Friday, March 24, 2023, 7:30 PM
Third Space Reading Room
Free & open to the public!
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Are you ready to join Ohio’s most beloved MFA writing consortium? Well you’re in luck—we’d love to have you. It’s time to broaden your horizons.
In this class we’ll engage with creative nonfiction that takes a single person as its subject. We’ll consider portraits of mothers, lovers, brothers, artists, writers, and celebrities. We’ll render nonfiction that reaches beyond biography, gesture sketch, or memoir to something rangier—choosing curiosity, hybridity, and connection as our modes of inquiry. Students will engage in stylized portraits of their own including a final researched piece about a specific individual, and we’ll discuss how writing about another person with care and variation can reveal both universal conundrums and particular histories. Books will include Hilton Als’ My Pinup, Hanif Abdurraqib’s Go Ahead in the Rain, Jennifer Clement’s Widow Basquiat, Marie Darrieussecq’s Being Here Is Everything, Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, Anne Germanacos’ Tribute, Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother, and Jenn Shapland’s My Autobiography of Carson McCullers.
This course will look at the history of the prose poem and evolving present moment of the form, but it will primarily be a prose poem studio where we write and share and talk about our craft. We will read a select range of prose poems—from Baudelaire to current practitioners—while maintaining a focus on classmate writing. The course will include some real-time work with formatting of prose poems, and consideration of the many possibilities of the unbroken line. Prose poem studio welcomes writers from all genres, and will provide solidarity for those working in hybrid forms. Our philosophy will be one of experiment and play; no prior knowledge of poetry (or prose) required.
© 2021 NEOMFA
English Department
Cleveland State University
2121 Euclid Ave., RT 1815
Cleveland, Ohio 44115