12 research outputs found
ENG 149A Intro to Creative Writing Autman Fall 2023
Creative writing is an act of liberation and imagination that allows the writer to invent new worlds, and to say the unsayable. This Intro to Creative writing class is a gateway course to a suite of classes that allows you to become an English Writing major or minor. This semester you will write poems, fiction and nonfiction. While the three genres sometimes overlap. A poem can have dialogue or use prose. Sometimes the line between fiction and nonfiction can seem porous. Readers of fiction often wonder, âHow much of this is based on the writerâs life?â Conversely readers of nonfiction wonder, âHow much of this is embellished?â All prose utilizes scene, dialogue, description and narration. Poetry can do all that and more. Good writing is good writing. My approach to teaching literature is two-pronged. Itâs primarily a practice-based model, by which I mean you learn by repetition and practice. You can read about riding a bicycle, but until you are sitting on a bike, you are in the world of theory. However, writing without immersive reading becomes hollow. Social media culture trains us to skim quickly and not marinate in texts.
In this class I encourage you to print out the readings, most of which are on PDFs and made available to you freely on Moodle. Circle words. Diagram. Make notes in the margins. You are what you read. When you donât read, it shows up in your writing. You get good at what you practice. In this class I want you to shut your phone off and disappear from this world, and commune with text. Write and read and write
ENG 245A Narrative Technique Autman Fall 2023
Human beings are wired for stories. Our species has told stories since the beginning but in the last two decades storytelling has exploded across genres and platforms. As we moved from oral to printed stories, books and the printed word reigned for the longest. The arrival off radio, film and television in the 20th century set the stage for what we are experiencing now. Never has it been easier to find stories of all kinds. This semester weâll be demystifying and analyzing what makes up effective narrative. They call it narratology, which is the study of narrative structure. Narratology looks at what narratives have in common and what makes one different from another. That will be our chief work this semester, examining written, visual and oral narratives.
Over the course of the semester you will read, critique and analyze news stories, literary pieces, podcasts, books, TV shows and at least one movie adaptation. For each of these you will always respond to what the writer-director-producer did with the story. This is very different from writing about the content per se. Everything in creative life is a decision.
Your job is to think critically through what the content creator decided to do, not so much respond to what you liked or not. This is the key to every assignment. If you were writing about that film, youâd refer to her by name and focus your comments on what she as the director did. Smart papers are 300-500 word responses to what you read with an eye on the creative decisions
The Train Rolls On
Transcript:
Whenever the freight trains comes through Grady, Arkansas, where my maternal family originates, the windows, tables and kitchen tops shake as the locomotive makes it way. The noise could be so deafening conversations television shows are interrupted by the rat-a-tat-tat of the engines. More than once the train woke me while I was sleeping at Aunt Freddie Maeâs house.
When my sister Chung and I were small children, we spent the summers from 1974 until 1983 running around barefoot on Gradyâs red dirt roads playing with dozens of our first cousins. Going down South meant riding 412 miles from St. Louis to Grady to where Mama grew up.
As the crow flies, Grady is 22 miles south and east of Pine Bluff in the middle of Lincoln County, a town of 523 souls. Cotton gins and John Deere tractors litter the landscape. Cotton, rice, and soybean fields claim more than three-quarters of Gradyâs land, an atmosphere where rats and snakes always thrive. Chung and I were so busy playing with cousins and partaking with the feeding of pigs, chickens and cows, I never realized just how tiny Grady was.
But it was always the train that arrested my attention.
The trainâs thunderous vibration revealed something in my sisterâs brain. At about 6 years of age, sheâd stick an index fingers in each ear and run down the road. My cousins and I chased her, early signs of mental illness.
Routinely the freight trains stopped on the railroad tracks preventing our family from getting to their jobs in the fields or at the saw mill in Pine Bluff. Aunt Louise told me that in the 1950s and 1960s she and her siblings often crawled underneath the train to get to the school bus.
My grandfather, Roy, got so irate at the train once, he climbed up waved a revolver at the conductor and yelled: âYouâve got five minutes to move this goddamned train out of the way.â
The train moved.
Cousin Travis told me that once he was dreaming of wrestling with his dead grandfather when the 3 am came through. In the middle of the confusion, he jumped through a window and woke up outside covered in blood and glass.
My family had learned to live with the trainâs racket. Sometimes conductors waved.
We stopped going in 1983. Aunt Freddie Mae died in 1991.
In the early 2000s, the federal government extended Interstate 530, effectively cutting Grady off the map. Nearly everything closed â the schools, furniture stores, bank, even the gas station closed for a while.
As the town died, Grady became a place to attend funerals. My grandparents, great grandmother, Aunt Freddie Mae, Aunt Verla, and several cousins died. The relatives who remained alive most of them have moved away. My sister moved into a care facility for the mentally ill.
The further I get away from those Grady days, the more I long for the boy running after his sister who was spooked by the train. At family gatherings in Dallas and Atlanta, we all stand around talking about how life was in Grady.
In February 2011, I dreamt I was standing on the dirt road in Grady, Arkansas, and I heard a loud voice say, âThe trains will no longer ride through Grady.â Two days, my beloved grandfather died at 94.
Perhaps the saddest train story happened to my uncle Arvan, the third oldest of the boys of my motherâs eight siblings. In late November 2013, he was trying to make it over the track when the train clipped his car, killing him. On the day of his funeral, the train company parked a single red engine to park outside Damascus Missionary Baptist Church.
In the summer of 2014, I took a video camera and smartphone to capture these images of the train and the town. Grady hovers over death but wonât cross over, yet the train keeps coming through each day.
In âTwo Trains,â the late poet Tony Hoagland writes:What grief it is to love some people like your ownblood, and then to see them simply disappear;to feel time bearing us awayone boxcar at a time
ENG 322A Autman Fall 2023
The term âhermit crab essay,â coined in 2003 by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola in their book Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction, refers to essays that take the form of something un-essay-likeâsuch as a recipe, how-to manual, or marriage licenseâand use this form to tell a story or explore a topic. The human story becomes the hermit crab borrows a form or shell to express itself. In the last twenty years the form has exploded blurring the lines between fiction and nonfiction. Also called âborrowed form.â This class is a meditation on repurposing familiar forms through research, imagination and craft. We are surrounded by so many forms we take them for granted. Some examples include the Bible or any sacred text, song lyrics, phone books, newspaper articles, obituaries, resumes, class schedules, dating profiles, government documents such as the U.S. Constitution, famous speeches like Abraham Lincolnâs âGettysburg Addressâ or Dr. Martin Luther King Jrâs, âI Have a Dream,â screenplays, scripts, letters, directions on board games and how-to-manuals are just a few. As we delve into the material you are going to hopefully see infinite possibilities at your fingertips. Once you start over laying your narratives onto borrowed forms you may strangely find a liberty in the forum. It feels counterintuitive. My goal is to open your imagination to nonfictionâs greater possibilities.
For years Dinty W. Mooreâs essay âSon of Mr. Green Genes,â showcased in the textbook, became literary catnip for my students. Itâs called an abecedarian or an alphabetically arranged essay. His unconventional memoir Between Panic and Desire is mostly experimental essays. He famously says âDonât make shit up.â That doesnât mean we canât invent within the confines of truth. Invention is different from fabrication. While fiction and nonfiction have clear distinctions. In the end good writing is good writing. Our textbooks push boundaries but are clearly nonfiction. We will always push up against that line. Hopefully by end of the semester you will be exploding with new approaches and ideas you can pursue in nonfiction, and the worlds of form around you become a creative oyste
Wonder Boys in Sweeter Voices Still: An LGBTQ Anthology from Middle America
The middle of America--the Midwest, Appalachia, the Rust Belt, the Great Plains, the Upper South--is a queer place, and it always has been. The queer people of its cities, farms, and suburbs do not exist only to serve as blue dots within red states. Every story about a kid from Iowa who steps off the bus in Manhattan, ready to finally live, is a story about a kid who was already living in Iowa. Sweeter Voices Still is about that kid and has been written by people like them. This collection features queer voices you might recognize--established and successful writers and thinkers--and others you might not--people who don\u27t think of themselves as writers at all. You\u27ll find sex, love, and heartbreak and all the beings we meet along the way: trees, deer, cicadas, sturgeon. Most of all, you\u27ll find real people -- Back cover
âBlack Body Snatchersâ in It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror
Twenty-five narrative essays by contemporary LGBTQ writers reflecting on queerness in horror film, from Hitchcock to Halloween to Hereditary -- Provided by publisher
Mother\u27s Tongue in The Best of Brevity: Twenty Groundbreaking Years of Flash Nonfiction
Book Description: How much of the human experience can fit into 750 words? A lot, it turns out. Since its founding in 1997, Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction has published hundreds of brief nonfiction essays by writers around the world, each within that strict word count. Over the past 20 years, Brevity has become one of the longest-running and most popular online literary publications, a journal readers regularly return to for insightful essays from skilled writers at every stage of their careers. Featuring examples of nonfiction forms such as memoir, narrative, lyric, braided, hermit crab, and hybrid, The Best of Brevity brings you 84 of the best-loved and most memorable reader favorites, collected in print for the first time. Compressed to their essence, these essays glint with drama, grief, love, and anger, as well as innumerable other lived intensities, resulting in an anthology that is as varied as it is unforgettable, leaving the reader transformed. With contributions from Krys Malcolm Belc, Jenny Boully, Brian Doyle, Roxane Gay, Daisy HernaÌndez, Michael Martone, Ander Monson, Patricia Park, Kristen Radtke, Diane Seuss, Abigail Thomas, Jia Tolentino, and so many more, The Best of Brevity offers unparalleled diversity of style, form, and perspective for those interested in reading, writing, or teaching the flash nonfiction for