Literature & Creative Writing   

This creative writing workshop helps you refocus, reimagine, and reinvigorate your life through writing from prompts and discussion designed to employ imagination and insight. Participants can write in any genre they wish, and no writing experience is necessary. The course will give you the space and encouragement you need to enhance your creativity and your life. Writing tools and ideas to continue your work in class and inspire further discovery will be offered.

A century ago, Somerset Maugham was one of the world’s most highly esteemed and commercially successful authors. More recently his reputation has fallen, and Maugham has become of greater interest to biographers, novelists like Tan Twan Eng, and, for our purposes, a class of experienced readers re-examining his work after many years. We will read and discuss ten of Maugham’s best-known short stories, including “The Letter” and “Rain.”

Each class session will read and explain key sections of The Divine Comedy. These key sections and some plot summary will allow us to work our way through the whole of Dante’s magnificent poem. All along the way, we will be looking at and talking about works of medieval art that will allow us better to understand Dante’s meanings. Outside reading of The Divine Comedy will not be required, although it would, of course, add to the experience.

First published in 1922, T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land” is widely regarded as one of the most important English language poems of the 20th century. Lines of the poem have developed lives of their own and regularly appear in books, media, and conversation. But the whole poem can seem quite daunting. This class will guide readers through “The Waste Land,” with the goal of understanding its historical significance and parsing its multiple meanings. Each week, we will examine a section of the poem, considering the multiple references and biographical details Eliot wove into each stanza, and discussing the impact of the poem on readers who stand on the other side of the 20th century.

This course is an introduction to the Nobel Prize winner’s writing style and major themes though a sampling of his short stories and two of his most fabled novels: The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls. Many of his other works will certainly come up in the discussions and some of the then-contemporary film adaptations could be added, time permitting.

We will discuss two of Jane Austen’s most popular novels, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. Through close attention to Austen’s impeccable style, we will learn to appreciate the breadth of her literary skills. Austen engages her readers’ sympathies with a panorama of charming, multidimensional characters as she chronicles their struggles with the customs and traditions of English life. At the same time, Austen’s wicked wit enables her to dissect those characters and the world they inhabit, as she skewers everything that her social world held sacred.