10 courses with the subject CREA, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
CREA 271Stranger than Short Fiction
3 sem. hrs. Offered annually, spring semester. What basic human need is fulfilled in the crafting, telling, and reception of stories? How have the evolution of human consciousness and our intuitive narrative capacity developed side by side? This spin on the introductory fiction workshop will foreground the biology and evolution of the human mind to establish and exercise the basics of writing short fiction. This course includes workshops, conferences, and discussions with visiting writers.
3 sem. hrs. Offered annually, fall semester. Practice in writing poems, with discussion focusing on imagery, rhythm, voice, and aspects of formal construction. Emphasis will be on student poetry in a workshop format, but poems by outside authors, including visiting writers, will also be studied.
3 sem. hrs. Offered annually. Practice in writing creative nonfiction, in particular the personal essay and lyric essay, with emphasis on workshopping student pieces. Discussion will focus on elements of craft, style, and discovery of individual voice and subject. Work by outside authors, including visiting writers, will also be studied.
1-3 sem. hrs. May be repeated for credit. In this workshop, the focus will be on writing, discussing, and revising our own flash fiction, but to do that we will first examine the quirky tradition in which we will be participating. Flash fiction is usually defined as a short story under 1,000 words, though there are other terms for even shorter texts (including micro fiction, sudden fiction, short shorts, and prose poetry). All creative writing is in some sense about movement, about how each part of the text changes what came before it, but the pared-down forms we will study concentrate our attention on each sentence, each word bearing real weight. In this tutorial, we will study the elements of flash fiction and its related forms in order to write into its compressed, surprising, suggestive tradition. One of the most famous pieces of flash fiction is these six words: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” If you aspire to pack that much punch in so few words, this is the tutorial for you!
3 sem. hrs. Offered alternate years. Advanced work in fiction writing for those who have distinguished themselves in CREA 271. Workshops and conferences. Some classes to be taught by visiting writers.
3 sem. hrs. Offered alternate years. This advanced poetry course builds on the skills developed in CREA 272. Students will hone their poetic craft through workshops, conferences, and discussions with visiting poets. We will also use the facilities of the Book Arts Center to create a collaborative chapbook, working together to bring the students’ poems all the way from rough early drafts to a thoughtfully designed, obsessively crafted, handmade codex.
3 sem. hrs. Offered alternate years. A combination of group workshop and individual manuscript/project guidance, this course builds upon CREA 275 with an aim toward building and refining methods for sustained projects in the genre of creative nonfiction. The course will draw material from immersion journalism, methods in historical nonfiction, and practices in long-form memoir and essay writing. Through class visits and/or engagement with the Visiting Writer Series, we will also work with contemporary practitioners of the genre.
