8-Week: The Power of Play

A little known secret: Writing can be fun. It can be explosive, enchanting, wild, alive, frightening in its ability to transform not just the page, but us, our understanding of the world and our place in it. Our focus here is play. Play is about experimentation. It is about risk and release and surprise. It is about uncertainty. The thin, wriggling line between the real and surreal. What Graham Greene said: When we are not sure, we are alive.

In this course we'll be reading a wide range of writers who are working in this space of play, of leaping off something and landing somewhere new. Using those writers as a jumping off point, you'll be writing something that challenges you, that forces you out of your comfort zone, pushes, and, hopefully, excites you. The goal of this course is not perfection. It is not to polish. It is to create and live more freely in that creation. That isn't to say we forgo the rules, in fact, the opposite. We'll be looking at the rules—structure, syntax, POV, narrative voice, tense, dialogue—as part of play. Successful play is bolstered by an understanding of conventions, and a willingness to harness them in new and surprising ways.

Our goal here is to see what is possible in others' work, to feel enchanted and emboldened, in hopes of imbuing our work with a new vitality.