2011-2012 MFA Courses

Instructor: Neville, Susan S
JH301     W     06:00 PM - 08:40 PM
Start Date : Aug 24 2011
End Date: Dec 17 20011

Graduate level prose creative writing workshop, mixed genre (fiction or creative nonfiction). Open to MFA in Creative Writing students only.

Susan Neville is the author of Indiana Winter; Fabrication: Essays on Making Things and Making Meaning; Twilight in Arcadia; Iconography: A Writer's Meditation; and Sailing the Inland Sea. Her short fiction includes In the House of Blue Lights, and Invention of Flight, winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her stories have appeared in the Pushcart Prize anthology and in Extreme Fiction and The Story Behind the Story. Her most recent book is Butler's Big Dance.

Instructor: Dahlie, Michael
JH303     T     06:30 PM - 09:00 PM
Start Date: Aug 24 2011
End Date: Dec 17 2011

Graduate level creative writing seminar in Writing Fiction for Young Readers. The purpose of this class is to help students embark on novels designed for the YA and Middle Grade markets. Students will read and discuss several popular and classic novels written for young readers. Students will also submit an outline for a novel of their own as well as some sort of selection from this novel. These materials will be reviewed in a workshop setting. We will also discuss aspects of the current YA and Middle Grade publishing world. MFA in Creative Writing students only.

Michael Dahlie is Butler University's first Booth Tarkington Writer-in-Residence. He earned his M.F.A. from Washington University in St. Louis. His first novel, A Gentleman's Guide to Graceful Living, won the 2009 PEN/Hemingway award. He has been named a winner of the 2010 Whiting Writer's Award. His short fiction has appeared in numerous journals, including Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, the Mississippi Review and Tin House.

Instructor: Lynn, Allison
JH312     R     07:15 PM - 09:45 PM

Graduate level prose creative writing workshop, mixed genre (fiction or creative nonfiction). Open to MFA in Creative Writing students only.

Allison Lynn graduated from Dartmouth College and received her M.F.A. in Fiction from New York University. Her articles and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, People, InStyle, and Redbook, among others. Now You See It, Allison's first novel, has received both the William Faulkner Medal from the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society and The Chapter One Award from the Bronx Writer's Center.

Instructor: Forhan, Chris
JH335A     T     06:00 PM - 08:40 PM
Start Date: Aug 24 2011       
End Date: Dec 17 2011

This is a graduate level poetry writing workshop. Throughout the semester, you will write your own poems in the context of a study of various poetic movements and aesthetic inclinations in American poetry of the last few decades, from the loosened form and expanded subject matter seen in "confessional" poetry of the '50s and '60s to the indeterminacy and radical disjunctivism evident in more recent "language" poetry. We will also read the work of the three visiting poets - Robert Hass, Tomaž Šalamun, and Natasha Trethewey - and consider it in the context of the various poetics we are studying. Throughout the semester, you will write a number of poems to be critiqued in a workshop format and will submit a series of short written responses to the assigned reading. 

Chris Forhan earned an M.A. from the University of New Hampshire and an M.F.A. from the University of Virginia. He is the author of Forgive Us Our Happiness, The Actual Moon, The Actual Stars, and Black Leapt In, winner of the Best Book of Indiana Award. Forhan's poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry and in Poetry, Paris Review, New England Review, and other journals, and he has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and two Pushcart Prizes.

Instructor: Ling, Micah
JH307     R     06:00 PM - 08:40 PM
Start Date: Aug 24 2011       
End Date: Dec 17 2011

We will be reading and discussing the authors who will be visiting Butler this semester; we will be using a book review website (Book Punch Reviews) as a tool to analyze and discuss the material. We will divide into groups and complete critical responses, 200-word reviews, and some creative pieces. We will have some in-class assignments and some out-of-class assignments - I'm hoping to really use the website as a way to post/publish a variety of things (interviews, etc.)

Micah Ling earned an M.A. in literature and an MFA in poetry at Indiana University with the Neal-Marshall Graduate Fellowship. She is the author of two collections of poetry: Three Islands (2009), and Sweetgrass (2010). Ling was one of three finalists for the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Award in 2010.

Instructor: Stapleton, Robert L
JH303     M     07:15 PM - 09:45 PM
Start Date: Aug 24 2011       
End Date: Dec 17 2011

The coursework for EN505/Literary Editing and Publishing will feature a series of intimate conversations designed to enhance your understanding of the literary marketplace from different perspectives: 

As editors, we will study the organizational designs, product creation, and marketing plans of successful publishing brands (journals, magazines, small presses, etc). An ongoing dialogue will focus on the hallmarks of publishable work; i.e., what editors are looking for. All students will perform a close analysis of a literary brand and present their findings.  

As students, we will consider the design and shape of publications. We will consider how to move from concept to physical product. This conversation will be fostered through guest editors and writers. All students will create and design a mock publication.  

Also, we will take a close look at department publications. In addition to regular visits from Booth editors, we will invite the editors of Manuscripts and Archives to join the conversation. Together we will consider how these publications are created, edited, branded, marketed, and more.

Rob Stapleton received a M.F.A. from Long Beach State. He is the founder and editor of Butler's literary magazine, Booth. Stapleton is a member of the National Writing Project and the Associated Writing Programs (AWP). He has published his fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in various journals and magazines. 

Instructor: Sutherlin, Susan J
    TR     01:00 PM - 02:15 PM
Start Date: Aug 24 2011       
End Date: Dec 17 2011

This class will rotate classroom discussion sessions where students examine various modes of age-appropriate creative and expository writing pedagogy, and an active experience where students guide and teach elementary or secondary school students to express themselves in literary genres. In fall 2011, the course will work in partnership with Shortridge High School, a leading Indianapolis Public School magnet. Butler students will work together with IPS students on a variety of projects, guided both by Butler and IPS faculty. These projects include providing targeted tutorial support on expository writing and scholarship applications, and the creation of a literary magazine.

Instructor: Dahlie, Michael
Tuesday, 6-8:30

Graduate level creative writing elective in screenwriting. This class will cover the essentials of screenwriting in order to help students begin (and perhaps complete) a screenplay over the semester. We will focus in particular on novel adaptations, and students will be responsible for working from source material whose copyright has expired (War of the Worlds, Wuthering Heights, The Tempest, etc.). The adaptations can be loose, modern re-creations or faithful re-tellings. We will review sections of the screenplays in a workshop setting. Open to MFA in Creative Writing students only.

Michael Dahlieis Butler University's first Booth Tarkington Writer-in-Residence. He earned his M.F.A. from Washington University in St. Louis. His first novel, A Gentleman's Guide to Graceful Living, won the 2009 PEN/Hemingway award. He has been named a winner of the 2010 Whiting Writer's Award. His short fiction has appeared in numerous journals, including Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, the Mississippi Review and Tin House.

Studies in Poetry: Points of Contact
Instructor: Forhan, Chris
Thursday, 7:15-9:45

If we look closely at those moments in poems that feel most moving, richly suggestive, and meaningfully strange, we can recognize that they often involve some surprising, unaccountable juxtaposition - a collision, for instance, of two words or images or ideas or tones that are quite unlike each other. Such moments underscore one way of thinking about a poem's form: that it is a continual negotiation between order and disorder, between pattern and variation, with the reader's expectations and desires being sometimes thwarted, sometimes fulfilled. In this graduate-level course on poetic form, we will study such points of contact in the work of numerous poets and discuss how the poems therefore reveal some presiding conceptions of form among modern and contemporary poets, and we will use our study of the poems as a means to begin generating material for our own work. Writing assignments: brief reading responses; perhaps a full-length essay; a poetry notebook; a few poems. MFA in Creative Writing students only.

Chris Forhan earned an M.A. from the University of New Hampshire and an M.F.A. from the University of Virginia. He is the author of Forgive Us Our Happiness, The Actual Moon, The Actual Stars, and Black Leapt In (2009), winner of the Best Book of Indiana Award. Forhan's poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry and in Poetry, Paris Review, New England Review, and other journals, and he has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and two Pushcart Prizes.

Instructor: Dan Barden
Thursday, 7:15-9:45 

Graduate level creative writing workshop in fiction. Open to MFA in Creative Writing students only 

Dan Barden, author of John Wayne: A Novel and The Next Right Thing (2011), received his M.F.A. from Columbia University and has published essays in Esquire, GQ, Details, and Poets and Writers, among other journals and anthologies. Before coming to Butler he held the prestigious Jenny McKean Moore writer-in-residence at The George Washington University. In addition to teaching creative writing courses in fiction, poetry, and personal essay, Dan also writes plays. 

Instructor: Porter Shreve
Wednesday, 6:30-9 

In this Creative Nonfiction course we will be writing in a variety of forms and reading a range of memoir, personal essays and literary journalism. The semester's work will be divided into four broad units: Portraits, Place, Arts & Culture, and Creative Nonfiction in Print. MFA in Creative Writing students only.

Porter Shreve holds a B.A. from American University and a M.F.A. from the University of Michigan. He is the author of three novels, The Obituary Writer; Drives Like a Dream; and When the White House Was Ours. His short stories, essays, Op-Eds and reviews have appeared in many publications, including the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe and the New York Times. He has been the Director of Creative Writing at Purdue University since fall 2005.

Instructor: Lynch, Alessandra
Wednesday, 6-8:30 

Graduate level creative writing workshop in poetry. MFA in Creative Writing students only.

Alessandra Lynch holds a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Antioch Review, Ploughshares, and other journals. She is the author of Sails the Wind Left Behind, winner of the Alice James Books New England/New York Competition, and It was a terrible cloud at twilight, winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize.

Instructors: Sandy Sasso and Hilene Flanzbaum
Day and Time TBA

Many stories in the Bible are well-known, like that of Abraham and Isaac, for instance. Other stories, however, are only brief sketches that seem incomplete, and leave us wondering what has been left out. In delving into the story and filling in the blank spaces, you would be creating a type of story which in Hebrew is called midrash, an ancient rabbinic tradition of interpretation or "retelling." In this course, we will first study the structure of selected biblical stories and classical midrash; second, we will write within this ancient tradition in order to contribute to this ongoing narrative of imagining and creating modern midrash.

Sandy Sasso received her B.A. Magna Cum Laude and M.A. from Temple University. She is the recipient of an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Butler University, among others. Rabbi Sasso is the author of nationally acclaimed children's books. She is the 2004 recipient of the Helen Keating Ott Award for Outstanding Contribution to Children's Literature and the 2005 Sugarman Family Award for Jewish Children's Literature. She has been honored as one of the "Influential Women in Indiana" by the Indianapolis Business Journal.

Hilene Flanzbaum earned her M.A. at Johns Hopkins and her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. She currently heads the department while teaching courses in American literature especially poetry, Holocaust Studies and creative writing. She has published numerous articles on American poetry and on Jewish Studies; her poetry and creative non-fiction has appeared in journals from Ploughshares to O Magazine; and she has edited two books, The Americanization of the Holocaust and Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology.

EN 422 Literary Translation
Instructor: Ania Spyra
Monday, 6:30-9 PM

In an ideal world, all writers would be translators, and all translators would be writers. Nothing makes one more sensitive to the pliancy of a language than the effort of transcribing it into another. This class aims to introduce students to both the theory and the practice of translation. In addition to reading and discussing articles about literary translation and comparing existing translations of the same work, students will explore and formulate their own strategies and approaches to literary translation, with an eye to how these strategies and approaches intersect with their own writing. The intended audience of the course is advanced undergraduates and graduate students with interests in writing/editing, foreign language, translation, and publishing. Fluency in a second language is welcome but not necessary; openness to working with a dictionary a must.


Ania Spyra earned her B.A. and M.A. at the University of Silesia, and her Ph.D. at the University of Iowa. A traveler and a polyglot, she combines these interests in her scholarship and is currently working on a book on multilingual experiments in transnational literature. Her essays on cosmopolitanism and multilingualism as well as her creative non-fiction have appeared in various collections and journals, including Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Sargasso, World Literature Today and Comparative Literature.