Spring 2025 Courses At a Glance
WR-320-01 Fieldwork – We 2:00 PM 4:50 PM – Adrian Shirk
WR-320-02 Poetry By Strange People – Mo 5:00 PM 7:50 PM – Maria Damon
WR-320-03 Thematic Screenwriting – We 2:00 PM 4:50 PM – Donald Andreasen
WR-320-04 Whose Future? – Th 5:00 PM 7:50 PM – Christopher Perez
WR-320-05 Autofiction – Tu 5:00 PM 7:50 PM – Claire Donato
WR-320-06 Genre Bending – We 5:00 PM 7:50 PM – David Gordon
WR-320-07 Writing On The Arts – Th 5:00 PM 7:50 PM – David Gordon
WR-320-08 Publishing Lab:Ubiquitous – We 5:00 PM 7:50 PM – Alysia Slocum Laferriere
WR-320-09 Sex Drugs and Rock and Roll: Writing in Extremis – We 2:00 PM 4:50 PM – Max Ludington
WR-320-10 Fabric Book – Mo 2:00 PM 4:50 PM – Sofi Thanhauser
WR-320-11 Songwriting – Mo 5:00 PM 7:50 PM – Sofi Thanhauser
WR-320-12 Ghosts In The Machine – We 10:00 AM 12:50 PM – Samantha Hunt
WR-320-13 History and Practice of the Writers’ Walk -We 10:00 AM 12:50 PM – Rachel Levitsky
WR-320-14 Plays and Movies – Tu 10:00 AM 12:50 PM – James Hannaham
WR-320-15 Postcolonial Travel Writing – We 10:00 AM 12:50 PM – James Hannaham
WR-320-16 Homework: Reading and Re-reading Black Feminist Literature – Mo 2:00 PM 4:50 PM – Sharifa Rhodes–Pitts
WR-320-17 First Chapters: Start Your Novel – Tu 5:00 PM 7:50 PM – Gabriel Cohen
WR-320-18 Body Horror: Abjection as Craft – Fr 10:00 AM 12:50 PM – Dianca Potts
WR-320-B1 Berlin Fieldwork – Christian Hawkey
WR 325A – Prattler Workshop II – Mondays 9:30 – 12:20 – Eric Rosenblum
WR-320-01 Fieldwork
We 2:00 PM 4:50 PM
Adrian Shirk
This course is designed for BFA Writing students who choose to pursue an independent fieldwork project that relates to an area of professional or artistic development that they want to gain new skills and experience in. Fieldwork allows the student to design a semester-length project with the supervising instructor in light of the students’ goals, which otherwise aren’t reflected in an existing course or internship. These projects may range from starting a literary journal, publishing project, podcast, video series, event, community arts workshop, collaboration with a local organization, performance production, specific form of professional development through research and mentoring (i.e. agenting, running a nonprofit, developing a business plan, etc), and many other possibilities. (All students who wish to register for this course must contact the instructor and declare the specific content and scope of their project for approval).
Similar to Internship/Seminar, this course asks: What can we learn from a fieldwork project if we treat it as an alternative type of classroom? How can we analyze and engage with our experiences “out in the field” with the rigor and curiosity we bring to other kinds of texts? Viewed this way, the fieldwork project becomes an educational opportunity that allows us to gain experiential knowledge about a particular professional, artistic and/or material sphere, and from which we can determine the kind of work-life conditions we will need as writers/artists, now and in the future. However, in even more ways than Internship / Seminar, this course offers self-reflexive assignments that reflect the project’s progress, and a journal that allows students to look critically and constructively at the content of their lives and work “outside” of their conventional classrooms, specifically pertaining to the parts of their lives that the fieldwork overlaps with.
At its core, this course offers a guided professional exploration while students carry out the labor of their independent fieldwork project. The class is designed around a seminar model with two primary goals: 1) to enable students to get the most out of their own projects as modes of education; and 2) to foster communication between students about their experiences and the fields/skills/vocations they are exploring, so that each comes away with a more nuanced picture of the variety of professions, experiences and choices available to writers in the current culture and economy. Above all, this course asks students to engage critically with their experiences and to complete specific self-styled projects based on the professional and creative inquiries / excursions they’re undertaking, resulting in a significant final project that stands as a measure of their fifteen-week activity.
WR-320-02 Poetry By Strange People
Mo 5:00 PM 7:50 PM
Maria Damon
If, as Allen Ginsberg proposed performatively with the publication of “Howl” in 1956, an animal scream can be a poem, what else can a poem be? If, as Stephen Henderson proposed in Understanding the New Black Poetry, James Brown is a poet, who else is a poet? We will read unorthodox work by people acknowledged as writers and people who have made their names (if indeed they have) in other ways. Opal Whiteley, Will Alexander, Sun Ra, Minou Drouet, Hannah Weiner, Cecil Taylor, John Wieners, Ernst Herbeck are some possibilities, though I am open to other work people might want to bring to the table. While there is no good term for what could be called “outsider writing,” the strange effects wrought by the cross between brilliance and unorthodox intellectual wiring makes for a potent brew for which it may be useful (or not?) to develop an analytical language. The wider category, provisionally considered “micropoetries,” comprising found but also non-human and asemic phenomena, will also be studied.
WR-320-03 Thematic Screenwriting
We 2:00 PM 4:50 PM
Donald Andreasen
In this course, we will examine and explore a theme-based approach to screenwriting while developing character and plot to make stories resonate. This approach (also called non-linear storytelling) allows you to expand your creative tool set to maximize your protagonist’s inner journey, so that it connects with audiences. This course also concentrates on streamlining scripts, ridding scripts of exposition and editing scripts in much greater detail for a “tighter” and more focused script – in other words, eliminating the unnecessary yet enhancing visual impact. In the first half, we will write short scenes in order to explore and develop various aspects of screenwriting. In the second half, we will work on and develop a script for a short film approximately 7-15 minutes in length. Throughout the semester students will read and discuss their work in class along with screenings and discussions of various films and topics.
WR-320-04 Whose Future?
Th 5:00 PM 7:50 PM
Christopher Perez
When writing about science fiction, Samuel Delany explains, “Events that have not happened are very different from events that could have happened, or the fantastic events that could not have happened.” This course will explore science fiction writing and the state of subjunctivity a writer has at their disposal when envisioning far away or perhaps not so distant futures. How can science fiction speculate where we’re going? And what might science fiction offer us as writers for imagining how we might navigate aspects of gender, race, class, and other social relations in the future? In this course, students will write multi-genre science fiction works with careful attention to, and assessment of, the present, along with a capacious vision of the future. Possible readings include Samuel Delany’s “About 5,750 Words,” Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ “M Archive,” Jorge Luis Borges’ “Library of Babel,” Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild,” Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, Sun Ra’s poetry, Rita Indiana’s Tentacle, films including Isadora Neves Marques’ The Bite, Frances Bodomo’s Afronauts, and more.
WR-320-05 Autofiction
Tu 5:00 PM 7:50 PM
Claire Donato
Coined in 1977 by French writer Serge Doubrovsky, the term autofiction describes writing that combines the autobiographical and the fictional—or “Fiction, d’événements et de faits strictement reels; si l’on veut autofiction” (“Fiction, of strictly real events and facts; autofiction, if you like”). The term burgeoned via Doubrovsky’s experiences in psychoanalysis, and from the existential suffering entwined with trying to explore and articulate the self. Though the term originates in French letters, autofiction has, over the past decade, gained traction in the United States—think of Sheila Heti, Teju Cole, Ocean Vuong, and Ben Lerner. It is debated and discussed, celebrated and maligned as a mauvais genre (bad genre), and has provoked many questions about literary self-representation from the modern to the digital age. This course will focus on autofiction as it relates to its historical and global contexts, and to the present-day Publishing Industrial Complex. We will consider autofiction’s intersection with the rise of cringe culture, psychoanalysis, the Internet, ethics and more. Is autofiction a new genre, or is it simply an age-old process of trying to fictionalize—and liberate—the self?
WR-320-06 Genre Bending
We 5:00 PM 7:50 PM
David Gordon
This course is an exploration of genre – crime, mystery, sci-fi, horror and others – and of writers who blur the lines between high and low brow, pulp and art, avant-garde, literary and popular culture. We will consider genre works that were first considered “pulp” or merely “popular entertainment” but have since been accorded high-art and serious literary status, as well as “advanced” work, (literary, high-art, avant-garde, experimental) that draws on these lower regions. The emphasis is on the ways writers and other artists can use these forms, styles, topics to create their work, the ways they cross “genre” lines, combine elements, and blur boundaries between high and low, and on discovering the ways in which it can feed our own writing. Class will combine close examination and discussion of the readings and film screenings with written responses and work-shopping student submissions. Writers and artists include: Simenon, Poe, Lovecraft, Delaney, Ross McDonald, Octavia Butler, PK Dick, Highsmith, Hitchcock, Murakami, Nabokov, Borges, Himes, Spark, the Coen Brothers and more.
WR-320-07 Writing on the Arts
Th 5:00 PM 7:50 PM
David Gordon
From critical journals like New York Review of Books or The Drift, to general interest publications like New Yorker or The New York Times, to the ever-changing world of blogs and websites and podcasts, arts journalism is an expansive field with a long history that is constantly evolving. This course will explore critical and journalistic writing on culture and the arts – literature, music, art, film and more. Students will read and analyze examples from writers such as Hilton Als, Patricia Lockwoood, Manohla Dargis, Howard Fishman, Lester Bang etc., as well as trying their own hand at short pieces in various forms like the review (positive/negative), the profile, the interview and a longer, reflective essay on subjects of their choice. Pieces will be workshopped and edited. Visitors will be announced along with a possible group trip to view, and then write about, an event. Readings are subject to change.
WR-320-08 Publishing Lab:Ubiquitous
We 5:00 PM 7:50 PM
Alysia Slocum Laferriere
Publishing Laboratory: Ubiquitous will introduce each student to the creative and editorial process of generating Ubiquitous, a literary and arts magazine with an over 30 year history at Pratt Institute. The literary magazine’s aim is to publish original works from the Pratt Institute community in areas of poetry, prose, visual arts, and design. The course will culminate with one published issue, with each student serving an editorial role.
WR-320-09 Sex Drugs and Rock and Roll: Writing in Extremis
We 2:00 PM 4:50 PM
Max Ludington
Sex, intoxication, physical and emotional pain, trauma, violence, mortal fear, spiritual revelation, romantic obsession. These are just some of the extreme experiences that have fascinated writers and readers since stories have been told. Whether positive or negative, these episodes map the depths and horizons of human experience and give us raw insight into our nature. How do we learn to translate those experiences into good writing without becoming melodramatic or overwrought? Great writers have grappled with that question, and have found answers that we can learn from. Students will be asked to draw upon some of their own most extreme experiences in order to find ways to use them in fiction or memoir. Also, we’ll discuss the process of imagining extremes without actually undergoing them. We will read writers past and present, and study them as models. Writers on the syllabus will include: Denis Johnson, Hunter Thompson, Carmen Maria Machado, Jennifer Egan, Edward St. Aubyn, Joyce Carol Oates, and Joy Williams.
WR-320-10 Fabric Book
Mo 2:00 PM 4:50 PM
Sofi Thanhauser
From medieval tapestry and Navajo weaving to contemporary artists like Louise Bourgeois and Keith Smith, textiles and language have an interwoven history that students in The Fabric Book will explore as makers and as theorists. We will read weavings as texts, explore 20th century artists books that use fabric as a substrate, and produce original works that employ modern digital fabric printing technologies alongside more traditional binding, weaving, dyeing, and printing techniques. Research into historic, economic and conceptual ties between text and textiles will fuel our own creative discoveries as we delineate and produce work within a canon that is unfolding in real time.
WR-320-11 Songwriting
Mo 5:00 PM 7:50 PM
Sofi Thanhauser
The tradition of Western literature begins with song. Scholars believe that Homer composed the Iliad and the Odyssey as part of the lineage of lyre-accompanied epic song, and Greek tragedy is believed to have evolved out of choral music performed for the god Dionysus. In this course we will explore songwriting as a contemporary practice that has roots in some of the most ancient forms of storytelling.
In addition to exploring traditions of songwriting–from Bertolt Brecht to Dolly Parton–students will compose a series of songs, and work collaboratively to explore different methods of accompaniment, both electronic and analog. We will also discuss various means of recording music, performing music, and notating music. Guest speakers will include songwriters, and people working in different aspects of the music industry, including independent record labels, and digital distribution. We will explore venues for live music performance today, as well as casting a critical eye on changes in music distribution and financialization, imagining new futures for the song as a form of communal literature.
Expertise in singing, musical notation, or playing an instrument are not required, just a willingness to experiment and participate in a supportive, judgment-free environment.
WR-320-12 Ghosts In The Machine
We 10:00 AM 12:50 PM
Samantha Hunt
What story isn’t a ghost story? How do we write what is un-writable? While the dead are in everything we do, they are also nowhere. Where do the dead live? How are we haunted by ancient systems that no longer serve the people who support them? This writing course will investigate questions about the unearthly, the disembodied and the pursuit of mystery in our own writing. We will read both traditional and non-traditional ghost stories that range from the terrifying to the trickster to the tearful. We will write our own new ghost stories.
WR-320-13 History and Practice of the Writers’ Walk
We 10:00 AM 12:50 PM
Rachel Levitsky
Writers are famous walkers and walking is a famous practice for writers. In this elective we will read writing on walking and from walking, and we will study and practice contemporary non-ableist adaptations on “the walk”. For each text we read, we will take a walk, and we will produce some sort of text. Texts will be multi-form and will include mapping, collage, video, performance and straight up text on the page. Walks will be made accessible for all bodies and minds.
WR-320-14 Plays and Movies
Tu 10:00 AM 12:50 PM
James Hannaham
In this class, students will read plays and film scripts out loud, occasionally in goofy voices. No acting skills are required, but reading skills will be appreciated. Please be eager to embarrass yourself. Some of the scripts will have been written by known playwrights and screenwriters, others will be written by you. We may read transcripts of real events. Some of the movies will have been made by professionals, some of the movies will be made by you. A portion of the material will be suggested/chosen by the class. As we read, we will also do research. Before we make movies or finish plays, we will read and revise scripts. The final project will be a short play or a short film made by you. There might be special guests.
WR-320-15 Postcolonial Travel Writing
We 10:00 AM 12:50 PM
James Hannaham
In our postcolonial world of war, repression, and migration, the ability to move freely from one country to another is a privilege enjoyed by few. Some developing nations depend on tourism to survive, while at the same time, large portions of their populations may be fleeing to wealthier nations. New ways of both seeing the world and “seeing the world” have emerged: ecotourism, voluntourism, danger tourism. Air and combustion engine travel are harmful sources of carbon emissions—how, and how quickly, can these methods of travel change? Space is even a potential destination for some tourists. How much should travel journalism be “service” journalism, aimed at consumers? We will explore these ideas and more through reading and writing about travel in both historical and contemporary contexts. Maybe we can even figure out how to take a class trip somewhere, or report on our individual spring break journeys.
WR-320-16 Homework: Reading and Re-Reading Black Feminist Literature
Mo 2:00 PM 4:50 PM
Sharifa Rhodes–Pitts
In Living a Feminist Life Sara Ahmed says “feminism is homework because we have much to work out from not being at home in a world. In other words, homework is work on as well as at our homes. We do housework. Feminist housework does not simply clean and maintain a house. Feminist housework aims to transform the house, to rebuild the master’s residence.” For a long while I’ve wanted to read and re-read certain texts I first encountered at home, where my mother’s bookshelves were filled with the novelists, poets and essayists from the 1970s and 1980s flowering of black women’s literature. I have a lot of gratitude that I didn’t have to go searching for these texts, they were foundational to the world that had been prepared for me. Understanding tradition to be the work has been done for us, so we can get with what must come next, this seminar will read and re-read literature and criticism from the black radical feminist and womanist tradition, including: Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, bell hooks, Barbara Smith, June Jordan, and Ntozake Shange among many others. All are welcome, whether you are reading or re-reading. Field trips, notebook tending and cups of tea will comprise the homework we will do together.
WR-320-17 First Chapters: Start Your Novel
Tu 5:00 PM 7:50 PM
Gabriel Cohen
Every novel has to hook the reader within the first few pages. How do you get a strong story rolling? How do you establish your characters and their world? We’ll take a look at a number of different opening strategies through reading excellent first chapters from published authors. Students will write the opening chapters of their own novel, and get detailed feedback. We’ll also discuss how to push on and finish a whole book.
Gabriel Cohen is the author of a literary novel, four crime novels, and a nonfiction book, and was a finalist for an Edgar Award. He has written freelance journalism and essays for the New York Times, Poets & Writers, TimeOut New York, and many other publications. He is in his 14th year of teaching at Pratt, and has also taught writing at New York University, the Center for Fiction, and Long Island University. He worked as a staff writer at the New Haven Advocate weekly newspaper, and was profiled in the New York Times for publishing three different genres of books from three different publishers in one year.
WR-320-18 Body Horror: Abjection as Craft
Fr 10:00 AM 12:50 PM
Dianca Potts
Through a diverse selection of creative works, revelatory prompts, and engaged discussion, students will collectively explore the possibilities of abjection, body horror, and the sensory as generative and analytical praxis. Students will unearth and excavate new ways to invoke and center the body through narrative design and experimentation with form. Throughout this course, students will be encouraged to uncover new approaches to their creative practice and spark the cultivation of new works and approaches to revision and craft. Participants will also learn how to incorporate artifacts, new media, and theory into their work to further excavate, channel, and conjure new thresholds and topographies within their writing. Together, we’ll uncover the narrative potential of what disturbs, rattles, and haunts. Students will engage with works by Natalie Diaz, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Cameron Awkward-Rich, Claire Cronin, Jennifer Reeder, Audre Lorde, Julia Kristeva, Barbara Creed, Michelle Garza Cervera, Rachel Yoder, Agustina Bazterrica, and more.
Please note: This course addresses topics that may be distressing to students. These topics include horror, body horror, and literary and cinematic depictions of horror (metaphorical and literal). Students who feel uncomfortable with listed course content may wish to notify their professor. Students may also wish to access Pratt Institute’s mental health resources throughout the duration of the course for help with dealing with topics covered by the course
WR-320-B1 Berlin Fieldwork
Christian Hawkey
Berlin Fieldwork invites students to explore their practice and professional goals by pairing them with an outside organization or cultural institution in Berlin. Berlin is a city with numerous reading series, cultural centers, bookstores, magazines, writers, and activist organizations, many of which operate across numerous languages, including English. This is your chance to get hands-on experience in a chosen literary and/or professional field.
WR-325B Topics in Journalism: Journalism Workshop: Prattler II
Eric Rosenblum
Mondays 9:30 am – 12:30 pm
This course is intended to familiarize students working on the Prattler with all aspects of generating, editing and designing the content of the school magazine, as well as the managerial skills required to coordinate such efforts. Most classes take the form of editorial meetings, and multiple writing assignments will be required of all students, pertaining to their respective functions in the production of the magazine.
Practice:
Publishing Lab: Ubiquitous
Writing on the Arts
Plays and Movies
Postcolonial Travel Writing
Songwriting
Fabric Book
First Chapters: Start Your Novel
Thematic Screenwriting
Prattler II
Inquiry:
Homework: Reading and Re-reading Black Feminist Literature
Autofiction
History and Practice of the Writers’ Walk
Ghosts In The Machine
Genre-Bending
Sex Drugs and Rock and Roll: Writing in Extremis
Poetry by Strange People
Body Horror: Abjection as Craft
Writing Lives Pathway:
Fieldwork
Publishing Lab: Ubiquitous
Internship/Seminar
Prattler II
The Art of Teaching Writing