- Trainer*in: Katharina Maria Kalinowski
Writers’ Space: Craft (Creative Writing/Artistic Research)
This class is dedicated to the study and practice of elements of craft in literary writing, including structure, character, setting, dialogue, point of view, dramatic arc, tone, theme etc. It is addressed to students who wish to hone and expand their writing and imaginative skills as well as their text comprehension and analytical competencies through creative writing practice in dialogue with critical reading.
How is writing made? How do words on the page create meaning and produce effect? How does writing and how do we as writers, through our craft decisions, engage with stories, cultural/literary expectations, audiences, and genre conventions? We will address and respond to these and other questions through creative practice, in-class writing prompts and exercises, interrogation of our practice, discussion, close reading, and textual analysis of sample material from fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and drama. Classes will be mainly held as workshops; as shared acts of imaginations and spaces in which we focus on artistic practice and talk about writing as process.
The class is open to students with and without previous experience in creative writing. Students enrolling in this course will be required to share creative writing in class, reflect on their artistic practice, engage with the creative work of their peers and the creative/critical reading material, and participate in class discussions. The aim is to explore and expand the possibilities of what we can do with our writing and where we can take it; to make conscious what may start out as unconscious and thus increase our range and versatility as readers, writers, and critics.
- Trainer*in: Katharina Maria Kalinowski
Beyond Nature Poetry: Ecopoetics (Creative Writing/Artistic Research)
Critically examining anthropocentric and sentimentalist traditions of "nature poetry", this class offers an immersive, practical, and theoretical engagement with ecopoetics: an array of creative and critical interdisciplinary practices concerned with human/more-than-human entanglements, ecopolitical challenges, and environmental destruction in the contemporary present. As persisting romanticised and commercialised ideas of Nature as an idyllic realm detached from the human are in need of critique, so are writing and thinking modes that build on and thus risk reproducing these ideas. Exploring the intersection of poetry and ecology, we will investigate how experimental, non-traditional poetic approaches can productively challenge narratives of human mastery over nature and respond to ongoing alterations of our surroundings from a point of interconnectedness. Linked to this is an ongoing critical-creative inquiry into language and how it is used to make connections to “the fragile and infinite territory our species named, claimed, exploited, sentimentalized, and aggrandized as ‘our world.’” (J. Retallack, 2007)
The creative writing we will engage with and develop in this class will thus be guided by questions concerning innovative ecopoetical form, interactions between language and the physical-material world, disruptive lyric, human/more-than-human encounters, environmental destruction, and socio-ecological/economic relations. Discussing (eco)critical theory, poets such as Joan Retallack, Gary Snyder, Rita Wong, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, and our own creative/artistic practice, we will explore the capacity of ecopoetics to reflect on, reinvent, and reimagine the power dynamics between humans and what we refer to as "nature", curated by language.
- Trainer*in: Sonja Frenzel
Dwelling in Crisis: How to Write Climate Fiction (Artistic Research)
We live in precarious times, when the ever-accelerating environmental emergency has long become an undeniable fact of our daily existence. This ubiquitous crisis carries the sense of apocalypse as well as the potential to re-think our present and to re-tell our future. Above all, it compels us, as human beings, to adapt.
In this seminar, we will explore the notion of "crisis" from three angles:
1) Creative writing exercises will offer inspiration on how to articulate experiences of "dwelling in crisis" in anticipation of an apocalyptic ending and/or the potential for more sustainable futures. By the end of this seminar, students will have written a full short story (revised draft).
2) As literary example, T.C. Boyle's most recent novel Blue Skies articulates crisis both on the global scale of climate change and in the localised experiences of its three main characters' personal catastrophes. Our critical reading sessions will explore this work for its potential to "write climate fiction" in our contemporary day and age.
3) As critical background, the cultural-theoretical essays in Frederick Buell's "From apocalypse to way of life: environmental crisis in the American century" compile pertinent and concise insights into contemporary experiences of "dwelling in crisis". Our analytical reading sessions will explore ways and means of bringing together environmental, societal and political, as well as cultural experiences of crisis.