How do artists make art? How do we evaluate it? In this course, students of all levels get to experience firsthand the particular challenges and rewards of art making through practical engagement with five fields — creative writing, visual art, theater, dance, and music — under the guidance of professionals.
Creative Writing Courses
Creative Writing
The curriculum allows the student to develop writing skills, provides an introduction to the possibilities of contemporary literature and offers a perspective on the place of literature among the liberal arts. Criticism by practicing writers and talented peers encourages the student's growth as both creator and reader of literature.
Speculative fiction is where the impossible happens. Though this expansive genre is often tagged as escapism, it connects to a deep part of our nature. Our foundation myths and fables are speculative fiction, and their current of fear and wonder runs straight through to contemporary science fiction, fantasy, and horror. In this class, we'll learn about some fascinating genre traditions, embrace experimentation, and try to build universes that won't (per Philip K. Dick) fall apart two days later.
This creative writing course, guided by Professor Alaa Al Aswany, focuses on mastering fiction's essential elements and techniques, such as story sketching, dialogue, character creation, structure, and plot development. It emphasizes learning from the rich diversity of Middle Eastern writers, including those in the diaspora, living in exile, and revolutionary voices, to enhance students' writing practices.
Advanced practice in the original composition of poetry for discussion in regularly scheduled workshop meetings. The curriculum allows the student to develop writing skills, provides an introduction to the possibilities of contemporary literature and offers perspective on the places of literature among the liberal arts.
Advanced practice in the original composition of fiction for discussion in regularly scheduled workshop meetings. The curriculum allows the student to develop writing skills, provides an introduction to the possibilities of contemporary literature and offers perspective on the place of literature among the liberal arts.
What motivates us to write about our own lives? What is the relationship between the "I' who experiences and the "I" who writes? How scrupulous must we be about telling the truth? What are our moral obligations to the people we write about? In this workshop, we will consider different approaches to the people, places and things that have formed us.
After mining our imaginations and memories, how do we deepen a reader's experience with the poem via the image? How does one draft an image readers will remember? This workshop-focused course will explore the image, its implications, as more than mere scenery, and seeks to focus the image at the poem's center.
The course will lead students toward the creation of a work of musical theater (for lack of a better term) which will run parallel to the collaboration of the two instructors of the course, Adam Gidwitz and Steven Mackey. Instrumental musical performers of any instrument, composers, writers, actors and others who feel they can contribute to a theatrical presentation are needed. The course will include introducing existing relevant works, the progress and process of the ongoing work of the instructors collaboration and of course facilitation of the student creations.