36 WYATT WILLIAMS – ARCHIVE AND OBSESSION – SPRING 2024

Course Description

Long before any writer sits down at a desk to begin writing, they have been gathering the material that will emerge on their page. They are guided by interests, obsessions, and circumstances. They draw on experiences they didn’t choose and investigations they did. Before they write, they need something to write about. In this seminar, you will gather material for your writing from the world around you and reveal the material that is already within. You will learn to make your obsessions manifest, building an archive to be used to inspire and inform your creative work. We’ll practice the world-expanding methods of investigation, immersion, interview, information gathering, and observation. We’ll learn how to ask questions and when to be quiet and let the world tell us what we need to know.

• Tell Me How It Ends by Valeria Luiselli
  ISBN: 9781566894951
• Bluets by Maggie Nelson
  ISBN: 9781933517407
• The Next American Essay edited by John D’Agata
  ISBN: 9781555973759
• The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm
  ISBN: 9780679731832
• A Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib
  ISBN: 9781984801203

• Archive Presentation and Workshop Essay                         40%
• Class Participation                                                                    30%
• Writing Prompts                                                                       30%

• This course will challenge all of us as writers to think deliberately about the work we do before we sit down at the page. How do we gather material from the world? What motivates us to form ideas about what we observe? How can information gathering shape the creative forms we eventually inhabit?
• We’ll train ourselves as readers to reverse-engineer the composition process of the books we read. Using what is (and isn’t) on the page, we’ll attempt to understand where an idea began and what steps were needed to inhabit the world that it eventually created.
• Using systematic and documented forms of investigation, immersion, interview, and observation, we’ll build a personal archive of gathered material and compose a final creative project.

We’ll spend much of this semester trying figure out the many shapes an archive might take, but let’s start with this rough, provisional, and potentially wrong definition: An archive is a container of raw material.

Many of us already make records or archives of some sort. Some write daily in a journal about our lives or feelings. Some take pictures with our phones of things we notice and scroll back through our camera rolls when we want to remember what we’ve seen. Some of us are collecting material without ever thinking about it, material we don’t know we have until we start writing it down on the page. Some readers keep a collection of quotes from reading in what’s called a commonplace book. Others collect objects in little boxes as talismans of places and times. This isn’t so different than what a researcher or journalist does. They collect material evidence – interview transcripts, notes of observation, copies of primary documents – until that collection begins to suggest shapes, patterns, or connections for an idea or angle.

Over the course of this semester, we’ll each create an archive of a minimum of twenty pages and craft a creative project from that material. When I say “twenty pages,” please know that these archives may take many shapes and are not at all limited to typed notes. It could be pages of transcribed interviews or a collection of primary documents; it could be a folder of iPhone photos or hours of unedited field recordings. What matters most is that this collection of material will accumulate over sustained time, slowly building and being added to for months throughout the semester. As the semester goes on and we consider and mimic the approaches of different authors, your archive will grow in different and varied ways.

Your archive is evidence of an obsession. It will reveal as much about the collector as the collection: The fingerprint of a mind that is looking, seeking, and gathering anything that might accumulate into something useful for art.

Which brings us to the point here: The archive is something that should work for you, not the other way around. The reasons for doing this kind of gathering and documenting are simple: They should inspire you to write and give you something to write about when you do. You have no obligations to the material you gather; you are only obligated to yourself as a writer. If sticking to the facts helps you write, do that. If the facts are just a place to begin, allow yourself to invent within them. You are welcome to produce creative work in poetry, fiction, essay, screenplay, journalism, or any other form that the material in your archive suggests.

Another way of saying that: This course will focus on nonfiction in process, but not necessarily in product.

There are two major assignments this semester. In the first half of the semester, you will give a short presentation about your obsession and present one piece of gathered evidence. In the second half of the semester, you’ll submit a short creative piece to be workshopped by the class. I’ll assign these dates alphabetically by last name but leave you the option to trade with your peers if you’d rather a different day.

Wednesday: Lecture Notes on Possible Sources

Observation:

– “The Raven” by Barry Lopez (TNAE p. 23-25)

Accumulation:

– Oranges by John McPhee excerpt (pdf)

Quotation:

– “Life Story” by David Shields (TNAE p. 339-341)

Measurements:

– “Break it Down” by Lydia Davis (pdf)

Memories:

– “On Times I Have Forced Myself to Dance” by Hanif Abdurraqib (ALDIA p 3-4)

– “The White Album” by Joan Didion (TNAE 47-73)

– Bluets by Maggie Nelson (numbers 1-81)

Wednesday:

– Bluets by Maggie Nelson (numbers 82-164)

– San Soleil by Chris Marker (in class)

-“Famous Blue Raincoat” by Leonard Cohen

– Bluets by Maggie Nelson (numbers 165-240)

– A Diary In Alphabetical Order by Sheila Heti

– I Remember by Joe Brainerd (pdf)

Wednesday: Lecture Notes on Triangulation

– “I Want to Give Merry Clayton Her Roses” by Hanif Abdurraqib (ALDIA p. 191-204)

– “Gimme Shelter” by The Rolling Stones (in class)

– Excerpt from Gimme Shelter by the Maysles Brothers (in class)

Week 5 – February 12-14

Week 11 – March 25-27

Monday: Student Workshop 5-6

Wednesday: “The Hog Barons” by Austin Frerick, reading at Prairie Lights.

IMPORTANT POLICIES AND STATEMENTS                               

Drop-In Hours Policy:

Students looking for feedback and advice on their creative work will find the best results by scheduling an appointment via email during office hours and submitting the work to be discussed. That way we can both prepare our thoughts and questions to make the most of our discussion time. That said, my door is always open during my drop-in hours and I’m happy to field casual questions about our work as writers during that time.

Late Work Policy:

Late work will not be accepted. In the case of an emergency, please make arrangements with the instructor. Extensions will absolutely not be granted on the day an assignment is due, or during the 48 hours prior. Failure to turn in an assignment on the day it is due will result in a 0 for the assignment.

Nondiscrimination Statement/Antiracism Statement:

I will not tolerate racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or ableist behavior in my classroom. I am committed to cultivating, enacting, and supporting this classroom as a just and equitable space. That means that I will hold myself, my students, and their work to a standard, both ethical and aesthetic, that does not avoid, dismiss, or minimize the realities of injustice in this country as they relate to race, sex, ability, gender, immigration status, religion, or sexual orientation.

Writing is full of risks. I want this class to be a space where you feel safe taking them, and where you practice doing so responsibly. If you are unsure about your literary handling of an identity not your own, or your feedback to another writer whose work engages such issues, please feel free to approach me before you submit the work to the group or feedback to the writer. If you are uncomfortable with another writer’s handling of race (or any other identity that you claim), please feel free to confide in me before addressing it to the group or individual. This is not to manage your voice, but to spare you unnecessary labor of negotiating that interaction. I am happy to do that work; it is part of my job.