Tag: Teaching

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Teaching at Skillshare

I am excited to announce that my first creative writing class for Skillshare is now available! It is titled “Crafting Complex Characters (Quickly) for Short Fiction.”

From the class page:

Whether you’re writing a 400 or 4000-word short story, you need to know your protagonist’s tics, joys, and sorrows in order to create a believable connection with an audience. As such, the goal of this class is to provide writers of all skill levels with a quick and easy multi-part project designed to build a credible character in under an hour. By the end of this class, you will have not only a mini character bible, but will have also “spoken” with your character, which will assist you in choosing the right point-of-view for your story.

I’d love for you to take a look at the class, and Skillshare has provided me with a special link that will allow you to sign up for two FREE months of premium membership. This gives you free reign to take any class you want! Click here (or the picture above) for the link.

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The ever-evolving Intro to Lit reading list

Here’s what we’re reading this semester. A bunch of new titles because, frankly, I was getting bored:

  • Joyce Carol Oates, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”
  • Matthew Dickman, “Slow Dance”
  • Ernest Hemingway, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”
  • Mahtem Shiferraw, “The Monster”
  • Emily Dickinson, “Because I could not stop for death”
  • William Blake, “The Sick Rose”
  • ZZ Packer, “Brownies”
  • Anton Chekhov, “Oysters”
  • Wordsworth, “My Heart Leaps Up”
  • Edward P. Jones, “The Night Rhonda Ferguson Was Killed”
  • Elizabeth Alexander, “Tina Green”
  • Mary Ruefle, “The Hand”
  • Katherine Anne Porter, “Theft”
  • William Faulkner, “That Evening Sun Go Down”
  • Dorothy Parker, “A Certain Lady”
  • Edgar Allan Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart”
  • Lydia Davis, “For Sixty Cents”
  • Franz Kafka, “A Hunger Artist”
  • Flannery O’Connor, “Greenleaf”
  • Haruki Murakami, “The Second Bakery Attack”
  • Aimee Bender, “The Rememberer”
  • Alice Munro, “Meneseteung”
  • Carlos Fuentes, “Chac-Mool”
  • Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”
  • Marie Howe, “What the Living Do”
  • Lacy M. Johnson, “White Trash Primer”
  • Alexander Chee, “Girl”
  • David Foster Wallace, “A Ticket to the Fair”
  • Herman Melville, “Bartleby”
  • James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues”
  • Barbara Ras, “You Can’t Have It All”
  • Julio Cortázar, “Continuity of Parks”
  • Grace Paley, “A Conversation with My Father”
  • Jorge Luis Borges, “Borges & I”
  • Annie Proulx, “The Half-Skinned Steer”
  • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, “The Fortune-Teller”
  • Maggie Smith, “Good Bones”
  • Donald Hall, “White Apples”
  • William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow”
  • Jamaal May, “The Gun Joke”
  • Cynthia Ozick, “A Drugstore in Winter”
  • Shakespeare, “Macbeth”
  • Zadie Smith, “Joy”
  • Tomas Q. Morín, “Love Train”
  • Michael Oppenheimer, “The Pairing Knife”
  • John Cheever, “The Country Husband”
  • James Joyce, “Araby”
  • Yazmina Reza, “God of Carnage”
  • Lorrie Moore, “You’re Ugly, Too”
  • Ron Carlson, “Bigfoot Stole My Wife”
  • George Saunders, “My Flamboyant Grandson”
  • Wallace Stevens, “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”
  • Amber Sparks, “13 Ways of Destroying a Painting”
  • Kij Johnson, “26 Monkeys, also the abyss”
  • Joy Castro, “Grip”
  • Anton Chekhov, “Lady with the Dog”

Plus mystery stories for midterm and final.

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Random

Intro to Lit Reading List

I’m teaching a section of Introduction to Literature this semester, and a few friends asked about my syllabus. While I’m not going to bore anyone with such a dry document, I am willing to post the class reading list here, in (more or less) the order we’re discussing the work.

  • Matthew Dickman, “Slow Dance”
  • Joyce Carol Oates, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”
  • Marie Howe, “What the Living Do”
  • Ernest Hemingway, “The Killers”
  • Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”
  • ZZ Packer, “Brownies”
  • Kathy Fish, “Shoebox”
  • Anton Chekhov, “Oysters”
  • Gray Jacobik, “Skirts”
  • Denis Johnson, “Emergency”
  • Edward P. Jones, “The Night Rhonda Ferguson Was Killed”
  • Elizabeth Alexander, “Tina Green”
  • Mary Ruefle, “The Hand”
  • Abby Frucht, “The Empiricist”
  • Cynthia Ozick, “A Drugstore In Winter”
  • Raymond Carver, “Fever”
  • Robert Coover, “The Babysitter”
  • Richard Ford, “Rock Springs”
  • Haruki Murakami, “The Second Bakery Attack”
  • Jamaal May, “The Gun Joke”
  • James Salter, “Ahknilo”
  • Edgar Allan Poe, “Tell-Tale Heart”
  • Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”
  • Shirley Jackson, “Pillar of Salt”
  • James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues”
  • Lydia Davis, “Jury Duty,” “For Sixty Cents,” & “Traveling with Mother”
  • Richard Brautigan, “1/3, 1/3, 1/3”
  • Michael Oppenheimer, “Paring Knife”
  • William Shakespeare, “Macbeth”
  • Gary Gildner, “Fingers”
  • Randall Jarrell, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”
  • Anton Chekhov, “Misery”
  • Douglas Glover, “The Poet Fishbein”
  • Ron Carlson, “Bigfoot Stole My Wife”
  • Zadie Smith, “You Are In Paradise”
  • Dick Allen, “To a Woman Half a World Away”
  • Donald Hall, “White Apples”
  • Emily Dickinson, “There’s a certain slant of light”
  • Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”
  • William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow”
  • Quim Monzo, “Praise”
  • George Saunders, “My Flamboyant Grandson”
  • Annie Dillard, “This Is the Life”
  • Anton Chekhov, “The Lady with the Dog”
  • Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener”
  • Katherine Anne Porter, “Flowering Judas”
  • David Foster Wallace, “Consider the Lobster”
  • Brian Doyle, “Joyas Voladoras”
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Young Goodman Brown”
  • Julio Cortazar, “Axolotl”
  • Aimee Bender, “The Rememberer”
  • Carlos Fuentes, “Chac-Mool”

There are a few other pieces, but they’re part of midterms/finals, and I don’t want anyone snooping around to receive an unfair advantage, so I’m not including them here.