WRITING THE ESSAY I: DOUBT: In a 2013 New York Times piece, Philip Lopate called the essay an exercise in doubt. Rejecting the often-touted virtues of certainty, Lopate instead invited essayists to honor the deeply unsure and divided nature of human consciousness and to embrace doubt as integral to the essay writing process. In this first-year writing seminar, we will explore and consider the value—and possible limitations—of Lopate’s insights in discussing and practicing various essay forms: the personal essay, the argumentative essay, and the exploratory essay. Texts may include readings by Joan Didion, Philip Lopate, David Foster Wallace, Cheryl Strayed, Brent Staples, Amy Tan, Richard Blanco, Timothy O’Brien, Junot Diaz, Zadie Smith, Tom Junod, Roxane Gay, and more. Our encounters with these readings are designed to inspire your ideas and unique approaches to your own writing, which will be harnessed through lots of brainstorming, free writing, workshopping, drafting, redrafting, and critical feedback from your instructor, your fellow students, and yourself.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: WRITING ABOUT VALUES: In this first-year writing seminar, we will explore fundamental issues of our lives in order to develop key analytic and argumentative skills. We will discuss what is really worth striving for and what makes a good or meaningful life. Topics include questions of priorities, definitions of good and evil, cultural and moral relativity, the nature of love, the challenges of suffering and death, and sociopolitical issues such as minority rights, feminism, and the environment. Texts may include short works by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Plato, Euripides, Shakespeare, Woolf, Sartre, June Jordan, Michael Pollan, Al Gore, and many others, as well as Eastern and Western religious texts and topical newspaper articles. In the course of composing and workshopping essays related to the readings, students will focus on tackling the stages of the writing process, entering a conversation, identifying key value conflicts, anticipating counter arguments, identifying sources, and engaging the reader. We will work on developing close reading and research skills, logical strategies, rhetorical techniques, and grammatical clarity, along with the effective deployment of summary, quotation, citation, and tone.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: COUNTERNARRATIVES. There is a common sense wisdom that the winners write the official history, but what goes into the process of hiding the other stories that get left out? The cities, towns, and lands we inhabit hold the other side of the story, and it can be a writer’s task to give voice to the untold. Providing alternate histories, uncovered truths, and voices from below, counternarratives help readers learn the depths of their surroundings and the legacies of resistance that have gone up against the imposition of the dominant history. Most exemplary, US history is built on the erasure of Indigenous resistance and genocide and false narratives of the impact of racial slavery. Crowding out the stories "from below" is part of the work of perpetuating these legacies of domination. In this first-year writing seminar, we will examine the relationship between place and story by reading texts that provide alternate narratives to the cities, towns, and countries where we live. In writing exercises, students will try to tell the other side of the story, and walk through the city trying to uncover hidden narratives to share.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: BRANCHING NARRATIVES. Every story can potentially branch in infinite directions. Why settle for just one? In this course we’ll sample the history of experiments in branching narrative, in writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Ursula K. Le Guin, in electronic genres such as hyperfiction, in playful literary movements such as Oulipo, and in a variety of video games. We'll conduct nonfiction branching experiments of our own, using tools such as extravagant footnotes, second-thought annotations, and the nonlinear storytelling app Twine. And we'll discover that the research process is itself a garden of endlessly forking paths.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: WRITING ABOUT VALUES. In this first-year writing seminar, we will explore fundamental issues of our lives in order to develop key analytic and argumentative skills. We will discuss what is really worth striving for and what makes a good or meaningful life. Topics include questions of priorities, definitions of good and evil, cultural and moral relativity, the nature of love, the challenges of suffering and death, and sociopolitical issues such as minority rights, feminism, and the environment. Texts may include short works by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Plato, Euripides, Shakespeare, Woolf, Sartre, June Jordan, Michael Pollan, Al Gore, and many others, as well as Eastern and Western religious texts and topical newspaper articles. In the course of composing and workshopping essays related to the readings, students will focus on tackling the stages of the writing process, entering a conversation, identifying key value conflicts, anticipating counter arguments, identifying sources, and engaging the reader. We will work on developing close reading and research skills, logical strategies, rhetorical techniques, and grammatical clarity, along with the effective deployment of summary, quotation, citation, and tone.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: MEMORY AND THE SELF: In this first-year writing seminar we will explore how memory shapes how we see ourselves, others and the world around us. How do the circumstances under which a memory is formed affect us? How does the language we use to talk to ourselves and about ourselves inform how we assemble our sense of self? To what extent is the act of forgetting a core component in identity-making? As the semester progresses, we’ll explore work by science writers, essayists and novelists to understand the malleable nature of memory and its impact on how we interact with our reality. Students will critically engage with texts, audio, and video to ultimately construct their own arguments and ideas about this deeply personal, but vastly universal topic. This will take shape in the form of short ruminations and responses, a presentation, and one longer research essay.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: THE STORIES WE TELL OURSELVES. This first-year writing seminar examines the theory and practice of creative nonfiction, focusing on the memoir and the personal essay. Students will learn how to translate personal experience into effective pieces of writing. We will study the techniques of “writing the self,” integrating literary analysis and creative writing and an exploration of the role of memory and imagination in reconstructing and shaping the past. We will read a variety of texts and examine the ways writers use language to bring their subjects to life, reading not only for the story but, more importantly, for distinctive prose style and technique. As writers we all have unique concerns, backgrounds, and perspectives. Our goal is to effectively communicate what we have seen, heard, and felt, focusing on the world outside of ourselves as much as our interior worlds. Our workshops will help us focus on hearing our unique voices and the voices of others, offering new ideas and thoughtful critiques. We will learn how to use the truth of our lives to create compelling narratives that feature quality thinking, depth of insight, and impressive prose style.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: THE STORIES WE TELL OURSELVES. This first-year writing seminar examines the theory and practice of creative nonfiction, focusing on the memoir and the personal essay. Students will learn how to translate personal experience into effective pieces of writing. We will study the techniques of “writing the self,” integrating literary analysis and creative writing and an exploration of the role of memory and imagination in reconstructing and shaping the past. We will read a variety of texts and examine the ways writers use language to bring their subjects to life, reading not only for the story but, more importantly, for distinctive prose style and technique. As writers we all have unique concerns, backgrounds, and perspectives. Our goal is to effectively communicate what we have seen, heard, and felt, focusing on the world outside of ourselves as much as our interior worlds. Our workshops will help us focus on hearing our unique voices and the voices of others, offering new ideas and thoughtful critiques. We will learn how to use the truth of our lives to create compelling narratives that feature quality thinking, depth of insight, and impressive prose style.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: OBSESSED: WRITING ABOUT WHAT HAUNTS US. In this first-year writing seminar, we’ll visit the landscapes that leave their observers obsessed, and observe and put into practice our own writing obsessions. How can an incredibly close study of a subject find its way into our work? What's the difference between deep research and obsession? We'll read essays, fiction, and poetry by Jhumpa Lahiri (Italian language); John McPhee (truckers); Vinson Cunningham (sermonic essays); Jonathan Franzen (birds); Natalie Goldman (craft essay on obsession in Writing Down the Bones); Natalie Diaz (poetry); Roxanne Gay (Scrabble); Sarah Vowell (Assassination Vacation); Siddhartha Mukherjee (cancer); M.F.K. Fisher (frugality)

WRITING THE ESSAY I: GREAT SHORT FICTION: This first-year writing seminar aims to develop the broader skills of close reading and clear, analytical writing. The syllabus offers a survey of the short story with authors both canonical and contemporary, including James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Shirley Jackson, Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, Sherman Alexie, and others. The course explores such themes as character and conflict, experimental and psychological fiction, and moral fiction, as well as the role of voice, descriptive language, and symbols. The course requires ongoing shorter assignments plus multiple drafts of three formal essays.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: TOO COOL FOR SCHOOL. This first-year writing seminar encourages students to consider the ways they are taught and the unspoken assumptions about their education. To do this effectively, students hone skills for reading, analyzing, and thinking about structures of implicit thought in formal education. To think through complicated issues, write to examine that thinking, share their ideas, and make arguments based on their perspectives and understandings. Authors include Paulo Friere, Adrienne Rich, Mary Louise Pratt, Susan Griffin, and Ralph Ellison.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: LITERATURE OF MELANCHOLIA. In this first-year writing seminar we look at texts that confront depression, grief and longing. Poets and philosophers have often examined these emotional states as passage through a “dark night of the soul” in which an author confronts the despair within and finds a way to traverse it. These personal and spiritual reckonings are often deep examinations of the self in the world and a search for meaning in existence. This writing intensive course considers philosophical, poetic and other renderings of mourning and melancholia in authors such as Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Karen Green, Sigmund Freud, Maggie Nelson, James Baldwin, Paul Celan and others. Through a series of essays, we begin a conversation in our own writing and thought with these authors and issues.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: QUEER SCIENCE FICTION: In this first-year writing course we will read, discuss, and respond in writing to queer science fiction and fantasy texts. As we read, we will consider the relationship between body and text, and practice close reading of these LGBTQIA textual bodies; queer pages that work to counter hegemonic norms. This course asks: how do queer texts function as a space for intersectional analysis? What are the connections and places of overlap between bodies and texts? What can we learn from the world-making possibilities science fiction and fantasy writing offer to queer authors and readers? Our texts may include writing by Ryka Aoki, Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Akwaeke Emezi, Nalo Hopkinson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Joss Lake, Yoon Ha Lee, and Rivers Solomon, among others. Possible films include Born in Flames, Brief Story from the Green Planet, The Matrix, and Neptune Frost. Writing assignments will include personal essay, critical analysis, and a creative final project merging scholarly writing with fiction.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: ELEMENTS OF FACT AND FICTION: In this first-year writing seminar we will ponder the importance, necessity and psychological functional of storytelling. As a species, humans are storytelling animals. We can’t explain ourselves or know each other without using, sharing, inventing and assuming stories. What is universal in reason? How does it work? Who decides the context of meaning? We’ll begin the semester reading old stories—fairy tales, for instance—and study the evolution of metaphor and culture. Good stories are timeless and relatable. How, then, do we keep churning out new ways of thinking old stories? We’ll read novels, memoirs and literary theory. We’re actively seeking an understanding of the goal(s) of narrative drive. How is learning achieved? What do we want to understand when we read other peoples’ experiences? Is it to relate to what’s already within us or do we grow? If so, how and where? Potential readings include: The Story Factor: Secrets of Influence from the Art of Storytelling, by Annette Simons; Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strategies, by Cristina Bacchilega; Strange as this Weather has Been, by Ann Pancake; Legend of a Suicide, by David Vann; A Childhood: The Biography of Place, by Harry Crews; There There by Tommy Orange; and My Year of Rest and Relaxation, by Ottessa Moshfegh.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: GREAT SHORT FICTION: This first-year writing seminar aims to develop the broader skills of close reading and clear, analytical writing. The syllabus offers a survey of the short story with authors both canonical and contemporary, including James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Shirley Jackson, Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, Sherman Alexie, and others. The course explores such themes as character and conflict, experimental and psychological fiction, and moral fiction, as well as the role of voice, descriptive language, and symbols. The course requires ongoing shorter assignments plus multiple drafts of three formal essays.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: TOO COOL FOR SCHOOL. This first-year writing seminar encourages students to consider the ways they are taught and the unspoken assumptions about their education. To do this effectively, students hone skills for reading, analyzing, and thinking about structures of implicit thought in formal education. To think through complicated issues, write to examine that thinking, share their ideas, and make arguments based on their perspectives and understandings. Authors include Paulo Friere, Adrienne Rich, Mary Louise Pratt, Susan Griffin, and Ralph Ellison.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: BRANCHING NARRATIVES. Every story can potentially branch in infinite directions. Why settle for just one? In this course we’ll sample the history of experiments in branching narrative, in writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Ursula K. Le Guin, in electronic genres such as hyperfiction, in playful literary movements such as Oulipo, and in a variety of video games. We'll conduct nonfiction branching experiments of our own, using tools such as extravagant footnotes, second-thought annotations, and the nonlinear storytelling app Twine. And we'll discover that the research process is itself a garden of endlessly forking paths.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: HERE THERE BE MONSTERS: When the world's vastness was still mostly unknown, ancient cartographers would draw dragons and wild beasts in the margins of their maps with the warning: “Here, there be monsters.” The notice served to discourage travelers from venturing into unknown danger. However, what it truly represented was the border between the known and the unknown. It implored the explorer to stay within the safe and acceptable precincts of human knowledge. In this course, we will press beyond those borders and face the monsters that our own stories have warned us about. We will examine why monsters are a culturally universal creation, and what we can learn about our own state of being from the monsters we engender, fear and desire. We will study texts, histories, and folklore ranging from the origins of the Haitian zombie to colonial witch hunts to our own contemporary cinematic and literary horrors. Through close reading, critical analysis and discussion, students will write about how the depictions and, importantly, the uses of these monsters, have changed over time – and what that ultimately tells us about ourselves.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: ILLNESS AND HEALING. In this first-year writing seminar students will look at classic texts on illness and healing such as Susan Sontag's Illness As Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors and Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals as well as essays on black women's maternal death rates and climate change. Is the earth sick? Why is chronic illness on the rise? Do mental illnesses need to be "cured"? We will formulate questions and learn to think on the page and research. The memes tells us if we heal ourselves we can heal the world. Students will write personal and research essays as well as look at news about the wellness industry and discuss current events in real time.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: IF I/WE MUST DIE: POETRY AND THE [PROTEST] LINE. In current and historic ages of protests and strikes and social change, the shifts in consciousness and materiality are also reflected in our creative forms. In this course, we will look at and write about how poetry reflects, leads, and refracts social and political movements of varying scales. Together, we will learn through poetry’s presence in different movements: from ecopoetics in the age of climate crisis, to indigenous writing and indigenous languages from Turtle Island to Armenia to Palestine (and indigenous research strategies as well), to anti-imperialist poetry and aesthetic terrorism, and examining banned literatures and protest literature across forms. We will be looking at protest poetry as it evolves across time and space (considering effectiveness and “failed” experiments) and we will seek to make our own convincing texts too, in and beyond the form of the essay. We will be writing responses, analyses, poetries, performances, and/or other forms in alignment with our shared goals as a class. *The course title borrows from poems by Refaat Alareer (Palestine, 1979-2023), and Claude McKay (Jamaica/Harlem, 1948).

WRITING THE ESSAY I: THE STORIES WE TELL OURSELVES. This first-year writing seminar examines the theory and practice of creative nonfiction, focusing on the memoir and the personal essay. Students will learn how to translate personal experience into effective pieces of writing. We will study the techniques of “writing the self,” integrating literary analysis, creative writing, and an exploration of the role of memory and imagination in reconstructing and shaping the past. We will read a variety of texts and examine the ways writers use language to bring their subjects to life, reading not only for the story but, more importantly, for distinctive prose style and technique. As writers we all have unique concerns, backgrounds, and perspectives. Our goal is to effectively communicate what we have seen, heard, and felt, focusing on the world outside of ourselves as much as our interior worlds. Our workshops will help us focus on hearing our unique voices and the voices of others, offering new ideas and thoughtful critiques. We will learn how to use the truth of our lives to create compelling narratives that feature quality thinking, depth of insight, and impressive prose style. Readings may include works by Kiese Laymon, Virginia Woolf, Jamaica Kincaid, Zadie Smith, Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, David Sedaris, Teju Cole, and others.