do mean." In our week
together I would like to examine this idea by thinking about the concept of
"bewilderment" and how it gets acted out in our poems—either through
syntax, our accessing the duende, leaps into the unconscious, or simply
circling around what is unsaid, unknown, unrealized. Or, as Aristotle puts it,
"The mind in the act of making a mistake. . ."
We will look for those moments we begin to stutter and
stumble when talking about our poems, or in the poems themselves, for these are
the thresholds beyond which is unknown, beyond which is the white space on the
map. Over the course of our week together we will attempt to push a little
deeper into this shadow world.
Biography
Nick Flynn is the author of three books of poetry, Some
Ether‚ winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, Blind Huber, and most recently,
The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands (Graywolf, 2011). His memoir Another
Bullshit Night in Suck City won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the
Memoir, and has been translated into fifteen languages. The Ticking is the
Bomb, a memoir of deciding to become a father while, or even though, the
country is engaged in two wars, was published by Norton in 2010. He has been
awarded fellowships from the Library of Congress, the Amy Lowell Trust, the
Fine Arts Work Center, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Some of the
venues where his poems, essays, and non-fiction have appeared include The New
Yorker, the Paris Review, National Public Radio’s This American Life, and The
New York Times Book Review. Being Flynn, a film based on Another Bullshit Night
in Suck City, was released in 2012 and stars Robert DeNiro, Julianne Moore and
Paul Dano. Nick teaches one semester a year at the University of Houston.
Students in this class (click on a name to see an example
of their work):
Wilderness
Sarchild
Charles Madansky
Gail DiMaggio
Erica Bodwell
Erica Hayes
Jeff Sugarman
Laura Bernstein
Sophia Starmack
Christine Simek
CREATIVE NON-FICTION
STEPHEN ELLIOTT
In this workshop we'll go over and discuss each other's
creative non-fiction. We'll talk about the difference between journalism and
creative non-fiction, the history of creative non-fiction, and the importance
of memory. We'll also get into practicalities, like the three reasons someone
will read a personal essay or a memoir from start to finish. This class is a
combination of presenting work and workshopping each other, mixed craft talk
and writing exercises.
Biography
Stephen Elliott is the author of seven books including the
novel Happy Baby and the memoir The Adderall Diaries. His feature film
directorial debut, About Cherry, was released theatrically by IFC in fall 2012.
He is also the founder of the literary website The Rumpus.
Students in this class (click on a name to see an example
of their work):
Kathy Peterson
Richard
Weingarten
Sarah Kennedy
Madeleine
Veninger
Deborah Schifter
Lucia Graves
THE SELF AS THE STORY: ESSAYS IN THE FIRST PERSON
ARIEL LEVY
How do we know if a story from our own lives is worth
writing or worthy of reading? Is what we find most interesting about ourselves
necessarily going to be interesting to a reader? And does that even matter? Or
should we as writers tell our stories simply because we feel compelled to?
These are some of the questions we will explore in this weeklong seminar
focusing on narrative, craft, and style in first person non-fiction writing.
Biography
Ariel Levy is a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine,
where she has profiled Silvio Berlusconi, the former Prime Minister of Italy,
Claressa Shields, the first woman in history to win an Olympic gold medal in
boxing, and the late director Nora Ephron. She is the author of Female
Chauvinist Pigs, and her work has been anthologized in The Best American
Essays, The Best American Travel Writing, and Sugar in My Bowl: Real Women
Write About Real Sex. Levy was a Contributing Editor at New York Magazine for
twelve years, and was lucky to be a Visiting Critic at the American Academy in
Rome in 2012.
Students in this class (click on a name to see an example
of their work):
Ralph Freidin
Peter Davis
David Kim
Sarah Martin
Irina
Aristarkhova
Sharon Day
Anne Klaus
POETRY WORKSHOP
HENRI COLE
This is a class in poetry writing for those who wish to
improve their craft as poets while broadening their knowledge of lyric poetry.
It will include daily exercises in lyric genres such as: the birth poem, the
self-portrait poem, the anaphoristic poem, the insect/animal poem, the
definition poem, the aubade, the erotic poem, the ekphrastic, the elegy, the
prayer, the travelogue, the apology, the apostrophic poem, etc.
Poems by students will be discussed in the usual
"workshop" format with particular attention to the process of
revision. Class time will also be spent on student packets including earlier
work.
For contemplation: “Poets who fail (and by fail I mean fail
themselves and never write a poem as good as they know they are capable of) . .
. lack the self-criticism necessary to perfect the poem. They resist the role
of a wrong thing in a right world and proclaim themselves the right thing in a
wrong world . . . In a sense they are not honest and lack the impulse (or fight
it) to revise and perfect . . . the poet who says "I am the greatest"
has damned himself forever.” - Theodore Roethke
“I believe the teacher's work should be largely negative. He
can't put the gift into you, but if he finds it there, he can try to keep it
from going in an obviously wrong direction. We can learn how not to write, but
this is a discipline that does not simply concern writing itself but concerns
the whole intellectual life. A mind cleared of false emotion and false
sentiment and egocentricity is going to have at least those road-blocks removed
from its path . . . The teacher can try to weed out what is positively bad, and
this should be the aim of the whole college. Any discipline can help your
writing: logic, mathematics, theology, and of course and particularly drawing.
Anything that helps you to see, anything that makes you look. The writer should
never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that doesn't require his
attention.” -- from Mystery and Manners, by Flannery O'Connor.
Biography
Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan, in 1956. He has
published eight collections of poetry, including Middle Earth, which was a
finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. He has received many awards
for his work, including the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Rome Prize, the Berlin
Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lenore Marshall Award, and, last year, the
Jackson Poetry Prize. His most recent collection is Touch (published by Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, 2011). He teaches at Ohio State University and
is poetry editor of The New Republic. He lives in Boston.
Students in this class (click on a name to see an example
of their work):
Helen Barnard
Rebecca Okrent
Maeve Kinkead
Richard Sime
Pam Matz
Kellie Wardman
Sarah Cross
Connemara
Wadsworth
THE PHOTOGRAPH AS LANGUAGE: THE ART OF VISUAL
STORYTELLING
DAVID HILLIARD
This workshop explores photography as a universal
storytelling language. From its inception the photographic medium has been
expected to prove, explain or entertain; its very mechanical nature asks it to
be precise. This workshop is designed to challenge your notions of what your
photographs can do.
During this week we will concentrate on storytelling. You
may be a photographer who is compelled to build a narrative or a writer who
longs to explore how plot can translate into imagery. Your stories may be fact
or fiction, staged or found, poems or novels. You will be asked to think about,
shoot and edit your photographs to most effectively present your ideas and
create a moving experience for both yourself and the viewer. You may explore
text, multiple images, bookmaking, collage and even the use of audio/music. All
working methodologies will be encouraged and explored.
This workshop is a wonderful opportunity to challenge your
current photographic practice; break old habits and create new ones. The worst
thing that might happen is that you’ll surprise yourself. We will look at
multiple genres of photography such as portraiture, landscape and still life as
a language with which to tell a story. There will be a short collaborative
exercise with Pam Houston’s Fiction workshop in which we all will explore a
similar theme and meet as a group to discuss the work and our experience.
You will be encouraged to write a concise artist statement
that speaks to your intentions, practices and technical choices. There will be
ongoing presentations of artists working with the notion of narrative and
storytelling as well as short readings. A portfolio review will also be offered
for each participant.
Biography
David Hilliard creates large-scale multi-paneled color
photographs, often based on his life or the lives of people around him. He exhibits
his photographs both nationally and internationally and has won numerous awards
such as the Fulbright and Guggenheim. His photographs can be found in many
important collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York,
the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles
and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. His work is represented by the Yancey
Richardson Gallery in New York, Carroll and Sons Gallery in Boston, Jackson
Fine Art in Atlanta, the Mark Moore Gallery in Santa Monica, and in Paris at La
Galerie Particuliere. In 2005 a collection of his photographs was published in
a monograph by Aperture Press. He has taught at Harvard and the School of the
Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and is currently an assistant professor in
Boston at the Massachusetts College of Art. David spent the spring of 2010 at
Dartmouth College as their artist in residence.
Students in this class (click on a name to see an example
of their work):
Martin
Carmichael
Margery Gans
Robert Morgan
Howard Rubin
Vicki Putz
Margaret
Birnbaum
Lisa Katz
Rissman
Gloria Weissberg
Benjamin Smith
PRINTMAKING MASTER CLASS
JAMES STROUD
This intensive weeklong class is designed to give the
experienced printmaker the chance to work with a Master Printer to develop
their creative methods. Students will work in etching, woodcut, or monoprint,
or may combine media to create a hybrid project. A rigorous approach to
mastering the details of technique will be emphasized, such as multiple-plate
printing, color development, and collage/assemblage applications. Throughout
the week, each student will receive individual instruction relating to the conceptual
as well as material means of realizing their work.
Biography
After receiving his MFA from Yale in 1984,
painter/printmaker James Stroud founded Center Street Studio, a professional
printmaking workshop specializing in intaglio, woodcut and monotype techniques,
that publishes print projects by emerging and established artists. He has
taught and been a visiting artist and critic at many institutions including,
Yale, Mass Art, RISD, Brandeis, Boston University, Art Institute of Boston and
Cornell University. His paintings and prints are in numerous public collections
including the Boston Public Library, Delaware Museum of Art, Museum of
Fine Arts in Boston, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, New York Public
Library, Pushkin Museum in Moscow, Russian Cultural Institute, Harnett Museum
of Art, University of Richmond, and the Yale University Art Museum.
Students in this class (click on a name to see an example
of their work):
Jeffrey Katz
Bill Fitts
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