CRW 3110 - FALL 2026 - GOLDRING

This undergraduate fiction technique and workshop course explores how realism can be made strange—formally inventive, emotionally charged, and structurally daring—while remaining grounded in lived experience, emotionally precise, and embodied. The course focuses on the body as a generative force in narrative—how sensation, desire, illness, grief, pleasure, and violence shape voice, structure, and time. Students will explore techniques that render interiority with intensity.
Through close reading of selected contemporary and twentieth-century writers, the course investigates techniques such as fragmentation, narrative disruption, repetition, compression, surreal or uncanny intrusion, and hybrid structures. Craft discussions will emphasize emotional stakes, narrative risk, point of view, and grammatical, syntactical, and narrative structures.
Weekly generative exercises will focus on emotional stakes, sensory precision, structural risk, and subversive approaches to character and plot. Students will workshop original short stories and novel excerpts, developing a critical vocabulary for discussing craft while cultivating rigorous, generous critique practices.
By the end of the course, students will assemble a portfolio of revised work that engages experimental form, embodied experience, and subversive approaches to realism. Designed for serious writers, this course encourages aesthetic risk alongside disciplined craft.