Letters & Conversations

In the era of the internet, what can a letter do?
What new forms of letters circulate? How has
social media changed dialogue and conversation?
What words can we exchange and how? Drawing on a
range of critical and creative practices, this
creative writing class will invite students to
read and write letters and to conduct, join, and
listen to conversations. Incorporating fiction,
nonfiction, poetry, and hybrid writing, we will
also engage visual art, tweets, podcasts, and
more. Key course topics will include childhood,
family, friendship, love, sexuality, gender, race,
police violence, trauma, and coming of age.
Students will leave having completed "a letter you
thought they'd never write or a conversation you
thought you'd never have" as well a future letter
scheduled to arrive to the sender many years
later. In our letters and conversations, we will
claim voice and risk vulnerability. We will
navigate forms of address, tone and timbre,
audience and occasion, intimacy, protest, and
more.