Teaching

A cultural studies course aimed at the critical investigation of the production, manipulation, and distortion of narratives on the internet. Students achieve “digital fluency” by being Extremely Online and researching the social and political forces that influence the creation of disinformation on the internet. Students then produce and exhibit creative work made in response to their findings.

In addition to studying the famously odd novella form, this workshop aims to introduce students to the hybrid digital/analog work, challenging them to use digital creation methods such as Twine, Twitter, memes, geocaching, podcasting, and even software like Microsoft PowerPoint to complete their novellas.

A nonfiction course and workshop in longform literary journalism designed to analyze works of “New-New Journalism” (i.e. contemporary creative nonfiction in the tradition of writers like Joan Didion, James Baldwin, and Tom Wolfe). Students write one piece of longform literary journalism and host a forum for questions about the ethics of reporting. Notable guests in Spring 2020 included Rolling Stone critic Kiana Fitzgerald, Things We Didn’t Talk about When I Was a Girl author Jeannie Vanasco, and New York Times reporter Ben Mauk.

In this workshop, students use creative writing to explore queerness in every sense of the term, from themes of gender and sexuality to digital subversions of analog works to narrative hybridism. Students engage with works of all forms by queer authors, from the printed word to the Twine game to the audio poem, and then produce queer art of their own. Writers read include Audre Lorde, Leslie Feinberg, James Baldwin, Jos Charles, and Porpentine.

Students study polyphony in fiction by reading contemporary polyphonic novels like Tommy Orange’s There, There, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and Zadie Smith’s NW. Students workshop three chapters of a novel-in-progress featuring at least three distinct narrators. At the conclusion of the workshop, students are required to map out an outline for the completion of their novels.

Students read writers like Fran Ross, Charles Yu, Mona Awad, and George Saunders to learn more about absurdity, conflict, irony, and point of view in humor writing. Students then use ridiculous prompts – which can range from writing a funny shopping list to a deranged interior monologue – to work on creating funny, genre-bending stories of their own.