Summer/Fall 2024 Semester Learning Activities

How to Write Annotations

Thursday, July 11, 2024 3:00pm-4:30pm PT

Lorinda Toledo

Required for the Magnolia Cohort.

As literary artists, annotations offer students an opportunity to engage in meaningful conversations with the stories and poems they read in ways that nurture the stories and poems they write. But what exactly are annotations? How to begin? And what could we possibly have to say? 

This workshop will take a hands-on approach to address these questions and explore critical review. You’ll leave with a more efficient approach to writing annotations that bring value to your work, and a better understanding of potential topics that most intrigue you.

No required reading.

Returning to the Well: Using Favorite Texts 

July 25, 2024 3:00pm-4:15pm PT

Toni Jensen

When inspiration lags or revision becomes daunting, returning to the well of original, beloved texts can fill a writer back up. This talk will step us through prompts and ways of working to make the most of these revisiting moments. We’ll interact with a few of my beloved texts as a demonstration of how returning to familiar texts can get our writing moving again.

Sections from the following texts will be included in the slides, and the full links are provided here if anyone wants to read the full texts.

Recommended Reading:

Beard, Jo Ann. “The Fourth State of Matter.” The Boys of My Youth, Back Bay Books, 1999. Available online at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/06/24/the-fourth-state-of-matter

Erdrich, Louise. Excerpt from Tracks. 1988. Harper Perennial, 2004. Available online at: https://www.readinggroupguides.com/reviews/tracks/excerpt

May, Jamaal. “There Are Birds Here.” The Big Book of Exit Strategies, Alice James Books, 2016. Available online at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/56764/there-are-birds-here

Designing a Flexible Workshop Syllabus

Thursday, August 8, 2024 3:30pm-4:45pm PT

Joshua Roark

*Required for Post-MFA students*

Designed for all students who are interested in teaching creative writing, this seminar includes an overview of virtual teaching opportunities, the pedagogical strategies of a successful workshop, methods for decolonizing your learning environment, and an examination of model syllabi that meet the contemporary demands of a writing teacher. Attention will be given to tools writers can employ to sell their services virtually in a startup of their own or through a community organization.

Full Disclosure: Writing Without Your Clothes On

Saturday, August 10, 2024 10:00pm-11:15pm PT

Sharman Apt Russell

Well, not really. That would be uncomfortable. This seminar is about the usefulness and strategies of the meta voice in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. As someone writing a seminar description, I wanted to get your attention and perhaps get you to join me for a discussion. The meta voice breaks the illusion of a novel, memoir, poem, or seminar description by speaking directly as the writer writing the text to the reader reading the text. Novelist Jonathan Lethem calls this, “Letting the contrivance reveal itself.” In some ways, and very deliberately, you are naked.

You probably won’t do this very often. But sometimes you will. Sometimes the piece you are writing transforms because you know how and why to do this. So it’s a useful tool.

The meta voice is a strategy I used in my research-based prose on childhood malnutrition and one that I tried—but rejected—for my forthcoming memoir on wildlife tracking. In this lecture/discussion seminar, I’ll talk about these decisions. We will do an in-class exercise exploring the potential for the meta voice in your work. And we will look at some examples of the meta voice in novels, short stories, and poems, and in any submitted work you have written yourself. (For the latter, email me a few days before the class any short text in which you address the nature and craft of that work by revealing, celebrating, or confronting yourself as the writer.)

Writing Sonnets

TBA, 2024       TBD-TBD PT

Jenny Factor

Think of it! A resilient thirteenth century verse form, practiced in asynchronous eras and multiple languages and cultures, survives and thrives to this day. But what is at the beating heart of this angelic, diabolical and enduring little fourteen-line contraption? Contemporary sonnets—to those poets who write the majority of them—are not recipe books, or torture devices, or an opportunity to get graded on the perfect figure-skating long program (when you’re not even an Olympic athlete). Contemporary sonnets are fluid functions in verse-form, whose elements can twist and turn, convey and vary.

In this class, we will “get the feel” for writing contemporary sonnets. Meter? We’ll practice it. Rhyme scheme? Time to broaden your definition of an “end word”. Theme or topic? Well, some concepts do seem to fit more naturally into the size and shape of the true fourteener. Let’s explore these themes together.

Prior to class, please be familiar with the rules of the sonnet, as defined by the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetic Forms or any other reliable source online or in print; and be able to say how the following sonnets do and do not meet the classic definition of the form.

Three types of sonnets are included in our handout (in the Reader): a collection of single sonnets, complying to rules, a collection of (as poet Molly Bendall has once called them) “misbehaving” sonnets, breaking one or more rules, and a collection of sonnet sequences, coronas, and crowns. Please read these over and make some notes.

Required Reading (in Reader): 

(As much of this as practical) Hacker, Marilyn. “The Sonnet.” Unauthorized Voices, University of Michigan Press, 2010, pp. 128-144.

(Also please read and analyze a few of the selected sonnets in the Reader):

Single Sonnets

Berryman, John. “Sonnet 115.” Sonnets, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.

Brooks, Gwendolyn. “Rites for Cousin Vit.” Selected Poems, Harper Collins, 2006.

Hacker, Marilyn. “Montpeyroux Sonnet.” PN Review 260, July/Aug. 2021.

Heaney, Seamus, from “Clearances.” The Haw Lantern, Noonday Press, 1987.

Stoner, Julie. “Dear John (Drafts 1-4).” Hot Sonnets, edited by Moira Egan and Clarinda Harris, Entasis Press, 2011.

Misbehaving Sonnets 

Campo, Rafael. “Ten Patients and Another.” What the Body Told, Duke University Press, 1996.

Davis, Olena Kalytiak. “may be you are like me: scared and awake.” Shattered Sonnets, Love Cards, and

Other Off- and Back-Handed Opportunities, Bloomsbury, 2003.

Su, Adrienne. “Four Sonnets about Food.” Middle Kingdom, Alice James Press, 1997.

Sonnet Sequences

Davis, Olena Kalytiak. “Francesca Says.” Best American Erotic Poetry, Scribner, 2006.

Hayes, Terrence. “American Sonnet for my Past and Future Assassin.” American Sonnets for my Past and

Future Assassins, Penguin, 2018.

Rios, Alberto. "Second Grade." The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body, Copper Canyon Press, 2002.

Writing a Complicated (and Compelling) Villain

Saturday, October 26, 2024 11:00am-12:15pm PT

Megan Kamalei Kakimoto

We all like to believe ourselves inherently good. Yet characters, just like the people who write them, contain multitudes—especially those characterized as villains. A complicated villain draws both empathy and anger from our readers, and we must get comfortable with a little productive discomfort if we are to create a believable villain. In this seminar, we will examine the sliding scale of villainy along with craft techniques and various approaches to creating productive discomfort by studying the works of Danielle Evans, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Lauren Groff, and Melissa Chadburn, and we will bring these lessons to our own complicated villains through writing exercises. All the while, we will let empathy guide our authorial decisions in respect to our complicated, compelling, and ultimately human villains.

Guest Dramatic Writing Seminar

Saturday, November 9, 2024 11:00am-12:30pm  PT

Savannah Bloch 

Description TBD