ENG 205A is an online, introductory creative writing class with a focus on poetry. No prior creative writing experience is necessary. It’s an opportunity to create, read, and explore poems. You’ll have a chance to write new poems, discover poems and approaches from established writers, and provide (& receive) peer review on poems written for class.

This course will introduce beginning writers to the craft of fiction, with a focus on the short story. We’ll read craft essays with an eye toward understanding basic fictional elements such as plot, point of view and character development. We’ll also read a wide variety of short stories. Students will complete weekly response papers and writing exercises. Our emphasis will be on experimentation and generating new work. Bring a willingness to try new things and together we’ll explore the joys of creativity.   

Intensive course for people who want to write and sell a great movie:

This course is for writers who have a great idea, or a great start and want to complete their scripts and work to get them on screen. The course will challenge your creativity and your discipline.

We will critique each others work and help each other over blocks. This class will work on this idea: how to be inventive without re-inventing the wheel. By looking at the basics, and engaging in exercises that strengthen those muscles, the class will then move to the challenge of originality.

Each module in the course will move your script toward completion, whether you come into the class with an idea or a script that has already been started. The end goal is to have a script that will be noticed. So how will you be noticed?

By using your voice without completely upending the classic structures; because it is originality that sells.

In this summer online course, I’ll be working with each of you through individualized writing projects and exercises to help you take your creative work to the next level. We’ll focus on some of the key factors that emerge as you work to strengthen your fiction: Voice, pacing, flow — as well as how, and when to trust yourself, when to ask for input from others, and how to navigate through the inevitable moments of self-doubt that growth as a writer entails. Along the way, we’ll read some short fictions and essays by established writers to help encourage and guide this process. Every student will receive regular, detailed feedback on the project(s) she or he designs with the advice of the instructor.

Russell Potter is an author of several works of fiction and nonfiction, including Pyg: The Memoirs of Toby the Learned Pig (novel, 2012), Arctic Spectacles: The Frozen North in Visual Culture (nonfiction, 2007) and the forthcoming Finding Franklin: The Untold Story of a One Hundred and Sixty-five Year Search (nonfiction, 2016).