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: THE GARDEN OF FORKING PATHS. 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: THE MORALITY OF LAW: Are all laws moral? What should society’s response be to an immoral law? In this first-year writing course students will understand what defines a law and then will examine the relationship between law and morality. Then students will take these ideas to analyze the impact on the American legal system. We will be reading a variety of work from fiction to academic texts, personal essays, and even poetry. Writers include: Angela Davis, Harlan Ellison, Hannah Ardent, Colson Whitehead, Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, Solmaz Sharif, César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, Audre Lorde, and others. We will also be using autoethnography as a tool to unpack these ideas. Students will write personal essays as well as research papers in this course.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: YOUR FAVORITE POET'S FAVORITE POET. is a class celebrating poetic lineage. Students will discover that every poet has to start somewhere – and that behind every good writer, is a good reader. Together, we will demystify the idea that poetry is for the select few and explore the art form through the lens of inclusivity, legacy and community. We will read and assess the work of poets recommended by Ross Gay, Airea D. Matthews, Mahogany L. Browne, Naomi Shihab Nye, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Dunya Mikhail, Gregory Pardlo, Joseph Millar, Tyehimba Jess, Hanif Abdurraqib, Ada Limón, Patricia Smith, Dorianne Laux, Tina Chang, Sharon Olds and more. Essay assignments will range from annotations on poetic craft to larger explorations of social justice, inspiration, risk-taking, imagination and permission. Students will also write essays identifying poetic choices that resonate and spark their imaginations, giving direction to their own creative work.

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: QUEER IN SPACE: 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: 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: PORTRAITS AND LANDSCAPES. Portrait and landscape: two paradigms, two orientations, two ways of seeing the world’s inhabitants and the worlds they inhabit. We will borrow these genres from the field of visual art to explore how we “frame” human and non-human lives in writing. We will read a range of texts by authors including essayists like Roland Barthes, Michel Serres, and Leslie Jamison, poets like Charles Baudelaire, Claudia Rankine, Mahmoud Darwish, and Yehuda Amichai, and fiction writers like Shobha Rao, Anuk Arudpragasam, and Cesar Aira, using their work to address questions of land and belonging—to whom does land belong, who belongs in a given landscape?—as well as questions of identity and profiling—whose faces matter, with whose faces do we identify and why? We will also hone our techniques of description and analysis by examining the work of painters and photographers.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: YOUR FAVORITE POET'S FAVORITE POET. is a class celebrating poetic lineage. Students will discover that every poet has to start somewhere – and that behind every good writer, is a good reader. Together, we will demystify the idea that poetry is for the select few and explore the art form through the lens of inclusivity, legacy and community. We will read and assess the work of poets recommended by Ross Gay, Airea D. Matthews, Mahogany L. Browne, Naomi Shihab Nye, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Dunya Mikhail, Gregory Pardlo, Joseph Millar, Tyehimba Jess, Hanif Abdurraqib, Ada Limón, Patricia Smith, Dorianne Laux, Tina Chang, Sharon Olds and more. Essay assignments will range from annotations on poetic craft to larger explorations of social justice, inspiration, risk-taking, imagination and permission. Students will also write essays identifying poetic choices that resonate and spark their imaginations, giving direction to their own creative work.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: REVERSE ENGINEERING THE ESSAY. Sometimes an author’s name becomes so synonymous with a particular kind of prose or style – or even human situation – that it becomes an eponymous adjective or proprietary trademark: We speak about things as being Dickensian or Pynchonesque or Kafka-esque in the way that we use words like Velcro or Xerox or BandAid. But what are we really talking about when we talk about “style”? If a work of art becomes completely permeated by one particular author’s vision, it’s not just because that author has given herself permission to fully inhabit her own quality of perception or pursue one set of concerns to exciting and unpredictable places, but also because she is deploying a very particular set of technical strategies at the level of the sentence. What makes a story Kafka-esque? What makes a David Foster Wallace sentence so distinctly “DFW”? In this seminar we will reverse engineer various brands of literary styles, taking a close look at their interior designs and architectures. Part of this will rest upon the premise that a certain amount of emulation is wholesome and that the way out of our influences is through them. What can we learn by trying very earnestly – and ultimately unsuccessfully – to sing along with the voices of the writers who move us the most.

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: The RETROSPECTOSCOPE: ON MEMORY AND SELF : In this first-year writing seminar we will explore the way 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 actually a core component in identity-making? As the semester progresses we’ll explore work by science writers, essayists and novelists in an attempt to understand the malleable nature of memory and the impact it has on how we interact with our reality. Some authors who will help construct our own arguments about this deeply personal, but universal topic, include: Jorge Louis Borges, David Eagleman, Jill Bolte-Taylor, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Roland Barthes, Jamaica Kincaid and Tim O’Brien, among others. Steeped in their unique and varying points of view, we will then write two short essays and one longer rumination on the nature of memory and identity.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: POETICS AS MATERIAL PRACTICE. In this first year seminar we will examine poetics within literature and across mediums such as architecture, fine art, film, fashion, and performance. Our aim will be to describe, discuss and understand how elements of language, structure, and symbolism (among others) create a unique grammar and meaning. Simply put, poetics as material practice means we will explore how the imagination is expressed in concrete terms. Course readings will often be coupled with multimedia content and thus include the likes of Edouard Glissant, Arthur Jafa, Marguerite Duras, Clarice Lispector, Alfred Jarry, and Jean Cocteau. Writing assignments will be aimed toward examining the poetics of these individuals and their work, as well as articulating a poetics of our own.

WRITING THE ESSAY I: OBSESSIONS AND OBJECTS. Behold: the obsession. A human impulse? A psychological byproduct of late capitalism? A muscle, a habit, a compulsion, a drive, an exorcism, a necessary and inevitable condition of existence? In this first year essay course, participants will write to the tune of their own interests and obsession(s). Here, we will gather obsessions old and new, and explore and expand how we relate to them. All students will be invited to produce a hand-bound chapbook or other culminating object(s); essay forms throughout may include micro, audio, visual, diaristic, polemic, academic (and anti-academic), non-text objects as essay, and more. Texts for this course will include your own explorations alongside works from Ulises Carrion, Edouard Glissant, object-relations theory, Etel Adnan, Harryette Mullen, 1080press newsletters, examples of other artists’ obsessions or object-studies, and more.

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: MOURNING AND 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: 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: THE ARCHIVAL IMPULSE. An archive is any collection of items judged to be enduringly valuable–whether it’s a set of maps housed at the Library of Congress, a curation of Instagram photographs, or a box full of a great-great-aunt’s journals and shoes. Because all archives are by nature selective and incomplete, they pose questions about what gets deemed valuable, why, and according to whom; and, accordingly, what gets left out of the historical record. In this course we will explore the relationship between writing and archives, examining how writers have both worked with existing archives (by engaging with archival sources, for example, or writing into absences and gaps) and also approached writing as archive (i.e., by chronicling their lives to produce new archives of experience). Throughout, we will explore the role and meaning of archives in our own lives while addressing issues related to privacy, access, and erasure. Readings will likely include work by Carmen Maria Machado, Jenn Shapland, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Saidiya Hartman, Lou Sullivan, Morgan M. Page, Lauren Russell, and Julietta Singh, among others. Assignments may involve diaristic writing, oral history, digital archives, and working with public records and institutional archives. As possible (given the unknown state of the pandemic this fall), we will take one or more field trips to local archives.

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: ON BEING ILL. Forty-two years ago, Susan Sontag wrote, “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick ... Sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” At this moment, when the world is wracked by a pandemic, we have an especially keen sense of this second citizenship and of the challenges, both ethical and practical, that it poses. In this seminar, we will examine how we think and write about illness and contagion, looking at texts drawn from various disciplines, among them literature, history, philosophy, and medicine. Throughout, we will follow Sontag in paying close attention to the metaphors we use for illness and the way illness serves as metaphor, asking what it means to live and write in a time when the two “kingdoms” of which she speaks are increasingly difficult to separate. Readings will include fiction by Lu Xun and Daniel Defoe, scholarship by Perundevi Srinivasan, Paul Farmer and Claire Colebrook, and memoir by Jamaica Kincaid, Leslie Jamison, Alphonse Daudet and Virginia Woolf.