COURSE DESCRIPTION

Introduction to Creative Writing (English 71) is a 3-unit lower-division course designed and administered by the Department of English & Comparative Literature at San Jose State University to fulfill Core General Education requirements in the C2 Letters area of Humanities & the Arts. The course will involve both the reading and production of poetry, creative non-fiction, and short fiction. Students in this class will read and discuss published works—contemporary and historical—of poetry, creative non-fiction, and fiction. Students will write original works of poetry, creative non-fiction, and fiction in response to works by published authors that students will use as models. English 71 will explore the traditions of poetry, creative non-fiction, and fiction as they have evolved over the last few centuries. Students will examine these traditions in the light of understanding the historical and cultural contexts from which they have arisen.

The course will be taught using a combination of online small writing groups (organized as learning communities) and online writing workshops. In the discussion, published works of creative writing will be closely read and analyzed. In the writing workshops, creative work by class members will be analyzed and critiqued for revision. Students are required to participate in all workshops dedicated to the discussion of class members’ writing.

All students registered for ENGL 71 (section 6) must attend a mandatory orientation meeting on Wed. January 25, 7:00 - 9:45 PM in IS-134A (Industrial Studies Building) . At the meeting you will receive information and training on how to use WebCT for the online instruction of this class.

REQUIRED TEXTS

Gwynn, R.S., Poetry: A Longman Pocket Anthology

Lamott, Anne, Bird By Bird

Schaefer, Candace, and Diamond, Rick, The Creative Writing Guide

Sedaris, David, Me Talk Pretty One Day

Wolff, Tobias, The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories

Alan Soldofsky has published three collections of poems: Kenora Station, Staying Home, and most recently a chapbook that includes a selection of poems by his son, the poet Adam Soldofsky, Holding Adam / My Father’s Books. Over the last three decades, he has published poems widely in magazines and academic journals including: The Antioch Review, California Quarterly, Cream City Review, Exquisite Corpse, The Fiddlehead, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, Grand Street, Greensboro Review, The Indiana Review, Ironwood, Konch, Manoa, The Michigan Quarterly Review, The Nation, The North American Review, Poetry East, Rattle, Reed Magazine, The Red Rock Review, and Sumac. He has recently completed a new collection of poems Bright Rubble. His essay “Nature and Symbolic Order: The Dialogue Between Robinson Jeffers and Czeslaw Milosz” is published in Robinson Jeffers: Dimensions of a Poet, ed. Robert Brophy (Fordham Univ., 1995). He has also contributed essays on modern and contemporary poets to a variety of journals on subjects that range from the post-confessional lyric, to the influence of Romanticism on postmodern American poetry. He has also published several essays on Robinson Jeffers. His articles, essays, interviews, and book reviews have appeared widely in periodicals including: Chelsea, Contact II, Ironwood, Jeffers Studies, Narrative, Metro Newspapers, Poetry Flash, Quarry West, and The Writer’s Chronicle. He lives in San Jose, California, and is a professor of English and Creative Writing at San Jose State University where he directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing.