Syllabus: EN420 Creative Writing

Creative Writing

COURSE DESCRIPTION Personalized study in creative writing, with the student experimenting with various kinds of poetic and fictional expression. The course introduces the rigors of the writing life and

emphasizes the serious writer’s need to develop a writing discipline. The instructor assigns a wide variety of writing prompts and exercises, but students choose their own subject matter and submit only works of their choice for evaluation. Students also have the option to emphasize poetry or fiction writing and thereby to adapt the course to their own interests of goals. (See also the Special Injunction at the end of this syllabus.)

RATIONALE & M ISSION “No writing is a waste of time—no creative work where

the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you have learned

something. It has done you good. It has stretched your understanding.”

—Brenda Ueland

Through creative use of language, we find and contemplate meaning, reflect on life and experience, and formulate our own visions of life and the world.

Writing poems and stories leads to enhanced understanding of ourselves, of others, and of language. Writing poems and stories also increases our interest in and our critical appreciation of others’ poems and stories. So that you may enjoy and increase these benefits throughout your life, the overarching goal of this course is to motivate you and provide you with the tools to be a lifelong creative writer and reader of creative works.

OUTCOMES & INDICATORS The following statements describe what you are expected to be able to do upon completion of this course (outcomes) and to explain how you will demonstrate that ability (indicators).

1. Use a wide variety of techniques (e.g., freewriting, image translation, journaling, guided imagery, imitation, pattern appropriation, etc.) to get out of you onto paper the poems and stories you have in you.

A S y l l a b u s f o r E N 4 2 0

McPherson College Spring 2011

E s s e n t i a l M a t t e r s EN 420 Creative Writing .....................3 credit hrs. Course meets in .................................... Mohler 235 from.......................................................... 10 – 11:20 on ....................................................... Tues. & Thurs

Instructor ...............................................Bruce Clary e-mail [email protected] Web Site .....................wwwi.mcpherson.edu/claryb/ Office ..................................................... Mohler 201 Office Hours..................................................... TBD Phones..............College X: 2530; Home: 242-0530

Feel free to drop in during posted office hours. For appointments outside office hours, please use my scheduling service, tungle.me/claryb

Requirements Met: EN 420 counts toward elective hours required for degrees in English and 7-12 teaching certification in English. Required Texts & Materials

Addonizio, Kim and Dorianne Laux. The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry. New York & London: W. W. Norton, 1997.

Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. New York and London: Doubleday, 1994.

Steele, Alexander, ed. Gotham Writers’ Workshop: Writing Fiction. New York & London: Bloomsbury, 2003.

About 10 file folders and a three-ring binder for organizing your exercises and the develop-mental histories of your work, and your course portfolio.

2 EN 420 Creative Writing

Indicators: (a) Participate enthusiastically in in-class writing exercises. (b) Submit assigned exercises employing such techniques.

2. Keep a writing discipline (and thereby appreciate and understand the processes and discipline required to produce creative work).

Indicators: (a) Maintain and submit a log of weekly writing sessions. (b) Submit weekly exercises and final portfolio on deadlines. (c) Discuss in classes and workshops the joys and struggles of your writing process.

3. Explore yourself and your experiences through writing poetry and fiction.

Indicators: (a) Discuss in classes & workshops the personal connections in your writing. (b) In a self-critique submitted with the final portfolio, explain the personal connections in one or more works.

4. Identify strengths and weaknesses in peers’ works-in-progress; make suggestions to others for improving/revising their work.

Indicators: (a) Participate in informal, impromptu discussions of works-in-progress. (b) Respond in writing to your peers’ works-in-progress. (c) In a presentation to the class, read one or more works by a peer and respond with a constructive, 5-10 minute critique.

5. Use feedback from others to revise your work.

Indicators: (a) Acknowledge in discussions of your work how you have incorporated previous responses/suggestions. (b) In a self-critique submitted with the final portfolio, explain how responses/suggestions helped shape the final form of one or more works. (c) Submit all process work for the poems and stories included in final portfolio.

6. Read your own work critically, identifying weaknesses and improving subsequent versions.

Indicators: (a) Report in in-class discussions how your work-in-progress has evolved. (b) In final portfolio, include all process work to illustrate developmental histories of the poems and stories submitted.

7. Craft language (in poetry and prose) so as to

• Create an authentic voice • Create a believable, complex character • Control plot or narrative movement • Control point of view

• Impart structures that exhibit thoughtful choice

• Create striking, surprising figures of speech

• Use images that appeal to all the senses • Choose vivid, specific nouns and verbs • Avoid “empty” words and clichés • Pattern sounds and images in pleasing,

provocative ways • “Play” with language semantically and

syntactically • Achieve standard surface features (as

appropriate)

Indicator: Compile and submit a portfolio of the works that best illustrate your competency in these areas.

STRUCTURE & PROCEDURES Structure & Instructional Methods

The first half of the course emphasizes writing disciplines and processes. Our immediate concern will be generating a body of material so that we can select from it the most promising works for further development and revision later in the semester. In general, our class sessions before mid-term consist largely of in-class exercises, instructor presentations, discussion, and informal sharing of works-in-progress. Class sessions following mid-term are devoted largely or exclusively to workshops where students share their work or present the work of other class members for feedback.

Procedures & Requirements Attendance and Participation. Because we will be a small community of writers responding to and depending on one another, regular attendance and active participation are crucial to the achievement of the class’s desired outcomes. Your absence or failure to participate fully hurts not only you but also the other members of the group. By prior arrangement with me, you may miss three class sessions without penalty. In all but extenuating circumstances, four or five absences will lower your grade, and six absences constitute grounds for failure. Regardless of the activity—writing, discussion, workshop critiques — your enthusiastic participation (and preparation, when applicable) is expected.

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Attitude. Nothing exposes our minds quite so nakedly as our writing. Rejection and ridicule hurt, so, understandably, writing for others is scary. Class participants need to know and trust that they are sharing with persons who are fair, who understand the difficulties and anxieties of writing, and who mutually support and respect one another's efforts to become a writer. We must feel free to fail, because we will do so time and again and because fear of failure leads to the only unacceptable failure—chronic failure to write. We could do much worse than adopt “Do unto others . . .” as our class motto.

But this matter of attitude has a flip side, too. We sabotage the educational process and our own growth as writers if we are overly sensitive, overly defensive, of our writing. Review Outcomes #4 and #5 above. One of the primary expectations of this course is that you learn to critique creative works constructively. Another is that you learn how to hear others talk about your writing and to sift from it that which can help you improve your work. Joyce Carol Oates, in her book On Boxing, says that she knows only one occupation aside from boxing whose participants willingly undergo continual punishment to the head—writing. We need to acknowledge the truth of Oates’ statement, but also to understand that, in this class at least, we are not entering the ring with lethal heavyweights impatient to knock our blocks off with one vicious hook but rather with sparring partners, persons on our side who only want to help us write better.

Compassion, sensitivity, fairness, and tact; openness, honesty, mental toughness, and objectivity: these are the watchwords we must balance if this class is to succeed.

Exercises/prompts/process work. Each Thursday I will distribute a writing log form along with the next week’s exercises, which will consist of a variety of reading and/or writing assignments. You will submit the completed log and exercises the following week in a manila file folder.

Follow these guidelines in preparing this work:

• Schedule a time five days a week when you will have an uninterrupted hour to devote to each exercise. Record your anticipated schedule on your log sheet.

• Important Note: I will always expect you to come to Tuesday’s class session with at least the first three exercises completed and in your notebook.

• Begin each new writing session/exercise on a fresh page. Put a heading at the top of the first page that includes the assignment number (if applicable) and some cryptic descriptor of the session's activity, the date and time you wrote the entry, and where you were when you wrote it. For example, the heading on one of your assignments might look like this:

3.4: Freewrite Sun., Feb. 23, 8:30 p.m., library carrel

If you write habitually at the keyboard, I would love to receive these exercises typed or word processed; however, unless it is important to you, do not retype exercises written in legible longhand.

• After each writing session, record the actual time you spent writing and a few comments about the session on your weekly writing log.

• Keep all your backdated exercises and session entries organized in a three-ring notebook and carry it to class with you. There may be occasions when we will build class discussions or activities upon previous weeks' assignments.

Keep everything you write in this course. Discard nothing! This doesn’t mean that everything you write deserves to be preserved. Most of what you will generate should be thrown away. I am only asking that you reserve judgment on what should be thrown away until after you have determined the final contents of your portfolio. [See next requirement.)

Portfolio. Your ultimate goal in the course is to develop a portfolio of your best material to submit at the end of the course. Reasonable guidelines for the portfolio might be

• Fiction 10+ pages • Poetry 125+ lines

However, you may prefer to emphasize poetry or fiction writing. In that case, the guidelines might look more like the following:

Emphasis in Fiction


Emphasis in Poetry



Follow these additional guidelines in preparing your portfolio:

• Sometime between April 11-21, make an appointment with me to develop a preliminary table of contents for your portfolio.

• Along with a typed copy of the final version of each work you select for your portfolio, submit in chronological sequence all the process work and preliminary drafts that constitute the developmental history of each work.

• Determine the reading sequence for your portfolio pieces and prepare a table of contents. Feel free to develop your own format for your final portfolio (three-ring binding with a divider for each work; folder for each work). Just make sure that process work for each final piece is clearly identified and correctly sequenced.

Self-evaluation & grade proposal. During finals week (May 16-19), all students will schedule a grade negotiation conference. At that conference, you will present a formal self-evaluation and grade proposal of 1,000-1,500 words along with your portfolio.

The persuasive proposal will be carefully keyed to the goals and expected outcomes of the course and will point to the developmental work as well as the finished pieces in the portfolio for supporting evidence. It will answer such questions as

• What writing habits have you developed? • What habits of critical reading have you

developed? • How have your attitudes toward writing

(including defensiveness toward criticism) changed, if any?

• What sort of peer critic/responder have you become?

• What has writing helped you better understand about yourself and/or your experiences?

• What sort of a self-critic and reviser of your own work have you become?

• Which of the qualities or skills listed in Outcome #7 are strengths of your writing? Weaknesses?

• How do you see your experiences in this course affecting you in the future?

EVALUATION OF LEARNING Weekly Writing (5 pts/week x 12 weeks). I will collect your writing log and file folder of weekly writing each Thursday, primarily to record that you have completed the week’s assignments in good faith and that you are keeping your writing discipline. I will also engage in some limited marginal dialog with you and return these folders at the next class session.

Each weekly folder is worth five points. The only way you can lose points is by not maintaining your writing discipline, either failing to do the assignments or doing them inadequately. Discipline and productivity—that is, writing, and writing a lot—outweighs all considerations of quality in the weekly folder.

Participation/Attitude. During class sessions, I keep some records of participation and contributions to class activities. Enthusiastic participation is expected. I will be in touch with you individually if I have concerns about your classroom participation or attitude.

Self-evaluation/grade proposal & portfolio. As you will learn in this course (if you don’t already know), poems and stories are incredibly diverse, the results of extraordinarily complex creative processes. Likewise, evaluating fiction and poetry is complex, highly subjective, and involves weighing a multitude of factors against each other. One individual can’t do it without risking unfairness.

For this reason, I will give every consideration to your end-of-term self-evaluation and grade proposal in awarding a course grade. I expect you will be honest and forthright about yourself and your work in the course, that you will have an accurate sense of how your work and performance squares against the standards and expectations we set, and that you will neither inflate nor underestimate your achievement.

This means the self-evaluation/grade proposal is an extremely important paper, a paper that exhibits how objectively you can reflect upon your own writing and habits. As I review your self-evaluation and portfolio, I will be considering the following criteria:

• Depth of insight: the range and depth of understanding you reveal about your course performance and your writing—includes connectedness to goals, clarity & precision of

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the evaluation & proposal language, specific nature of claims, thoroughness of self-assessment.

• Strength of evidence: the quality, power, and relevance of the evidence supporting your claims of learning and achievement; the extent to which you prove or show claims with specific references to works in the portfolio.

• Quality of finished works: the extent to which your final poems and stories exhibit your command of the criteria listed in Outcome #7 (voice, imagery, structure, etc.)

The purpose of the grade negotiation conference is to confirm an agreement on your final grade. Provided that you have violated none of the conditions affecting final grades (see below) and that I agree with or am persuaded by your self-assessment, you will receive the grade you propose. If necessary to reach agreement, we will schedule a second negotiation conference.

Conditions Affecting Final Grades • Attendance: Students with four or five absences

lose one letter grade. Students with six or more absences must make a persuasive argument for passing the course.

• Weekly Folders: Students who do not earn 91 percent of total daily writing points cannot propose an A. Students who do not earn 81 percent cannot propose a B. Students who do not earn 71 percent cannot propose a C. Students who earn less than 61 percent cannot pass.

• Incompletes: Failure to submit an adequate portfolio during finals week will result in a failing grade unless the student can provide persuasive arguments for an Incomplete during the grade negotiation conference.

Mid-term Grades. You have two options for mid-term grades: (1) you can request the most appropriate mark for this course, IP (in progress), or (2) you can request a mark reflecting your weekly folder scores and your participation & attendance records. If you choose the latter, it is, of course, with the full understanding that the grade means nothing. Your final grade is based solely upon your self-evaluation and portfolio (minus any penalties incurred by violating the conditions affecting final grades).

SPECIAL INJUNCTION You are responsible for seeing that this syllabus does not interfere with your education. You can always do more work or different work (within reason) than the syllabus requires. Consult with me if you wish to explore the possibilities for adapting this course to better suit your needs.

B IBLIOGRAPHY You learn to write not only by writing but also by reading. Indeed, writing follows reading. It is unreasonable to think you can write better than you can read: writing develops after close reading. Thus, becoming a better reader, a more experienced reader, is an important part of becoming a better writer.

You should read as much contemporary fiction and poetry as you can as part of your regimen to become a better writer. I have not asked you to purchase an anthology of readings (although The Poet’s Companion includes dozens of good poems). At times we will read some poems or a work of short fiction in class. At other times, I’ll assign a work for you to read or ask you to find your own work(s) for study.

Miller Library carries the following periodicals that publish at least one poem or story in each issue. You should pull each of these from the current periodical shelves at least once during the semester:

Ms. Atlantic New Yorker College English New Republic Harper’s

The single best contemporary poetry site on the Web is Poetry Daily at http://www.poems.com. The Academy of American Poets site, poets.org, is also quite good. The course Web page will provide links to other online literary magazines and sites.

A good number of consistently rewarding collections of classic, modern, and contemporary stories and poems are available in Miller Library. Look in the 811s for the poetry, in the 813s for the fiction. I promise enjoyable browsing in the following:


Poetry Barresi, Dorothy. The Post-Rapture Diner. Berg, S. and R. Mezey, eds. Naked Poetry. Brautigan, Richard. The Pill Versus the Springhill

Mining Disaster. Collins, Billy. Nine Horses. -----. Sailing Alone Around the Room. Creeley, Robert. Words. Daniels, Jim. M-80. Dubie, Norman. Illustrations. Frost, Robert. Complete Poems. Gallagher, Tess. Moon Crossing Bridge. Gildner, Gary. Blue Like the Heavens. Goldbarth, Albert. Saving Lives. Graham, Jorie. The Dream of the Unified Field. Hawkins, Hunt. Domestic Life. Halpern, David, ed. American Poetry Anthology. Hogan, Linda. The Book of Medicines. Kasdorf, Julia. Sleeping Preacher. Kooser, Ted. Weather Central. McDonald, Walter. Counting Survivors. Meinke, Peter. Scars. Norris, Kathleen. Little Girls in Church. Ochesther, E. and P. Oresick, eds. Pittsburg Book of

Contemporary American Poetry. O'Hara, Frank. Lunch Poems. Olds, Sharon. The Unswept Room. Orr, Gregory. City of Salt. Ostriker, Alicia S. The Crack in Everything. Plath, Sylvia. Ariel. Plumly, Stanley. Out-of-the-Body Travel. Robinson, Edwin Arlington. Tilbury Town. Rohrer, Matthew. A Hummock in the Malookas. Snyder, Gary. Riprap. Solomon, Sandy. Pears, Lake, Sun. Stafford, William. Traveling through the Dark. Tate, James. Absences. -----. The Oblivion Ha-Ha. Weaver, Michael. Timber and Prayer. Wright, James. Collected Poems.

Short Fiction Alvarez, Julia. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their

Accents. Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio. Atwood, Margaret. Bluebeard’s Egg. -----. Dancing Girls. Bambara, Toni Cade. Gorilla, My Love. Barrett, Andrea. Ship Fever. Barthelme, Donald. Sixty Stories. Barth, John. Lost in the Funhouse. Beattie, Ann. The Burning House. -----. Where You’ll Find Me. Becker, Geoffrey. Dangerous Men.

Bell, Madison Smart. Barking Man. Bloom, Amy. A Blind Man Could See How Much I

Love You. Butler, Robert Olen. A Good Scent from a Strange

Mountain. Caldwell, Erskine. Complete Stories. Carver, Raymond. Any title. Cather, Willa. Stories, Poems, and Other Writings. Cisneros, Sandra. Woman Hollering Creek. Dorris, Michael. Working Men. Erdrich, Louise. Love Medicine. Faulkner, William. Collected Stories. Gilchrist, Ellen. The Age of Miracles. Halprin, Mark. A Dove of the East. -----. Ellis Island. Hemingway, Ernest. Snows of Kilimanjaro. Jackson, Shirley. The Lottery. Joyce, James. Dubliners. Kincaid, Jamaica. At the Bottom of the River. Lahiri, Jhumpa. Interpreter of Maladies. Leavitt, David. Collected Stories. London, Jack. Novels and Stories. MacLeod, Alistair. Island. Major, Clarence. Fun & Games. Malamud, Bernard. The Magic Barrel. McCullers, Carson. Collected Short Stories. Means, David. Assorted Fire Events. Moore, Lorrie. Birds of America. -----. Like Life. -----. Self-Help. Mukherjee, Bharati. The Middler and Other Stories. Oates, Joyce Carol. The Assignation. O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. O'Connor, Flannery. A Good Man Is Hard To Find. -----. Everything That Rises Must Converge. Ozick, Cynthia. The Shawl. Paley, Grace. Collected Stories. Porter, Katherine Anne. Collected Stories. Russo, Richard. The Whore’s Child. Selzer, Richard. The Doctor Stories. Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. -----. Storyteller. Shaw, Irwin. Short Stories: Five Decades. Spark, Debra, ed. 20 Under 30. Spencer, Elizabeth. Ship Island. Stegner, Wallace. Collected Stories. Steinbeck, John. The Long Valley. Tan, Amy. Joy Luck Club. Templeton, Edith. The Darts of Cupid. Updike, John. Music School. _____. Problems. Welty, Eudora. Stories, Essays, and Memoir. Wharton, Edith. Collected Stories. Woolf, Virginia. A Haunted House.

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Helpful Books for the Creative Writer Addonizio, Kim. Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the

Poet Within. Norton, 2009. Bailey, Tom, ed. On Writing Short Stories.

Oxford, 2010. Baxter, Charles. Burning Down the House: Essays on

Fiction. Graywolf, 2008. Behn, Robin. The Practice of Poetry. Writing Exercises

from Poets Who Teach. Harper, 1992. Bell, James Scott. The Art of War for Writers: Fiction

Writing Strategies, Tactics, and Exercises. Writer’s Digest, 2009.

Bell, Madison Smartt. Narrative Design: A Writer’s Guide to Structure. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1997.

Bernays, Anne and Pamela Painter. What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers. 3rd ed. Harper Perennial, 2009.

Bradbury, Ray. Zen and the Art of Writing. Brande, Dorothea. Becoming a Writer. 1934. Los

Angeles: Tarcher, 1981. Burroway, Janet. Writing Fiction: A Guide to

Narrative Craft. 8 ed. Longman, 2010. Clark, Kevin. The Mind’s Eye: A Guide to Writing

Poetry. Longman, 2007. Dearman, Jill. Bang the Keys: Four Steps to a Lifelong

Writing Practice. Alpha, 2009. Dillard, Annie. The Writing Life. Perennial, 1990. Dufresne, John. The Lie That Tells a Truth: A Guide

to Writing Fiction. Norton, 2004. Friedman, Bonnie. Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear,

Distraction, and Other Dilemmas in the Writer’s Life. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.

Gardner, John. The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers. Vintage, 1991.

Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. Shambala Publications, 1986.

Goodman, Richard. The Soul of Creative Writing. Transaction, 2009.

Hemley, Robin. Turning Life into Fiction. Cincinatti, Ohio: Story Press, 1994.

Hugo, Richard. The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1979.

King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. 10th anniversary ed. Scribner, 2010.

Koch, Kenneth. Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry. Touchstone, 1999.

---. Sleeping on the Wing: An Anthology of Modern Poems with Essays on Reading and Writing. Vintage, 1982.

Kooser, Ted. The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice for Beginning Poets. Bison, 2007.

Kowit, Steve. In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet’s Portable Workshop. Tilbury House, 1995.

LaPlante, Alice. The Making of a Story: A Norton Guide to Creative Writing. Norton, 2010.

Masih, Tara L. The Rose Metal Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction. Rose Metal, 2009.

New York Writers Workshop. Portable MFA in Creative Writing. Writers Digest, 2006.

Novakovich, Josip. Fiction Writer’s Workshop. Cincinnati, Ohio: Story Press, 1995.

Oliver, Mary. A Poetry Handbook. Mariner, 1994. Prose, Francine. Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for

People Who Love Books and Those Who Want to Write Them. Harper Perennial, 2007.

Smith, Michael C. and Suzanne Greenberg. Everyday Creative Writing: Panning for Gold in the Kitchen Sink. Lincolnwood, Ill.: NTC, 1996.

Stern, Jerome. Making Shapely Fiction. Norton, 1991. Stone, Kelly L. Thinking Write: The Secret to Freeing

Your Creative Mind. Adams, 2009. Ueland, Brenda. If You Want to Write. 1938.

Graywolf P, 1997. Wooldridge, Susan. Poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life

with Words. Broadway, 1997. Young, Dean. The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as

Assertive Force and Contradiction. Graywolf, 2010.

Zinsser, William. On Writing Well. 30th anniversary ed. Harper, 2006.

Documents

Syllabus: EN420 Creative Writing