Description
This course provides students with the ability to explore and develop practices that engender creative poetry and prose, in ways that are most consonant with their particular writerly goals and interior landscapes of "art and ardor", per author Cynthia Ozick. Through perspectives furnished by insightful peer critique and discussion of sublimely artful works, students will garner the ability to better analyze and enhance their own writing. The course will engage students with elements essential to exemplary, original, dynamic, and unforgettable writing: nuanced character development, compelling point of view, plot structure that itself becomes a literary language, and ways of cultivating both inspiration and effective writing routines and rituals, which together forge completed creative works from their inception as glimmers within the imagination. We will also banish the naysaying phantoms that haunt even the most celebrated writers. As the semester progresses, we will increasingly foc