Intensive Summer Writing at Wesleyan

Join us this summer for a series of courses in June and July that are designed to revolutionize your writing practice.

Expected outcomes:

• Explore the elements of craft, including structure, voice, clarity, the use of descriptive detail, and revision
• Perceive and identify areas for growth in your writing
• Maximize the potential of editing your own writing
• Develop skills for critiquing your own and others' work
• Employ a higher degree of self-reflexivity in your writing practice

Session I

ENGL270 Writing Creative Nonfiction
with Anne Greene

Practice in writing several forms of literary and journalistic nonfiction--a profile, narrative, review, commentary, travel essay, family sketch, or personal essay, for example. Students are also welcome to try science writing, arts or music reviewing, and other somewhat specialized writing designed to engage general readers.

Session II 

ENGL259 The Art of the Personal Essay 
with Elizabeth Bobrick

The personal essay is short-form, first-person, narrative nonfiction that encompasses many genres: memoir, reflection, humor, familial and social history, cultural criticism. Yet even these boundaries often blur within a single essay, and the personal essay can expand to include almost any topic. Writing personal essays - what author and critic Philip Lopate calls “the self-interrogative genre” - helps us find out what we think, often makes us change our minds, and, ideally, leads us to new insights.

The personal essay has a long and rich history, and is still a vibrant, flourishing form. Our reading will include classic and contemporary works by authors from diverse cultural backgrounds, e.g., James Baldwin, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, E.B. White, Jo Ann Beard, Hilton Als, Edwidge Danticat, Richard Rodriguez, Ann Panning, John McPhee, Le Thi Diem Thuy, Leslie Jamison, Anwar Accari, and many others. The majority of our readings will be included in a course packet, while others will be available online, and in Jo Ann Beard’s The Boys of My Youth.

In class, we will discuss the assigned readings, participate in group responses to each other’s writing (workshops), and write in response to prompts. We will study both traditional and unconventional techniques of nonfiction, focusing on the elements of craft: structure, voice, clarity, the use of descriptive detail, and revision.

ENGL282 Narrative in Theory and Practice 
with Pamela Burger

Narrative—or storytelling—is a critical component of our daily lives.  We find narratives not only in novels, but also in the news we read, the games we play, the photographs we take.  Stories are so embedded in the way we communicate that we often overlook their significance. In this course, we will explore the idea that stories don’t just “happen,” but rather are carefully constructed systems that shape the way we understand the world around us. By reading theories of narrative in conjunction with fictional texts, we will examine how stories come into being, and how they create meaning through form and structure. We will identify narrative strategies across various media, including, but not limited to: detective fiction, folktales, video games, film, and digital spaces.
 
Questions to consider will include: How do authors create a sense of time, plot, and character? How can different media shape and alter the narrative process? Students will have the opportunity to put theory into practice by creating their own narrative works in a new genre every week. Final projects include the option for a creative work in any genre or media or a critical essay. Readings include Conan Doyle, Angela Carter, Vladimir Propp, Roland Barthes, Wayne Booth, and Natasha Trethewey, among others.

ENGL296 Techniques of Fiction
with Brando Skyhorse

This introduction to the elements of fiction and a range of authors is for people who want to write and, through writing, increase their understanding and appreciation of a variety of short stories.