This course is both a fiction workshop and a deprogramming. While you are likely to have encountered literature as an intellectual or academic practice, sublime writing is often experienced (and produced) in the body as much as the brain. Great writing often begins that way, too, via methods that are irrational, messy, irreducible, intuitive, even mystical. In fact, we might even ask: how do we turn off the brain? We will learn to read and write not as scholars prodding toward a correct answer but as explorers and sensualists having encounters with living, breathing entities on the page. We might ask: what does a scene make you feel? where do you feel it in your body? what makes a text come alive to you and only you at this moment in your life? Note that this is not an invitation to indulge in narcissism or narrowness in the classroom; rather, this is a chance to appreciate how subjective each person's interaction with a text is, and how valid a panoply of viewpoints. We'll read published works that feel alive on the page: electric prose, divisive narrators, "unrealistic" plots, experimental forms, characters classified as "wrong" or "immoral." You will be responsible for take-home writing assignments, as well as short in-class writing exercises that encourage messy, intuitive writing of your own.
5 units · Letter or Credit/No Credit
This course is both a fiction workshop and a deprogramming. While you are likely to have encountered literature as an intellectual or academic practice, sublime writing is often experienced (and produced) in the body as much as the brain. Great writing often begins that way, too, via methods that are irrational, messy, irreducible, intuitive, even mystical. In fact, we might even ask: how do we turn off the brain? We will learn to read and write not as scholars prodding toward a correct answer but as explorers and sensualists having encounters with living, breathing entities on the page. We might ask: what does a scene make you feel? where do you feel it in your body? what makes a text come alive to you and only you at this moment in your life? Note that this is not an invitation to indulge in narcissism or narrowness in the classroom; rather, this is a chance to appreciate how subjective each person's interaction with a text is, and how valid a panoply of viewpoints. We'll read published works that feel alive on the page: electric prose, divisive narrators, "unrealistic" plots, experimental forms, characters classified as "wrong" or "immoral." You will be responsible for take-home writing assignments, as well as short in-class writing exercises that encourage messy, intuitive writing of your own.
Offered in Winter 2026 at Stanford University.