Course of Study for the Writing and Consciousness MFA
MFA in Writing and Consciousness Curriculum
This 48-unit degree results from two full-time years of coursework, which can be accomplished entirely through weekend intensive and online work, and culminates in completion of a book-length literary project. The curriculum offers students four different kinds of educational experiences: (1) Writing workshops, (2) Seminars on the Art of Writing, (3) Consciousness coursework and (4) The Artist in the World (professional development for literary artists).
8 Core Requirements:
Students complete required units in all four categories (Writing Workshop, Writing and Consciousness, The Art of Writing and Professional Development: The Artist in the World. Students can also choose to work more deeply in areas that provide them the most artistic growth and/or professional development. For example, students wanting to emphasize their academic development may take the maximum Writing and Consciousness units, while students focused on their careers may want to take the maximum Art of Writing and Artist in the World courses.
All students MFA in Creative Inquiry, Interdisciplinary Arts complete 18 units of Writing workshop (includes MFA workshop and MFA project).
I. Writing Workshop and MFA Project (18 units)
WRC 7093 MFA Workshop I (6 units)
WRC 7094 MFA Workshop II (6 units)
WRC 7712 MFA Project (3 units)
WRC 7712 MFA Project (3 units)
II. Writing and Consciousness** (6 units)
A. Required Courses
WRC 7081 Creative Inquiry for Writers: Writing and Consciousness (3 units)
WRC 7124 Contemporary Literature: Perspectives and Practices (3 units)
III. The Art of Writing* (9 units)
Select From The Following:
WRC 7087 Writing as Art: The Art of Text/Image (3 units)
WRC 7131 Poetic Forms: The Art of Poetry (3 units)
WRC 7138 Invention and Revision: The Art of Fiction (3 units)
WRC 7142 Recreating the Real: The Craft of Nonfiction (3 units)
* Students with interdisciplinary arts interest or experience can substitute some Art of Writing requirements for courses offered in the MFA in Creative Inquiry, Interdisciplinary Arts curriculum [See the “Interdisciplinary Arts Seminars” or “Arts Practice Seminars” sections of page 6].
WRC 8888 Special Topics (1-3 units)
IV. Professional Development: The Artist in the World (6 units)
WRC 7128 The Artist in the World: Preparing the Artist’s Portfolio (3 units)
CIA 7038 Interdisciplinary Pedagogy (3 units)
V. Electives** (9 units)
Select From The Following:
CIA 7301 Teaching Practicum (3 units)
WRC 7083 The Art and Craft of Teaching Writing (3 units)
WRC 7085 Editing and Publishing (3 units)
WRC 8799 Independent Study (1-3 units)
WRC 8888 Special Topics (1-3 units)
CIA 7218 The Artist as Administrator (3 units)
CIA 7301 Teaching Practicum (3 units)
CIA 7302 Community Arts Practice I (3 units)
CIA 7303 Community Arts Practice II (3 units)
** Students may also take up to 6 “Writing and Consciousness” and/or elective units from any graduate CIIS program with advisor approval.
Course Descriptions
MFA Workshop I (6 units)
This workshop focuses on learning to read as a writer, to write as a reader (of literature and life), to offer helpful and respectful responses to work in progress, and to challenge old habits and assumptions. This is a multigenre workshop, which inspires cross-fertilization of ideas and techniques. Participants bring in their most current and urgent writing for responses that support the writer, explore the nature and lineage of the work, and provide questions and suggestions for revision. The primary focus of this course will be the consideration of course participants’ work, but writing exercises and pertinent readings will further open us up to a wide range of aesthetics, voices, and artistic and craft techniques. The aim in this workshop is not to reach consensus, or to establish a particular aesthetic or set of rules, but to expand each writer’s self-awareness and capacity to develop a unique, extraordinary voice and body of work.
MFA Workshop II (6 units)
A follow up to MFA Workshop I, this course allows students to build on the skills and expertise of the first semester by offering a new perspective or approach. Students’ artwork continues to serve as the primary course text. Students also prepare for and respond to each other’ work, continue to work with outside mentors, keep online journals and read and reflect on texts from a variety of arts forms. But they also begin to focus on the development
of a body of their own work and their culminating project for this course is a plan for developing their MFA project.
Contemporary Literature: Perspectives and Practices (3 units)
This course asks students to engage modern and contemporary literature through the social, psychological and spiritual movements of the modern/post-modern eras. Making use of interdisciplinary perspectives, the course invites students to consider how new ideas, cultural events and social or technological developments have sparked or inhibited creative work and how/when/why art shapes or shifts culture.
Creative Inquiry for Writers: Writing and Consciousness (3 units)
In fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction, writers explore myths, dreams, reality and illusion, self-awareness and self-deception, and the awareness of awareness of inner and outer worlds. This core introduction to the study of writing and consciousness includes both imaginative works and historical and contemporary theories of mind: philosophical, psychological, and neuroscientific. Students will employ creative modes of inquiry—both academic and imaginative—in the analysis and synthesis of course texts with self-reflection, artistic self-discovery, and the collaborative transformation of community. The class will include in-class creative and analytical writing exercises; multi-disciplinary, multi-genre collaborative presentations; and a substantial critical reflection.
MFA Project (3 units x 2 semesters)
Developed over two semesters, participants work with a single faculty advisor throughout the year as they develop their thesis: a minimum of 70-100 pages of fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, or cross-genre work, and a substantial self-reflective essay.
The Artist in the World (3 units)
In The Gift, Lewis Hyde writes that, in the modern world, “works of art exist simultaneously in two ‘economies,’ a market economy and a gift economy.” Artists, writers, and performers all have additional tasks, beyond the making of the art itself: to find ways to survive emotionally and financially, to develop the ability to continue making art despite all the usual challenges of life, and to discover not only how they want to bring their projects into the public realm, but how they want to engage the world politically, socially, and imaginatively. Depending on student needs and interests, subjects covered may include artist’s statements; book proposals; CVs and cover letters; grants, fellowships, and residencies; emotional resilience in the face of the world’s responses to our art; and ways of identifying not only the types of day job that work well for different temperaments and skill sets, but also the agents, publishers, galleries, or performance venues most likely to be interested in a given artist’s work. This course will mix this practical information with a chance for participants to reflect on themselves, their learning, their creative processes, and how they want to use what they’ve learned in the future.
Requirements include 6 to 9 units of the following:
The Art of Poetry: Poetic Forms (3 units)
This class offers an intense survey of poetics designed to give writers more tools for approaching the sound, rhythm and adhesive nature of language, with attention to the strategies of contemporary experimental and avant-garde poetics. All writers, whether their primary modes are fiction, nonfiction, or poetry, benefit from the close study of language, sound, and image. Poets have actively used writing as a means to change our perceptions and society. From the disruptive mosaics of the modernists to the mathematical permutations of the oulipo, the avant-garde has sought change through the reshaping of form, thereby disrupting meaning’s tendency toward rhetoric and the curtain of its untruth.
Invention and Revision: The Art of Fiction (3 units)
In order to create writing that successfully engages with the world, we each need to invent our own approaches to the art of storytelling. In this methods/workshop course, students experiment with the imaginative possibilities of such narrative elements as traditional and alternative structures, points of view, language and imagery, complications of character, the handling of time, and significant detail. The class analyzes selections from a diverse,
international group of writers and texts—traditional and experimental, classic and contemporary, insider and outsider—in the process of expanding our tools and abilities as writers. Each writer’s unique vision, subject matter, and voice is honored and strengthened in the course of this work as participants discover the artistic implications of their own narrative choices and how these relate to the deeper meanings of their work.
Recreating the Real: The Craft of Nonfiction (3 units)
An in-depth study of the art and craft of nonfiction, including the personal essay, travel writing, the spiritual autobiography, social and political commentary, cultural critiques, stories of place and more. In our reading of both published essays and the work of participants, we will examine the methods, stylistic possibilities, and ethics of writing about real people and real situations and the boundaries of fiction/nonfiction. We will also consider the place of nonfiction in constructing a literary life, nonfiction as a persuasive tool for change, and the audiences for various kinds of nonfiction.
Writing as Art: Text and Image (3 units)
Much contemporary teaching about writing focuses on the writing process as a tool for self-discovery and personal growth or on writing as a process of effective communication. This course explores writing as an art process. We’ll examine the relationship between word and image in writing—and students will complete projects that allow them to develop writing as art objects and writing pieces that actively make use of aesthetic elements. Students develop and create various writing as art objects—such as postcards, visual/written maps, illustrated “books”, and boxes built from text and image.
