Danielle Dutton

How can writers approach a topic as vast as the Anthropocene, the sixth great age of mass extinctions in which human industry has become a catastrophic environmental force? How can our writing reflect and reimagine what critic Timothy Morton has called “hyperobjects”: concepts or entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions (climate change, plutonium, Styrofoam, the Everglades, etc.) that we have a hard time describing them? How can the “slow violence” of climate change or the tangled networks of global capitalism be represented in narrative or poetic forms? Can something written in human language ever give a just voice to non- human species? Is there a way to write about the ongoing environmental crisis of the Anthropocene that also preserves space for human agency—and perhaps even hope? This class is co-taught by members of the literature and creative writing faculties; our thinking will be hybrid and eclectic, and you will be invited to practice both critical and creative writing throughout the course. We will engage work by writers and artists such as Karen Tei Yamashita, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Wanuri Kahiu, Cecilia Vicuña, Ursula K. Le Guin, Amitav Ghosh, Donna Haraway, Jeff VanderMeer, etc. The final weeks of the course will be devoted to workshopping your own creative and/or critical writing of the Anthropocene.

In this class we’ll explore intersections of prose/fiction and the visual, from illustrated manuscripts to stories about visual artists and visual art by writers. We’ll look at excerpts, essays, novels, drawings, collage, and/or paintings by people like Renee Gladman, Mariko Nagai, Sofia Samatar, W.G. Sebald, Francis Bacon, Paula Rego, and John Keene. How might a story act like a photograph or move like an installation? How might forms of visual art--a diptych, the nude--inspire the forms in which we write? Throughout the semester, students will create writing that is in some meaningful way steered or shaped by the visual (be that description, ekphrasis, illustration, a story about standing in front of a painting in a museum trying to decide if you should kiss your date, etc.). Our investigation will be driven less by a thesis than by a generative inquiry into the many ways a purposeful intersection of art forms can open up expressive possibilities.

Fiction 1 serves as an introduction to writing fiction, and as any writer will tell you: to write well you must also read well. Therefore, in addition to attending to your own stories, we’ll read an array of published stories—from Herman Melville's 19C "Bartleby, the Scrivener" to Octavia Butler's 20C "Speech Sounds" to stories by young writers working today—seeking to understand how and why they work. This might sound like a simple task, but I’d like to suggest that it’s actually hard to do. We often read as consumers (thumbs up/thumbs down), but working to get inside something to try to understand it (be it a painting, a novel, or another person’s way of thinking), means opening ourselves to this new thing and the ways in which it might change us. It requires generosity, curiosity, and patience. You’ll likely encounter writing in here that you find frustrating, as well as work you immediately like, but your visceral response, while natural, is not ultimately what we’re after. Our aim is to figure out what makes stories work, what their words, sentences, or paragraphs are doing to us as we read. In short: we will read as writers, looking at the choices different writers have made within the short story form. On a practical level, we’ll talk about elements of fiction—plot, character, setting, etc.—and you’ll experiment with these in your writing.