As the second required creative writing workshop for the MFA core curriculum, this course addresses diverse definitions and understandings of fact and imagination and how these figure into creative works. Students explore work by a number of contemporary writers for whom invention is spurred by, and in some cases supplanted by, research and even appropriation. Mapping a poetics of contemporary modes where fact and imagination intersect (through documentary poetics and conceptualism, to procedural writing) students develop a repertoire of techniques for grappling with the slippage between fact and imagination—a starting point from which to create.

This course provides students the opportunity to learn about publishing by serving as the editorial and production staff of Clamor, UW Bothell’s Literary and Arts Journal. Students gain skills in communication, assessing and editing literary texts, layout design, technology for creating and disseminating multi-media work, project management, and teamwork.

The goal of this workshop is to encourage students to see themselves as part of a larger conversation in contemporary poetry. We read recent books (the reading list changes each quarter) by writers who are pushing the boundaries of the lyric poem as part of the dialogue surrounding the place of the “personal” in poetry, including a range of experimental approaches, from typographic and visual methods that perform on the page, to “somatic exercises” that make bodily performance part of the act of writing, to persona and constraint poems that allow the poet to speak in another’s voice. In considering what the various forms of their writing enable these poets to do, we lay a foundation for talking about what we each want to do in our writing.

This introductory class asks students to examine how writers, historically and across genres, create a self in literature, whether through confession, persona, unreliable narrator, pastiche, or any number of devices. Students learn to develop regular writing habits, read one another’s work generously, and cultivate an engagement with language and sense of play. They also ask fundamental questions about the nature of self and self-representation in art.

The goal of this intermediate writing workshop is to encourage students to see themselves as part of a larger writing community, both at the Institute and beyond it. To that end we emphasize revision, reading contemporary work, attending readings, and collaborating with peers. Students work in groups to curate a web-based chapbook of contemporary writers, write and present weekly poems, and respond to recently-published books by younger poets.

This class explores the way artists and writers have historically used visual approaches to text for social, political, and aesthetic ends. Taking poetry as our case study, we examine visual writing practices from a historical and cross-cultural perspective to ask what is at stake in the mediation and remediation of text. Students engage in both critical reading and analysis of texts and hands-on creative projects.

This workshop investigates the theory and practice of new media poetry, exploring the idioms inherent in the technologies through which poetry can be created. Each week we examine works of digital poetry, tracing their aesthetic principles across the arts to see them in relation to historic and contemporary work. Students create their own work in response to these pieces, which we discuss using a taxonomy of terms generated by our exploration of other texts.