English 523 The Revision Workshop
M 4:00-6:30
Spring 2005
Greg Martin
Office: Humanities 257
Office Hours: T/TH 2:00-3:30 and by appointment
Phone: 277-6145
E-mail: gmartin@unm.edu
Course website: www.unm.edu/~gmartin
This is a writing workshop focused on revision. Unlike previous sections of 523, which balanced the reading of published work and workshopping, this Spring, the class will focus exclusively on workshopping and revising. Each student will write two new pieces of creative nonfiction, and the class will workshop each of these pieces three times. The goal of the course is to push you to produce more than you thought you could, to break down what Jane Smiley calls “evasion strategies.” The structure of the class is designed so that week after week, you’ll be pushing your work to its elastic limits, so that no piece is allowed to lie dormant. Perhaps in the past, after workshop, you’ve told yourself that you need to just let a piece “rest,” so that you can “ponder” it, and come back to it after awhile. Then a month goes by and you wouldn’t recognize the piece if it passed you on the sidewalk. That won’t happen in this class.
The particular subgenre of creative nonfiction you may turn in to the workshop is wide open: Autobiographical Narrative (an essay that looks a lot like a short story); a Lyric Meditation (a more “classic” Montaigne-like essay that is structured associately, like a poem; Travel Writing; Literary Journalism. It's all fair game.
Because of the structure of the class, (and because I know each of you), my assumption is that you have some grounding in creative nonfiction, and so the few readings for discussion in class will be limited to essays on craft. At the same time, each student will pursue their own course of reading throughout the semester, with my guidance, with an emphasis on emulation and imitation. You will read Stephen Koch's book (on your own schedule), and you’ll pick other books and essays to study closely. Throughout the semester, you will write in a "journal" your reflections on how this reading is influencing your work. At the end of the semester, you will give me ten pages from this journal (typed.) It's not a formal essay, or a craft annotation, or a "paper" of any kind. It's an influence reflection. Write it for yourself, in the way that feels most comfortable to you. (But I get to read ten pages of excerpts--no more.) The only requirement is that it should be focused on craft, on your deliberate stalking of the essays and books you're reading, and what they're teaching you. If you read, for example, just two books, over and over and over, the entire semester, that's fine with me.
Like any course in creative nonfiction, this is a writing workshop that focuses on how both memory and forgetting shape us, and shape our writing about real lives and events. We will explore that blurred boundary where memory is both fiction and truth, and where memoir is both truth and invention. We will also explore the real obligations that memoirists have to real lives: to their subjects, and to their readers, to the “truth” (whatever that is). And in all this, we will explore how craft technique informs and guides. Nabokov, in Speak, Memory, writes that the true task of autobiography is the following of thematic design, of pattern and order, through one’s life. We will be seeking those patterns, attempting to make larger sense, to see how our personal lives participate in the human condition.
My hope is that the course will push you stylistically and technically, and encourage you to take emotional risks, to write what you could not have written before, to raise your standards for what you consider good writing, and then to meet those standards through the development of the habit of art.
Six creative nonfiction drafts: 2 separate pieces, three drafts each (60%)
Important note #1: the writing that you turn in to workshop must be, in some recognizable way (more on this) memoir or literary journalism. (No fiction.)
Important note #2: Some of you are working on booklength projects, and so will not be turning in pieces that stand alone at 10-25 pages. Fine. If so, make sure to provide at the beginning of your workshop submissions a single spaced paragraph or so of the background your readers will need to give you feedback.
Peer Responses: (30%) 1-2 page, typed, responses for each of your peer’s manuscripts submitted for workshop. These peer responses are to be distributed to me, and to the author of the workshopped piece, on the day the work is discussed. These responses should focus on what you take to be one of the work’s deeper concerns, its situation and story, your thoughts on how the essay is evolving, draft to draft, as well as suggestion for revision.
Influence Reflection (10%)
Try to think of the workshop as a tentative process of helping the writer make this piece better, or as is often the case, make a future piece better. Everything we say will be wrong, or partial, or skewed by our own aesthetics. You will hear startlingly different analyses of your work from the class. Writing is not democratic, and you can’t possibly listen to all the voices in the class. Go away from the workshop with the reading that is most helpful to you. Choose, as your favorite critic in the class, the peer who seems most in sympathy with your work. Then make friends with that person, get together outside of class, share your work, and drink caffeine. Good workshops always extend beyond the classroom.
1. Manuscripts are due at specific times. You need to deliver copies of your work, for each of your peers and for me, one week before you are to be workshopped. There is no flexibility in this scheme. The workshop’s effectiveness depends on the timely distribution of your work. Late essays will not be workshopped. You have been charged a $20 fee for the course towards photocopying for workshop using the department's kind, able workstudy students. Your memoir should be given to the department secretary to be stamped and dated at least 48 hours before you need to distribute your work to the class. If you cannot meet this deadline, Get thee to Kinkos!
2. Essays should be typed, double-spaced, numbered, 12pt font, with one inch margins, on one side of the page, with no cover pages, and bound. Also include: your name, the course number and section, my name, the date, the title.
3. Correct grammar, usage, punctuation and spelling are expected. A piece flawed by pervasive proofreading or mechanical errors will be graded down.
4. Attendance and participation are mandatory. If you miss class more than twice it will affect your grade—the more absences, the greater the effect.