MIT students are challenged daily to solve for x, to complete four problem sets, two papers, and prepare for an exam worth 30% of their grade... all in one night. When they do stop to breathe, it's for a shower or a meal. What does this have to do with creative writing? Everything. Creative writing and MIT go together better than you might imagine.

In this course we will read and write about works that explore symbolic encounters in the American landscape. Some of the assigned works look at uneasy encounters between ordinary individuals and animals—wolves, eagles, sandhill cranes—that Americans have invested with symbolic significance; others explore conflicts between the pragmatic American impulse to impose order on unruly nature and the equally American inclination to enshrine the unaltered landscape.

This course focuses on traditional nature writing and the environmentalist essay. Students will keep a Web log as a journal. Writings are drawn from the tradition of nature writing and from contemporary forms of the environmentalist essay.

The reading and writing for this course will focus on what it means to construct a sense of self and a life narrative in relation to the larger social world of family and friends, education, media, work, and community. Readings will include nonfiction and fiction works by authors such as Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Andre Dubus, Anne Frank, Tim O'Brien, Flannery O'Connor, George Orwell, John Steinbeck, Amy Tan, Tobias Wolff, and Alice Walker. Students will explore the craft of storytelling and the multiple ways in which one can employ the tools of fiction in crafting creative nonfiction and fiction narratives.

During this seminar, students will chronicle their MIT experiences and investigate MIT history and culture. Visits to the MIT archives and museum, along with relevant readings, will supplement students’ experiences as source material for discussion and writing.

The reading and writing in this course will focus on the art of self-narrative or autobiographical writing. Such writing can be crafted in the form of a longer autobiography or of separate, shorter autobiographically-inspired essays. The various forms of autobiographical narrative can both reflect on personal experience and comment on larger issues in society.
This course explores, through reading and writing, what it means to construct a sense of self-and a life narrative-in relation to the larger social world of family and friends, education, media, work, and community. What does it mean to see ourselves as embodying particular ethical values or belonging to a certain ethnic, racial, national or religious group(s)? How do we imagine ourselves within larger "family narrative(s)" and friendship groups? In what ways do we view our identities as connected to and expressed by our educational and work experiences, including experiences at MIT? How do we see ourselves as shaping and shaped by the popular media culture of our society? How do we think about our ethical and social responsibility to our friends, families and communities (large and small)? Readings will include autobiographically-inspired nonfiction and fiction.

This course is an examination of the formal structural and textual variety in poetry. Students engage in extensive practice in the making of poems and the analysis of both students' manuscripts and 20th-century poetry. The course attempts to make relevant the traditional elements of poetry and their contemporary alternatives. There are weekly writing assignments, including some exercises in prosody.

This course is an introduction to the short story. Students will write stories and short descriptive sketches. Students will read great short stories and participate in class discussions of students' writing and the assigned stories in their historical and social contexts.

This is a course focused on the literary genre of the essay, that wide-ranging, elastic, and currently very popular form that attracts not only nonfiction writers but also fiction writers, poets, scientists, physicians, and others to write in the form, and readers of every stripe to read it. Some say we are living in era in which the essay is enjoying a renaissance; certainly essays, both short and long, are at present easier to get published than are short stories or novels, and essays are featured regularly and prominently in the mainstream press (both magazines and newspapers) and on the New York Times bestseller books list. But the essay has a history, too, a long one, which goes back at least to the sixteenth-century French writer Montaigne, generally considered the progenitor of the form. It will be our task, and I hope our pleasure, to investigate the possibilities of the essay together this semester, both by reading and by writing.

As the course title suggests, this class is meant to acquaint you with the literary and rhetorical tradition of the essay, a genre which has been described by one scholar as "the meeting ground between art and philosophy," and by another as "the place where the self finds a pattern in the world, and the world finds a pattern in the self". Though the essay is part of a tradition of prose which stretches back to antiquity, it is also a thoroughly modern and popular form of writing, found in print media and on the web.