English 389: Special Studies in Craft: "STUFF: THE SHAPE of THOUGHT"

In this craft workshop, we'll consider how language functions as shelter, portal, firework, bramble, bridge, wormhole, soufflé, fissure, stallion, willow, trapdoor, or river, among other possibilities. Ah, the glorious sentence! Like artists, architects, or chefs with words, we'll design and create compelling works to share. Weekly reading and writing exercises will celebrate the art of syntax, diction, patterns, rhythm, etc. to illuminate how form informs sense (in poetry, fiction, hybrid, memoir, essay, flash, and fragment); we'll map ways toward meaning, diagramming, unpacking gifts of grammar, playing with punctuation's potential! Grounding abstraction in the stuff of life, we'll notice methods, and powers of natural and constructed archetypes, to explore how language affords us opportunities to translate and enact thought's semblance. We'll contemplate composition, locomotion, and song as we seek models in animal, mineral, and vegetable realms, drafting with intention to locate, wild, and refine our own voices, aesthetics, and ideas. We'll read widely across time and space, savoring sentences and styles of many writers from Maxwell, Woolf, and Márquez to Robinson, Doer, Ausubel, and Le Guin; from Dickinson, Hopkins, and Moore to Hayes, Schiff, Park Hong, and Philips; from Orah Mark, Leach, Davis, and Gladman to Gay, Kapil, Alsadir, and Dungy.