This core senior course will empower students to tell their own stories. We will study the fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry of today’s best writers to develop our own writing craft. We will learn how to access memory and imagination as resources, use concrete and specific language, write scenes instead of summary, center on conflict, and make the familiar feel surprising. Representative texts will include Sherman Alexie’s You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, and Billy Collins’s 180 More.