It took dominion everywhere.    --Wallace Stevens, "Anecdote of the Jar"
    English 363:  Advanced Creative Writing

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Advanced Creative Writing aims for a balance of fluidity and structure, with the intention of allowing you, an experienced writing student, to pursue your own writing interests and needs while the class provides you with continued instruction in writing poetry, fiction, and drama.  To achieve that fluidity, most classes will follow workshop format, and a workshop, as you know, is like a garage, with you the mechanics collected around an open hood, tinkering until the engine runs smoothly, efficiently. My role in that process is essentially that of facilitator (head mechanic): I will guide and encourage; I will try to draw out of each of you your particular strengths and abilities. I will continue to introduce terms, tools, and techniques for you to practice, but much of the time this teaching will rise out of the particularities of your own poems, stories, and plays. Through it all I want you not only to improve as writers, but to become your own teachers, to internalize the methods of workshop and take them with you beyond this semester and beyond Randolph-Macon.

You know well by now that writing, whether “creative” or expository, is process, and that process is one that, in my experience anyway, is a distinctly physical, as well as mental or intellectual, activity. Similarly, there is a kind of exertion required in a writing class. There is work, after all, in workshop. You are engaged in a physical creative process just as are students in a painting class or a dance studio. After our workshops and conversations, I hope you will feel exercised—that slight soreness in the muscles, the elevated heart rate, maybe even something of a runner’s high. And I hope you will leave the classroom feeling as splattered as an art student with paint or a mechanic with grease but with punctuation, syntax, and grammar. With all the mechanics of language.

I hope too you will hear the music in those mechanics. Because then, if the engines really start humming, we can revise my earlier metaphors from workshop as garage or studio to that of a recital hall, where I am conducting an energetic, highly-proficient, and interpretively-creative chamber ensemble.

But now back to the prosaic. 

More specifically, the requirements for the semester are as follows: 

1)      Read the three required texts by the dates specified on the class schedule, as well as additional reading TBA as we go along;

2)      Submit work (work = 2 poems, 1 story, or 1 play) for 7 workshops occasions—3 before midterm break and 4 after the break (work must be handed out in Mon. class for Wed. workshops, by Friday noon for Mon. workshops);

3)      Attend 3 public readings (RM or other) and post responses to those readings to the discussion list;

4)      Write an informal mid-term self-evaluation;

5)      Give a class presentation on a craft issue of your choice, or lead one Intro 261 workshop (2^nd quarter);

6)      Participate in the combined English 261A and English 363 final public reading (see schedule for place and time;

7)      Submit your final portfolio w/ cover letter (two copies, one for me and one for a classmate for peer response);

8)      Write and submit peer response letter for a classmate’s portfolio (two copies, one for me and one for classmate);

9)      Attend class regularly (excused absences include illness, genuine emergency, and school-sponsored activities such as American Culture or athletic team trips or games), participate enthusiastically in workshops, and post responses to the discussion list when required.

Required texts:      Sharod Santos, The Two Minds of Poetry

                                  Charles Baxter & Peter Turchi, Ed., Bringing the Devil to His Knees

                                  David Mamat, Three Uses of the Knife

Recommended texts:      Linda Gregerson, Negative Capability

                                               Jay Woodruff, Ed., A Piece of Work