Registration for Summer 2024 classes opens March 28. Please read the following announcements carefully:
- We are offering some classes in-person and some classes via Zoom. Please read all course descriptions carefully before registering.
- To ensure that students receive individual attention from the instructor, enrollment is limited. Enrollment for all in-person classes is limited to 10 students.
In-Person Classes
Lang 371: Writing the Five Senses: A Prose Workshop
Instructor: Heather Newton
CRN: 30106
Meets in person at the Reuter Center
Thursdays, 6:00-8:30pm: 6/6, 6/13, 6/20, 6/27, 7/11
Sensory details enrich fiction and nonfiction and are crucial to depicting character, setting and tone, yet writers often fail to give much attention to senses other than sight. In this class, we will explore all the senses: sound, smell, touch, taste and sight. You will learn how to select sensory details that are both original and instantly familiar to the reader, while avoiding clichés. We’ll look at examples of sensory details well rendered on the page, and do in-class exercises and prompts to get you thinking more deeply about how to give each sense its due. Come prepared to write!
Heather Newton’s novel The Puppeteer’s Daughters (Turner Publishing 2022) has been optioned for television. Her short story collection McMullen Circle (Regal House 2022), was a finalist for both the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award and the W.S. Porter Prize. Her novel Under The Mercy Trees (HarperCollins 2011) won the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award, was chosen by the Women’s National Book Association as a Great Group Reads Selection and named an “Okra Pick” by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance. She teaches creative writing for the Great Smokies Writing Program and Charlotte Lit, and is co-founder and Program Manager for the Flatiron Writers Room writers’ center in Asheville. For more information, visit her website.
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Lang 371: Flash Memoir Workshop
Instructor: Lori Horvitz
CRN: 30104
Meets in person at the Reuter Center
Wednesdays, 6:00-8:30pm: 6/5, 6/12, 6/19, 6/26, 7/3
Writing flash memoir is a great way to practice the craft of writing memoir, a form that requires you to explore a deeper story within a limited number of words. It forces writers to be attentive to the most essential details in order to unearth a deeper meaning (a “flash” of insight) in their work. All sessions will include in-class writing, structured critiques, and discussion of published texts.
Lori Horvitz is the author of two collections of memoir-essays: Collect Call to My Mother: Essays on Love, Grief, and Getting a Good Night’s Sleep and The Girls of Usually. Her personal essays have appeared in a variety of journals, including Under the Sun, Hobart, South Dakota Review, The Laurel Review, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Hotel Amerika. Professor of English at UNC Asheville, Horvitz has been awarded fellowships from Yaddo, Cottages at Hedgebrook, VCCA, Ragdale, Blue Mountain Center, and Brush Creek. She holds a Ph.D. in English from SUNY Albany, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College.
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Lang 371: From Panoramas to X-Rays: Point of View and Narrative Strategy in Fiction
Instructor: Alex McWalters
CRN: 30105
Meets in person at the Reuter Center
Mondays, 6:00-8:30pm: 6/3, 6/10, 6/17, 6/24, 7/8
This class will explore the complexities of narrative strategy and point of view in fiction. Equal parts short story workshop and craft analysis, we’ll use craft essays (by David Jauss and others) as a guide for better understanding, and utilizing, the intricacies that lie behind the oversimplified ideas of point of view as simply a choice between the first-person “I” or the third-person “he/she/they” or the second-person “you.” To say, for instance, that a work of fiction’s point of view is “third person omniscient” or “close third/limited omniscient” or “objective third” does not fully capture the nature and spectrum of narrative perspectives. It says nothing about how much or to what extent readers have access to each character’s mind. Likewise, there are many different variations of first-person narration, such as retrospective-first or peripheral-first. This is where an understanding of psychic/narrative distance comes in. Don’t know what I mean by psychic/narrative distance? Take this class!
Students can expect to receive feedback on their short stories in progress. And while point of view technique will be emphasized, I will address all manner of techniques in your work. We’ll also read stories by writers such as Sandra Cisneros, David Foster Wallace, Jhumpa Lahiri, Stuart Dybek, James Baldwin and more.
Alex McWalters plays percussion for River Whyless and is an adjunct professor of creative writing at UNC-Asheville. He holds an MFA in Fiction from Warren Wilson and has served as the Warren Wilson MFA Residency Fellow since 2020. Songs by River Whyless have been featured on, or in, NPR’s All Things Considered, Tiny Desk, World Café, and The Washington Post. His writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Nimrod International, Dogwood Journal, No Depression, Paste Magazine, The Bluegrass Situation and elsewhere.
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Virtual Classes
Lang 371: Shedding Silence: Using Memory and Metaphor to Overcome Trauma
Instructor: Tony Robles
CRN: 30107
Meets online via Zoom
Mondays, 6:00-8:30pm: 6/3, 6/10, 6/17, 6/24, 7/8
This workshop will explore the different types of exposition and uses of voice in creative nonfiction. Participants will learn the origins of the modern memoir and personal essay. Workshop readings will include excerpts from memoirs and personal essays by Japanese American writers Lawson Inada, Hiroshi Kashiwagi, Janice Mirikitani and others who use memory and metaphor to overcome trauma and forge a poetic vision. The workshop will also focus on the role of setting in stories and how tension is developed in a short story. Participants will engage in writing exercises and share their work.
Tony Robles is author of two poetry/short story collections, Cool Don’t Live Here No More—A Letter to San Francisco and Fingerprints of a Hunger Strike. His short fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and included in numerous anthologies. He was also named writer in residence by the Carl Sandburg Home Historic Site in 2020, was shortlisted for Poet Laureate of San Francisco in 2017, and was an individual artist grantee by the San Francisco Art Commission in 2015 and 2017. A graduate of the MFA in creative writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts, Tony lives in Hendersonville.
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Lang 371: Variations on a Theme: Form and Subversion in Poetry
Instructor: Whitney Waters
CRN: 30108
Meets online via Zoom
Tuesdays, 6:00-8:30pm: 6/4, 6/11, 6/18, 6/25, 7/2
Traditional forms in poetry can often get a bad reputation as boring, outdated, or stuffy. But one of the greatest things about form is breaking it—or at least bending the rules a little. In this course, we will examine the ways in which form can provide a constructive container for a poem, and we will also look at ways in which contemporary poets subvert traditional forms. Each week we will focus on a different form, including the sonnet, sestina, and ghazal. We will read examples of each of these forms by poets who subvert them in various ways. Whether you’re an experienced sonneteer or have never written a form poem before, this class is for you. My hope is that this course will challenge your assumptions about formal poetry and encourage you to use form as a generative writing tool.
This is a workshop-based course that will use the work of published poets as a basis for discussion, including poems by Ashley M. Jones, Patricia Smith, Terrence Hayes, Diane Suess, and others.
Whitney Waters is a poet and educator living in Asheville, NC. She has an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College and an MA in Literature from Western Carolina University and teaches writing at Western Carolina University and Mars Hill University. Her work has appeared in Twelve Mile Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Great Smokies Review, and elsewhere.