ADVANCING CONSTRUCTIONS OF THE 21ST-CENTURY SHORT STORY

What formats, forces, and social understandings affect tendencies and expectations in modern innovative short fiction and what to do now? Are short stories short enough? Students evaluate current trends and experiment through stimulating exercises.

Craig Wright (Professor of Creative Writing (Fiction) at SOU, author of the short story collection Redemption Center, songwriter, and current Pushcart Nominee for “The Things Other People Do”)  

$950 

 NOIR 

 A mood, a mystery, a desperate character: noir begins in the shadows and veers into the dark heart of human deception. Bring a working manuscript or start from scratch—all genres are welcome in a hard-boiled workshop with investigations of exemplary texts, from film noir to American neo-noir. 

Robert Arellano (Associate Professor of Creative Writing at SOU and author of six novels including the 2010 Edgar finalist Havana Lunar: a Cuban Noir)

  $950

21ST-CENTURY POETRY AND THE INHERITANCE OF EXPERIMENTALISM

What does contemporary poetry owe to the innovations of twentieth-century movements like Dada, Oulipo, and Language Writing? How is it changing? Is poetry more or less equipped to counter increasingly potent modes of negation, cooptation, and absorption by capitalist culture? 

K. Silem Mohammad (Associate Professor of Creative Writing (Poetry) at SOU and author of Deer Head Nation, Breathalyzer, and The Front)

 $950

VISITING WRITERS

Vanessa Place

Of Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman’s Notes on Conceptualisms, Mary Kelly said, “I learned more about the impact of conceptualism on artists and writers than I had from reading so-called canonical works on the subject.” Kenneth Goldsmith has called Vanessa Place’s work “arguably the most challenging, complex and controversial literature being written today.” Considered a leading practitioner of conceptual poetry, Place is also a critic, criminal defense attorney, and co-director of Les Figues Press. Place lectures and performs internationally. 

Sharon Mesmer

Sharon Mesmer’s recent poetry collections are The Virgin Formica (Hanging Loose) and Annoying Diabetic Bitch (Combo Books). Other collections include Vertigo Seeks Affinities (Belladonna), Half Angel, Half Lunch (Hard Press) and Crossing Second Avenue (ABJ Press, Tokyo). A selection of her poems will appear in the forthcoming Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. Fiction collections are In Ordinary Time and The Empty Quarter (Hanging Loose) and Ma Vie à Yonago (Hachette, in French translation, 2005). An excerpt of her story “Revenge” appears in I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing By Women (Les Figues). Music writing and book reviews can be found in the Brooklyn Rail. A two-time NYFA fellow and Fulbright Specialist, she teaches at NYU, the New School, the Poetry Project and online for the Chicago School of Poetics.

Kevin Killian

Kevin Killian, one of the original “New Narrative” writers, has written three novels, Shy (1989), Arctic Summer (1997), and Spreadeagle (2012); a book of memoirs called Bedrooms Have Windows (1990); and three books of stories, Little Men (1996), I Cry Like a Baby (2001), and Impossible Princess (2009). He has also written two books of poetry, Argento Series (2001), and Action Kylie (2008). With Lew Ellingham, he has written on the life and work of Jack Spicer, and (with Peter Gizzi) he has edited My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer  (Wesleyan UP, 2008). He has written forty plays for the San Francisco Poets Theater, including Stone Marmalade (1996, with Leslie Scalapino), The American Objectivists (2001, with Brian Kim Stefans), and Often (2001, with Barbara Guest). Recent projects include a collaboration with artist D-L Alvarez (The Visitor Owl, a hybrid film/live action performance staged at SFMOMA this summer); Nude, a book of poems with images by artist Ugo Rondinone; and Tagged: Variations on a Theme, Killian’s intimate photographs of poets, artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers and students.