Manhattan Courses: Fall 2013

Held at the Manhattan Facility: 101-113 East 27th St.
(midway between Park Avenue South and Lexington), 3rd Floor
Courses held in conjunction with Manhattan Writers Speak on the same themes.

For more information on any classes, please email: magdalene.brandeis@stonybrook.edu

jonesCWL 510.S60  Forms of Fiction: Advancing the Novel, Kaylie Jones
Wednesdays, 5:20-8:10 (Class #90077)

This workshop will focus on the fundamental tools of story and scene. You will learn how to

  • Start at the right point in the narrative
  • Choose the right point of view/voice for your novel
  • Build tension and comprehend the dramatic arc of your story
  • Best use dialogue and descriptive devices to advance your story
  • Recognize the most common mistakes in fiction writing

Writing prompts will be offered to help you focus on these aspects of technique. Your work will then be discussed in class. By the end of the term, you will have a solid foundation on which to build the rest of your book.

lou ann walkerCWL 540.S60 Forms of Creative Nonfiction: Memoir, Lou Ann Walker
Thursdays, 5:20-8:10 (Class #90076)

Students will focus on telling their own stories, using a variety of techniques gleaned from masters of the form. We'll discuss the handling of secrets, the nature of the memoir versus the personal essay, the infusion of fiction into memoir, and the nature of privacy.

 

 

 

CWL 565.S60 Special Topics in Writing about People: Reading & Writing Illness,
Dan Menaker & Magdalene Brandeis
Monday, 5:20-8:10 (Class #95914)
Course begins on August 26.

menakerbrandeisConsidering how common illness is, how tremendous the Nspiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed (...) – when we think of this (…) it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature. Virginia Woolf, “On Being Ill.”

In this course, in order to address the meaning and validity of Woolf’s question, we will read and write about the place that mental and physical illness holds in literature, both fiction and nonfiction, and both in the work of others and our own. What can we learn from John Bayley’s Elegy for Iris? Why did David Rakoff turn to Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry during his MRIs? How does culture, explored in Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals or Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You You Fall Down, affect the way we think about and write about illness, our own and others? Our reading into the emerging field of narrative medicine leads us to the possibility that the story we tell about an illness can in itself be good medicine. Possible guest lecturers: Siddhartha Mukherjee, Andrew Solomon, Sanjay Gupta, Jane Brody, Abigail Zucker, Jenny Allen, Dana Jennings, Susan Gubar, Suleika Jaouad, Robin Henig, Rafael Iglesias, Lionel Shriver, Katherine Bouton, Tom Page, Roger Rosenblatt, Rita Charon, Colm Toibin.