Sample Residency Presentations in Fiction

Stonecoast offers a uniquely rich residency curriculum of classes, panels, lectures, presentations and discussions, presented by Stonecoast faculty along with selected alumni, current students, and visiting writers. Presentations relate to all aspects of creative writing, from expert publishing advice to detailed explorations of the writing craft. from literary analysis to punctuation, from writing about race and class to balancing writing and family. Some presentations are cross-genre in nature, while others are specific to one genre. Here are some recent presentations focusing on issues in fiction.
 

The Erotic Pen: Writing, Seriously, About Sex

Elizabeth Searle

Fiction takes us inside the skins of our characters-- and what more fascinating time to slip into those skins than during our characters' most intimate and luminous experiences? This seminar is not about writing 'erotica' but about writing erotic scenes in character-driven literary or popular fiction. In the seminar, we will explore (through discussion and examples) the joys and frustrations, of attempting an honest vivid depiction of sexuality. Writers covered will include: James Salter, Maria Flook, Gustave Flaubert, Toni Morrison, Carole Maso, Steve Almond. Our reading will be Elizabeth Benedict's THE JOY OF WRITING SEX, which is full of excellent examples from a variety of writers and which offers fine advice not only about writing sex scenes but about writing in general. If inspired to do so, students are encouraged to bring to the seminar brief (under 1 page) examples of erotic writing they love.

Required Reading:
Elizabeth Benedict, The Joy of Writing Sex (paperback, Henry Holt, 2002). Read especially chapters 1-3

Perfectly Reliable: Narrative Tension in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day

Lewis Robinson

Please join me for a dissection of Ishiguro's addictive narrative strategy. We'll explore how the author builds a story around a first-person narrator who is both wonderfully particular and haplessly clueless. Using close readings of specific passages, we'll divine the book's driving tension, and we'll consider how the same strategy can be applied to our own work. Ancillary topics include how to make your reader feel incredibly brilliant and emotionally heroic and more evidence supporting the theory that point-of-view is EVERYTHING.

Required Reading:
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

Suggested Reading:
Richard Ford, The Sportswriter
Mark Hadden, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Writing About the Fantastical in Literature: Anne Carson’s Mythic Obsessions in Autobiography of Red

David Marshall Chan

Borges, Kafka, Calvino, Gogol and many other writers are known for incorporating elements of the fantastical and extraordinary in their literary work: basements housing other dimensions, office workers who transform into cockroaches, noses that come alive.  In this seminar we will investigate how some contemporary writers have approached fantastical elements in their writing, looking specifically at Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse, a book steeped in the extraordinary and arguably the writer’s best known work.  In retelling a Greek myth about a red winged monster and contemporizing it into a modern day coming-of-age story, Carson employs a number of interesting narrative strategies, particularly in the book’s opening sections where the story’s framework is established.  The book also raises the question of how an author goes about portraying their obsessions in their writing.  Carson was over forty years old and well established as an academic when she began publishing creative work, and she makes use of her extensive knowledge of the Greek classics in this novel.  While one innovative aspect of this book is how it is both a novel and a poem, this seminar will focus on particular narrative strategies for portraying fantastical elements in contemporary (non-genre) literature, and we will also discuss how other authors (including A.S. Byatt, Kelly Link, Haruki Murakami, and George Saunders) have presented fantastical elements such as monsters, animated corpses, UFOs and aliens, and haunted houses in their literary creations.

Required Readings:

Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse

Suggested Readings:

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Aleph”

A.S. Byatt, “The Thing in the Forest”

Kelly Link, “Stone Animals”

Haruki Murakami, “UFO in Kushiro”

George Sanders, "Sea Oak"

Transcending Seeing for Setting

Aaron Hamburger

Our first instinct as writers is to think of settings in purely visual terms. However, the way we experience a sense of place in life is much more complex than the things we see.  Setting is also about the other four senses:  taste, touch, smell, and hearing, as well as issues like the effects of money, cultural values, nature, time, and process.

In this class, we’ll take a close look at excerpts from White Noise by Don DeLillo, the story “Brokeback Mountain” by Annie Proulx, the essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” by David Foster Wallace, and the first chapter of The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum to explore how a variety of authors use setting as an integral part of their stories.  We’ll consider how setting is intimately involved in other elements of fiction, like plot and character.  Then we’ll do some directed writing exercises to expand our skills at creating a lifelike sense of setting in our own fiction.  

Suggested Readings:

Don DeLillo, White Noise (the first chapter)

Annie Proulx, “Brokeback Mountain”

David Foster Wallace, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”

L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz (the first chapter)

Get Obsessed and Stay Obsessed

Lewis Robinson
 
What makes “a writing life”?  In her essay “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” Adrienne Rich suggests the following: “To write poetry or fiction, or even to think well, is not to fantasize, or to put fantasies on paper.  For a poem to coalesce, for a character or an action to take shape, there has to be an imaginative transformation of reality which is in no way passive.  And a certain freedom of the mind is needed—freedom to press on, to enter the currents of your thought like a glider pilot, knowing that your motion can be sustained, the buoyancy of your attention will not be suddenly snatched away.  Moreover, if the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at that moment.”  In this class, we will consider the challenges and rewards of dedicating a life to writing, paying special attention to the zeal of writers such as Rich, Steven King, Francine Prose, Anton Chekhov, Richard Yates, Monica Wood, and John Irving.
 
Suggested Readings:
Anton Chekhov, A Life in Letters
Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer
Stephen King, On Writing
Blake Bailey, A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates
Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” (from On Lies, Secrets, and Silence)

Opening Gambits

Elizabeth Searle

What makes for great first paragraphs and pages?  How, in your all-important novel or story openings, do you seduce your reader, cause them to fall through the page?  And then to turn the page? How have great writers like Virginia Woolf, James Salter, Joyce Carol Oates and Dennis Lehane handled the openings to their major works?

In a mix of lecture and discussion, we will explore together some effective fiction openings and determine their common factors.  We will focus on novel openings but also discuss some stories.  Then, in quick brainstorming in-class exercises, students will analyze their own most troublesome openings.

Students are asked to bring along (not to be read aloud) one of their own first pages. If inspired, they should also bring along (to be read aloud) one of their all-time favorite novel or story first lines.

Suggested Readings: 

Douglas Bauer, The Stuff of Fiction, “Openings”

David Huddle, The Writing Habit; “Mystery and Method”

Debra Spark, Curious Attractions, “Beginnings and Endings”

Return to Fiction Genre Page

Related Links:

About The Fiction Curriculum

Fiction Faculty

Visiting Fiction Writers

Sample Fiction Residency Presentations

Alumni Profile