Literature & Creative Writing   

We will read and discuss ten stories from A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker. Participants need not have taken either of the earlier courses based on this anthology. This final round of stories will include some classics by Shirley Jackson, J.D. Salinger, and Annie Proulx.

Course Materials:  A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker, 1925 - 2025 by Deborah Treisman

Caribbean women writers have reshaped contemporary literature with explorations of identity, history, migration, and belonging. This course introduces new and experienced readers to the literature in selected short works by writers Jamaica Kincaid, Rosa Guy, Claudia Rankine, Ramabai Espinet, and Merle Hodge. We will explore thematic themes of brief readings that will be provided. The emphasis will be on shared reflection and dialogue to discover how much we as a people have in common in our day-to-day lives, regardless of cultural upbringing.

In a world filled with strife, violence, and division, these short stories transcend “national boundaries to comment on the most prevailing aspects of the human condition.” They attempt to redefine the borders of the world we live in by recognizing the conflicting issues of race, language, economy, gender, and ethnicity which separate and limit us. The stories reflect on these beautiful, but at times chaotic and tragic, renditions on the human experience.

Course Materials: One World:A Global Anthology of Short Stories. Edited for New Internationlist by Alan Hughes. ISBN: 978-1-906523-13-8

This course provides an introduction into Eastern European literature. We will explore the area from Austria to western parts of Russia. Discussions will include a look at key historical events, genre types, common motifs, and literary movements.

Cultures shine through the cracks of experience: moments of transformation that illuminate times, places, and peoples. Moments like death. The Japanese tradition dignifies poems that respond with candor and clarity, not despair. These pieces prize brevity and restraint—verse as an ordered response to perfect stillness, long understood as a consummation, not an ending. Emphasizing craft rather than grief, we will see Buddhism, Shinto, ritual honor, and samurai ethics in Japanese culture, past and present, in poetry on the edge.

Course Materials: Japanese Death Poems, ed. Yoel Hoffmann. Approximately $11.00 on Amazon. ISBN13: 978-1462916498. Other materials will be available as PDFs.

Step into the vibrant worlds of five legendary storytellers—without leaving your living room. This course explores the lives and works of Mark Twain, Margaret Mitchell, Charles Dickens, the Brontë Sisters, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Discover how Twain’s wit, Mitchell’s sweeping Southern epic, Dickens’s unforgettable characters, the Brontës’ gothic passions, and Conan Doyle’s clever mysteries were shaped by their times and imaginations. Each week blends biography, history, humor, and lively discussion.

This course reads the Miss Marple novel The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side alongside several Poirot and Marple short stories, all of which involve poisoning. Through a combination of lecture and discussion, the course will explore questions about Christie’s contexts and her relevance today. Why was poison Christie’s favorite murder weapon? How does learning about poisons enrich our reading experience? How does Christie anticipate modern concerns about fame, celebrity, drugs, and privacy? Is there more to Christie than just finding out whodunit?

Course Materials: The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, by Agatha Christie. Amazon $11.48 paperback/ $0.00 Kindle Unlimited

This course delves into the novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932), which is considered a masterpiece of dystopian literature because it seemed to predict major historical turns of the 20th century. Members will learn about an imaginary worldstate in which people are engineered to love their society and their own places in it. We will read the novel against a backdrop of questions about happiness, ideal communities, the impact of new technologies on humanity, and whether human freedom is always merely an illusion.

Course Materials:  Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley.

This course explores the grit, heat, and heartbreak of the American steel industry through two seminal works of labor literature: Thomas Bell’s Out of This Furnace and William Attaway’s Blood on the Forge. We will examine how the mills acted as a crucible, melting down old identities, whether European immigrant or Southern sharecropper, and forging something new, though often at a devastating human cost.

Course Materials: Out of This Furnace, by Thomas Bell. ISBN: 978-0822952732.

                             Blood on the Forge, by William Attaway. ISBN: 978-1590171349.

Whether you are writing a memoir or fictional novel, experienced or a novice, there are certain elements that must be considered as necessary for an effective presentation of the written word. In this course, those elements of good writing will be revealed, and you will have an opportunity to purge your fear of the blank page and write. With exercises during each class that will inspire, you will have the opportunity to improve your writing as you learn to eliminate even the most subtle issues that writers face and will help you at every stage take your writing to a higher -- and more successful -- level.