EN 314.01 Creative Writing Workshop (Summer 2011: 3)
Fulfills Cultural Diversity requirement.
This writing workshop will take place in Mussoorie, India. It will focus
heavily on questions of location and dislocation. Writing can be seen as
a complex negotiation between what we know and what we imagine, what we
see and what we project or interpret. Such negotiation is greatly intensified
for the person "out of place" --a condition that one, as a traveler, chooses
to inhabit. Travel experience to the Himalayan Mountains will provide the
group with abundant cultural, geographic, and ecological material to draw
from and write about, but distance will also produce a fresh encounter with
the concept of "home." In --Questions of Travel," Elizabeth Bishop wrote,
"should we have stayed at home,/ wherever that may be?" She seems to suggest
that home becomes less knowable, rather than more, as a function of the
journey. These are rich matters to investigate as writers, and we will explore
location and dislocation through three forms: nonfiction narrative, poetry,
and fiction. The seminar will require several types of work: pre-travel
reading, journal keeping (notes from guest talks, readings, and excursions),
writing in different forms, group workshop, and revision. Students will
finish the course with notes for future writing, drafts in process, and
a portfolio of finished work.
Elizabeth Graver
Last Updated: 03-OCT-11