English

This advanced elective course is offered in two semesters. Students may take both or choose either semester. The course is intended for those who wish to concentrate collaboratively and in depth on the craft, purpose, and power of writing, moving beyond the skills developed in the core English curriculum. 

Each student keeps a writer’s notebook (journal) which forms the foundation for the course, and class time is often spent on writing activities. Students develop and revise several longer pieces each semester with the support of the class. A portfolio of work produced during the class, along with the journal and engagement with the workshop format of the class, forms the basis for grading. The course is open to students in grades 11 and 12 and does not fulfill graduation requirements in English. 

Examples of Student Writers’ Workshop Pieces

In the fall semester (Essay and Memoir), students examine classic literary essays by Joan Didion, Zadie Smith, Jo Anne Beard and others and explore a variety of nonfiction genres to develop their craft as writers.

In the spring (Creative Writing) students study fiction and poetry, often working across or outside of genre. Students will examine classic and contemporary short works of fiction and poetry from a craft perspective, including pieces by Ernest Hemingway, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lydia Davis, and Jericho Brown, among many others, and may select an additional mentor text from the core English curriculum for a longer writing project. Students will regularly partake in traditional craft workshops of each other's writing, and co-create curriculum based on their own interests.

While climate change is technically the force that brings us together, this is ultimately a course about home—why we yearn for it, why we leave it, what it means to watch it change. In recognition of the scale of influence human beings have had on our home planet, many scientists have proposed a new term for our present geologic era: the Anthropocene. The implications stretch far beyond weather patterns, demanding we think across disciplines and genres to grasp what's at stake.

This advanced course takes a rigorously interdisciplinary approach to climate change. We will study environmental nonfiction alongside the emerging genre of "cli-fi" or climate fiction, examining how artists and thinkers from various fields are reckoning with our planetary moment. Above all, we will challenge each other to engage courageously with the crisis at hand, considering what it means to come of age, live, die, and love in the Anthropocene.

Major texts may include Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer (nonfiction), A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet (dystopian fiction/satire), Exit West by Mohsin Hamid (speculative fiction), and Mobility by Lydia Kiesling (satire). We will also study selected short stories, essays, and poems by writers including N. K. Jemisin, Meera Subramanian, Kanishk Tharoor, Ashley Shelby, Jamaal May, June Jordan, W.S. Merwin, Ada Limón, and Wendell Berry, along with the occasional art piece, podcast, or film.

Variously described as a short story lacking self-control or a novel pared down to its essence, the novella is an underappreciated literary form that takes advantage of the compression and precision of its briefer cousin while maintaining some of the broader possibilities afforded by a longer narrative. For our purposes, the nimble novella will allow us to move easily between authors, genres, and time periods. In addition to familiarizing ourselves with a wide range of stories and writers, we will listen for ways in which these pieces may speak to one another and their shared form. Novellas studied will include Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, an American classic of snow, sledding, and silence; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Stevenson’s celebrated horror story of the duality of human beings; and Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, a contemporary account from Japan of a woman fighting against conformity in order to find happiness. Other texts may include The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle; West by Carys Davies; So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell, Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Foster by Claire Keegan, widely considered to be the contemporary star of the novella.

Surrealist poet Paul Eluard writes, “There is another world, but it is inside this one.” In some ways, our subconscious experiences, particularly our dreams, are, in fact, worlds within us. Why are these worlds special, frightening, delightful, satisfying, compelling, strange? How do writers build dreamlike worlds of language to help us see into this other dimension, and what might we find there? This course will explore what literature has to say about our dreams and why literature itself is like a dream. We will begin with some theories of the subconscious and collective unconscious, as well as the study of some  literary and artistic movements including Modernism and Surrealism that have sought to access and represent these experiences. Possible texts include Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream. We will also study works by Shakespeare and the Romantic poets, as well as 20th century to contemporary poetry by Lucille Clifton, Jack Spicer, and Jean Valentine, among others. Along with nightly reading and critical writing, this course will include a significant creative writing element: students will keep dream journals and write their own poetry and stories. 

An extraordinarily fertile and expansive artistic territory, fiction is a limitless field. Speculative fiction, the particular area of study for this class, uses somewhat recognizable settings and tropes to reveal difficult truths and potential solutions to problems we face today or may face tomorrow. Writer Margaret Atwood believes “speculative fiction” refers to stories about things that really could happen but just hadn’t completely happened when the authors wrote the texts. This course will look to see what this type of literature has to teach us about ourselves and our world. Possible texts: Mandel’s Station Eleven, Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom, and stories by writers such as Borges, Link, Millhauser, Butler, Hand, and Vonnegut. We may also look to film (Blade Runner) and television (Black Mirror) for other compelling speculative stories. 

Often when we think about great drama, we think Shakespeare or Sophocles. We travel back in time instead of looking at our present moment. This course will look at the drama being written in the now, the contemporary drama of America that has been gracing the stages, winning awards, and capturing the voices of our modern day. We will study how contemporary dramatic literature speaks to the history, place, and societal issues of these United States. From the battle with PTSD of veterans returning from war to the economical impact from the loss of factory work in once vibrant cities, the playwrights we will read, study, and hopefully see staged, are tackling important, relevant, and meaningful topics.  Some of the authors we might read include Lynn Nottage, Sarah Ruhl, Martyna Majok, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, and Rajiv Joseph.

In this course, students will learn to read poetry by first gaining an understanding of how poetry differs from prose. Students will gain proficiency with formal and musical elements such as meter, rhyme, consonance, assonance, repetition, stanza structure, caesurae, and a variety of standard forms such as sonnets and villanelles. Close reading of the poems will reveal how imagery and figurative language enhance the ideas of the poems. The course will present some poems as part of a tradition of poetic ideas, odes or love poems, for instance, but will also read several collections of poetry to explore how studying a body of work differs from looking at a poem in isolation.

Possible texts: Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine, Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith, and Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong. Additionally, new collections of poetry may be chosen because they have recently won prominent awards, such as the Pulitzer Prize or the National Book Award.

In the past few years, the graphic novel has drawn increasing attention in English classrooms. Once thought to be only for geeks, artists, or reluctant readers, this genre has become a powerful method for telling all kinds of stories. In blending the mediums of writing and artwork, graphic novels offer a literary experience that is ripe for analysis. In this class we will study the graphic novel as a tool for sharing memoir, myth and superheroes, socio-political commentary, and classic literature. Some works will be taught alongside excerpts of their prose versions, others will be taught solely in graphic novel form. Possible texts include: American Born Chinese; Watchmen; Persepolis; The Best We Could Do; Macbeth; and City of Glass.

Haunted houses are the stuff of legends, and ghosts are the ultimate metaphors. We understand the conventions of Gothic literature without thinking about them--old houses, hidden spaces, ghosts, crimes, darkness, family curses, and mystery. In this course we will examine works through the lens of the Gothic genre, exploring how the supernatural in fiction reflects aspects of real life. We will think about how houses can become characters and how even the suggestion of a ghost can shift reality for characters. While early works in the Gothic genre often exoticized or "othered" people from outside of western Europe, BIPOC authors and women have taken advantage of its subversive potential to explore the concept of otherness, marginalization, and the abuse of power. We begin with the origins of American gothic in The Fall of the House of Usher and other stories by Edgar Allan Poe, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and ghost stories by Edith Wharton, followed by Shirley Jackson’s classic novel of gothic horror The Haunting of Hill House to understand the genre before moving to 21st century texts, including stories, films, and poems.

This course uses the frame of Afrofuturism as a lens through which to see stories of Americans with African heritage. Students will study texts from a variety of genres in order to consider the black American experience from many angles. Guiding queries include: 

• What does it mean to privilege black voices? How does this challenge the hegemony? 
• When and how do we label or name racial groups? What does it mean to identify as black? 
• How do we have healthy conversations about race in multiracial settings? 
• What is the role of storytelling in the black experience/history? 

Possible texts include The Vanishing Half by Britt Bennett, Passing by Nella Larsen, Call Us Dead by Danez Smith, essays by James Baldwin, Parable of the Sower and Bloodchild and other stories by Octavia Butler, The Color Purple by Alice Walker, Stick Fly by Lydia Diamond, Kill Move Paradise by James Ijames, A Raisin in the Sun by Lorainne Hansberry, poetry by Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Rita Dove, and films like Get Out directed by Jordan Peele and Moonlight directed by Barry Jenkins. 

The main text for this course is the 2017 translation of Homer's Odyssey by Emily Wilson, professor of Classics at the University of Pennsylvania. We also read a "cover" of the original song: Madeleine Miller's Circe,  published in 2018, a first person retelling of the story from the point of view of one of Homer's characters, Circe.

The Odyssey is a traditional folk song captured in written language. Like all traditional songs it propels itself forward using familiar tropes such as the disguised return home, the desecration of the guest-host relationship, contests of strength, the fidelity of a spouse, the treachery of the gods, and the place of song itself in the culture. It is a fun book to read, an easy book to write about, a fable, a legend, a myth, a grim bedtime story.

That an episode of Homer's epic has been expanded into Miller's Circe, a commercially successful book written in English in the third millennium, is a testament to the persistent love that we have for these stories and for this kind of storytelling. Circe is popular fiction. It has aspects of youth fiction. It is a thriller -- full of intrigue, excitement, romance, and terror -- just like the original. Miller steals wholesale from the original. All of the characters and elements are the same. But now the voice comes from the twenty-first century: it is written in the first person, it is confessional, it is psychologically dense, and in this version it is the voice of a woman.

What are we modern humans to do with the persistent impulse toward belief in God and in a spiritual dimension to life? Why do such thoughts arise, and what wisdom can be gained in the investigation of our doubts about such belief? In this course, we grapple with the notions of religious and spiritual faith, studying the works of "believers," as well as the theologically rebellious “doubting Thomases” of the literary world. Along the way students will actively investigate and articulate their own beliefs in relation to the ideas presented in the literature. We will cultivate a compassionate community that honors every learner's perspective as we encounter ideas and beliefs in degrees of agreement or of conflict with our own. Our ultimate goal is to broaden our spiritual vocabulary and our understanding of what it means to be spiritual. Past or current religious affiliation or spiritual practice is not required. Selected texts include The Book of Job, Jon Fosse's A Shining, James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, Herman Hesse's Siddhartha, and Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood, as well as poetry by Arnold, Dickinson, Donne, Gibran, Hopkins, Larkin, Rumi, and Wright. In addition, we will learn about existential philosophy through the lens of various authors, such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus, and explore the narratives of near death experiences. 

This course pairs poetry, short stories, essays, and novels with film to examine the various ways writers and auteurs express their ideas, evoking our emotions and deepening our understanding of the human condition. The focus of study will be on personal and analytic responses to what is read and watched to develop students’ understanding and appreciation of the written word and visual media. To that end, students will develop their vocabulary related to cinematic expression, employing such terms in their responses to what we watch. In most cases, the class will study literature that has been adapted to film. Alternatively, literature will be read and then compared to a film that expresses shared themes. Students will view the films on their own time (i.e., not in class), bringing their observations and insights to class discussions, just as they would with the literature of any other English class. Possible texts include Annie Proulx’s short story “Brokeback Mountain” and the film adaptation, directed by Ang Lee; Ted Chiang's short story “The Story of Your Life” and the film adaptation; Arrival, written by Eric Heisserer and directed by Denis Villeneuve; Charles Yu's novel Interior Chinatown and the TV series adaptation; and various selected works by black authors (i.e., essayists Baldwin, Coates, Kendi, Morrison, and hooks; and poets Claudia Rankine and Jericho Brown) paired with Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing.