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Black literature and media have long served as important sites of ecological thought and as blueprints for resistance to the combined matrices of imperialism, racialized dispossession, and extractivism. In exploring key works by Jamaica Kincaid, Derek Walcott, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, adrienne maree brown, Julie Dash, and others, we will unpack and complicate the idea of the human, and prioritize intersectional approaches to thinking with the violence of climate catastrophe. In so doing, we will approach ecology as both subject and method, and investigate possibilities for radically other futures outside the entrapments of racial capitalism and environmental degradation. While our course texts index the disastrous effects of racial capitalism and accompanying ecocide, they also chart different modes of thinking-living-acting where "Black livingness" (McKittrick) is a central aspect of ecology.

"Every word a woman writes changes the story of the world, revises the official version," is this what sets contemporary women writers apart? How can we understand the relation between the radically unprecedented material such writers explore and 'the official version'? What do we find compelling in their challenging of structure, style, chronology, character? Our reading- and writing-intensive seminar will dig into the ways women writers confront, appropriate, subvert, or re-imagine convention, investigating, for example, current debate about the value of 'dislikable' or 'angry' women characters and their impact on readers. While pursuing such issues, you'll write a variety of both essayistic and fictional responses, each of which is designed to complicate and enlarge your creative and critical responsiveness and to spark ideas for your final project. By affirming risk-taking and originality throughout our quarter, seminar conversation will support gains in your close-reading practice and in articulating your views, including respectful dissent, in lively discourse - in short, skills highly useful in a writer's existence. Our texts will come from various genres, including short stories, novels, essays, blog posts, reviews, memoir.

In this seminar, we will take a deep dive into the creation of short stories. You will come away from the course with an expansive sense of what goes into crafting a short story collection, from its earliest ideas to a fully realized book. Reading some of the most exciting contemporary fiction -- including work by Jhumpa Lahiri, Edward P. Jones, Carmen Maria Machado and Joy Williams -- we will examine each story as a model for inspiration and imitation. Through weekly writing prompts and in-depth discussions, we will explore and practice how writers build nuanced and multi-dimensional characters, sharp and believable dialogue, sustained suspense and other techniques essential to writing powerful short fiction. We will read a variety of short story collections, with each week centered around a specific topic, including World Building and Ghost Stories. Some weeks the author will visit the class, giving us the unique chance to analyze their work with them, and to learn about the craft and life of a working fiction writer. Fulfills short story literature requirement for the Minor in Creative Writing and the Creative Writing Emphasis in the English Major.

This class will serve a twofold function. It will introduce students to a basic, aesthetic understanding of the short story form. This will involve weekly reading of masterful examples of the form, in-depth discussion of the stories and how they work, and workshop critiques of student work. Over the course of the quarter we will also consider the place of Native fiction within the larger tradition, and how it works, the ways it is the similar and the ways it might be different, and of course how different Native writers have dealt with the set of problems specific to them both as citizens of tribal nations and as artists who must consider and respond to the pressures and expectations typical to colonized peoples. By the close of the course students will have gained a foundational vocabulary and aesthetic perspective that will allow them to reflect on the short story form, and move forward as writer should they feel so inclined. Note: While this course will at times take a POV that allows for discussions particular to Native peoples, it is not an explicitly political course. This class will greatly benefit anyone who wants to begin their training in the discipline of fiction. Note: Students will not be allowed to join this class after the first week of the quarter