Would you take this course?

Creative Writing (08C:023:SCC), Wednesday, 7:00 pm - 9:30 pm in 424 North Hall.

Do you like your art a little rough around the edges? Uncomfortable even? This course focuses on the poems, fictions and non-fictions that are hard to swallow. Through reading, writing and discussion (lots and lots of discussion) we will tackle the places and spaces our writing veers towards when no one else is looking. Using Frank Stanford’s epic masterpiece “The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You,” as a source text, we will learn to control these urges and to use them in artful and insightful ways while also discovering our unique voices and the methods with which to insert them into the wider conversation that is creative writing. Grades will be based on participation and final portfolio.

Required texts:

The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, Frank Stanford, ISBN 0-0918786-50-9.

Additional handouts supplied by instructor.

*They decided to go with option 1-------------------------------------------------------------------------

8C:098 Poetry Writing (rejected)

…and reading, and re-writing, and dialogue, and finally, poetics. This course is designed around the idea that poetry isn’t just the poem, but an on-going conversation. We will read books. We will discuss books. Then, we will write books. Over the course of the semester you will be asked to write, shape and present you very own chapbook. Also, you will be asked to assist others in writing, shaping and presenting theirs. Ultimately, this course will help you to enter the conversation, not with a series of disconnected interjections, but with a sound, cohesive statement. Grades will bases on participation and chapbook.

Required texts:

The Singing Knives, Frank Stanford, ISBN: 978-0-918786-55-5.

Creation Myths, Mathias Svalina, ISBN: 978-0-9791501-9-7.

Twentieth-Century American Poetics, Dana Gioia, David Mason, ISBN: 0072414723

Additional handouts supplied by instructor.

U of I asked to come up with a few course descriptions...these are the classes I've been dreaming of teaching, and teaching in my dreams.

*update