Department of English
Liam Callanan
Associate Professor / Curtin Hall, 4th floor
P.O. Box 413
Milwaukee, WI
53201-0413
414 229-4511 phone
414 229-2643 fax
www.uwm.edu/Dept/English
www.liamcallanan.com
Dear students enrolled in, or considering enrolling in English 615 (online):
First, the official stuff, then the fun stuff:
· English 615 is the capstone course of the undergraduate creative writing program. It is intended for undergraduates finishing their writing career, and for graduate students beginning theirs. You must have taken introductory (English 233) and intermediate workshops (English 415, twice) before enrolling for this course.
The fun stuff:
· This is the first time English 615 will be taught online, and we’re committed to making it an enriching experience for everyone who enrolls. Parts of it will be quite familiar if you’ve taken an offline workshop before: you’ll write several stories (likely two, although the amount depends on enrollment) and do several writing exercises besides. You’ll also provide feedback for those stories on D2L. After everyone has had their say, I’ll try to pull the threads of the discussion together in a way that’s useful not only to the author but the class as a whole.
· We’ll also be using, for the first time, an exciting new fiction anthology, New American Stories (ISBN 978-0804173544), edited by Ben Marcus. It’s full of fresh voices (and some innovative older ones), and should include a number of stories that you’ve not encountered in or out of class before. (It’s also cheap: less than $15 new.)
· Though this class is viewed as a “capstone”—see official stuff above—that’s…the exact opposite of what we’d like the class’ outcome to be. That is, we don’t want this to cap, or finish, anything in your writing career, and we certainly don’t want you to emerge feeling like a stone has been placed on or in your head, weighting you down. Rather, this class should work as a launch pad: the writing and reading assignments will be designed to help you establish work habits, and imaginative, generative pathways that you can use to feed future creative work after graduation.
· We’ll discuss “what next.” For many of you, this will be your final creative writing class. Even if it’s not, however, we’ll talk about ‘what next’—that is, what to do after finishing school. We’ll talk about what careers make sense for creative writers, and we’ll talk about how to publish your work—your stories, your novels, whatever you’ve been working on, or plan to work on.
Who am I?
· Good question. I’m a novelist and nonfiction writer and have taught at UWM for about a dozen years. In 2016, I won UWM’s Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching award, though the truth is, many of my students have been the best teachers I’ve encountered over the years. I’ve published two novels, one collection of short stories, and have a third novel, Paris by the Book, coming out in April. (I’ll be traveling a bit to do readings, so whether you live in Wisconsin or somewhere else in the world, we may get a chance to meet face-to-face.) I have a website that, though a constant work in progress, should give you a glimpse of my writing life: liamcallanan.com. There’s even a video of me reading and talking about my work if you’d like to see what I look like IRL.
Have more questions?
· I’m happy to answer them: . I’ll look forward to reading your work next semester.
Very truly yours,
Liam Callanan