Richard O'Reilly

A writer's creative output is not strictly limited to novels, poems, plays, stories, and other traditional literary forms, but may also include texts historically viewed as private documents: diaries, letters, personal reflections. In this class, we will consider these latter forms as literature unto themselves, along with interviews and public performances of the creative self, small-scale and large. We will focus on interviews and conversations by authors including James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, David Foster Wallace, Bob Dylan, August Wilson, and Imogen Binnie. We will look at journals and letters by Samuel Beckett, Flannery O'Connor, Alice Walker, and Anais Nin, to examine how private writings and correspondences inform the creation of the artistic self. We will write our own journals and letters, and conduct and transcribe interviews with peers on the events of the day. This class is recommended for students with an interest in literary biography and ephemera, as well as experimental generative practices.

We will work with the storytelling monologue and more, using as models: Ira Glass's This American Life, NPR's Stories on Stage, and podcasts like Mysteries Abound. We will take pieces from the idea and notebook stage through revision and rehearsal and finally to the recording stage. In other words, you will complete a piece for the radio--and it will be fun.

This class is for the poet with a taste for prose or the performer with a zest for language and story, or any artist or scholar intrigued with the connections and potential of prose, poetry and performance. We'll start with models: poems by Anne Sexton and Allen Ginsberg, plays by Harold Pinter, August Wilson and Caryl Churchill, songs from Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan, short fiction by Alice Munro, Imogen Binnie and David Sedaris. We'll take them apart and build new ideas out of the bones of the known work. We'll create new work with a goal of making 12 short pieces in the course of the semester, writing sometimes in collaboration, sometimes solo. We will read and respond to the prose poems of Nin Andrews, Lydia Davis, Lynn Emanuel, James Tate, Charles Simic, Wang Ping, Elizabeth Bishop among others. The class will culminate with a performance of your new work.

Taken every semester, the Graduate Projects courses allow students to focus in private sessions on the development of their work. Students register for 6 hours of Graduate Project credit in each semester of study.

Taken every semester, the Graduate Projects courses allow students to focus in private sessions on the development of their work. Students register for 6 hours of Graduate Project credit in each semester of study.