This course will help more advanced fiction writers improve their skills in a supportive workshop context, which encourages experimentation and attention to craft. We focus on technique, close reading, and the production of new work. Students submit manuscripts for discussion, receive feedback from peers, and revise their work. They keep a process journal and practice mindfulness to cultivate powers of focus and observation. We read Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose, and short fiction by authors in different genres. A writing sample and permission of the instructor are required.

Taught by the Grace Hazard Conkling Poet in Residence, this advanced poetry workshop is for students who have developed a passionate relationship with poetry and who have substantial experience in writing poems. Texts are based on the poets who are reading at Smith during the semester, and students gain expertise in reading, writing and critiquing poems. Strongly recommended: ENG 216 Intermediate Poetry Writing or the equivalent. Writing sample and permission of the instructor are required. Enrollment limited to 12.

This course has two central ambitions. First, it introduces themes of magic and witchcraft in (mostly) American literature and film. We work together to figure out how the figure of the witch functions in stories, novels and movies, what witches and witchcraft mean or how they participate in the texts’ ways of making meaning. At the same time, we try to figure out how witches and witchcraft function as loci or displacements of social anxiety--about power, science, gender, class, race and politics.

A study of England's first cosmopolitan poet whose Canterbury Tales offer a chorus of medieval literary voices, while creating a new kind of poetry anticipating modern attitudes and anxieties through colorful, complex characters like the Wife of Bath.Weread these tales closely in Chaucer's Middle English, an expressive idiom, ranging from the funny, sly and ribald to the thoughtful and profound. John Dryden called Chaucer the "father of English poesy," but if so, he was a good one. Later poets laughed with him, wept with him, and then did their own thing, just as he would have wanted.

In this course, we explore the constructed worlds made by some wonderful writers and build fictional worlds of our own. The course involves both in-class participation and a great deal of writing:  short stories, worldbuilding exercises, writing about reading. Each week, we read the fiction published in that week's edition of "The New Yorker."

The deadly fog that hung over London throughout the 19th century was both a social reality and a pungent metaphor for a metropolis in which it seemed that almost anything could be hidden: secrets, crimes, identities. But sometimes the fog parts--and then comes scandal. We'll begin with Dickens' anatomy of the city in Bleak House; move on to sensation novels by Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, which contest and subvert the period's gender roles; look at murder with Sherlock Holmes and Dr.

This course will focus on the extraordinary burst of literary creativity that coincided with the emergence of a new American nation.

This course will explore the monstrosity of motherhood - the fear, disgust, alienation, and confusion of both being a mother and having one. We will discuss literary and cinematic representations of mothers as absent, distant, cruel, ambivalent, irresponsible, and deviant, and consider the ways we have been taught to think of motherhood both as a self-sacrifice and as necessary. But we will also seek new models of care, love, and attachment that are dependent neither on the sacrifice of one’s self nor on biological reproduction and that recast mothering as potentially revolutionary.

Offered as ENG 207 and HSC 207. An introductory exploration of the physical forms that knowledge and communication have taken in the West, from ancient oral cultures to modern print-literate culture. Our main interest is in discovering how what is said and thought in a culture reflects its available kinds of literacy and media of communication.

This workshop will develop skills for developing a research-base for creative writing and balancing a writer's emotional and imaginative material with texts, expressions and artifacts from the outer world. We will examine how bringing fact and imagination together enriches the culture and sustains the writer, and how to develop a writing practice that will "go the distance" over a lifetime. Writing sample and instructor permission required. Enrollment limited to 12.