MFA Courses

Instructor: Andy Levy
M  6:30-9:00

Graduate Prose Workshop. Nonfiction - A graduate-level workshop seminar in nonfiction prose writing.  All students will compose nonfiction prose of their own design, and provide critique of the work of their peers in a workshop setting.  Running alongside this workshop will be a craft seminar in Creative Nonfiction, in which students will read prominent examples from the genre and compose short essays modeled on those exemplars.  Students will also meet well-known practitioners of fiction and creative nonfiction in formal and casual settings, and will participate in one additional semester-long activity:  daily journal-keeping, annotation exercises, and/or the creation of a bibliography of creative nonfiction resources.

Andy Levy received his BA from Brown, MA from Johns Hopkins, and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The First Emancipator (2005), winner of the Slatten Prize for biography, and A Brain Wider Than The Sky: A Migraine Diary (2009), co-editor of the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Fiction (1997), and co-author of the textbook Creating Fiction: A Writer's Companion (1995).  His essays and reviews have appeared in Best American Essays, Harper's, the American Scholar, Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere.

Instructor: Susan Neville
Tues:  6:00- 9:00

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

Susan Neville, Demia Butler Professor. B.A. DePauw University; M.F.A. Bowling Green State University. Expertise: Fiction and Creative non-Fiction Writing.

Instructor: Chris Forhan
Tuesday: 6:30-9:00

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

A poetry parlor game:  are you a descendant of Emily Dickinson or of Walt Whitman?  Is your impulse to subtract, to compress, to distill, or is it to add, to spread, to talk and keep talking?  In this graduate level poetry writing workshop, you will write your own poems while simultaneously studying poets whose work tends either toward the compact and elliptical or toward the expansive and discursive.  We will take inspiration particularly from the writing of two of this semester's visiting poets:  the compact, emotionally intense lyric poems of Laura Kasischke and the voracious serio-comic outpourings of Albert Goldbarth.  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 MA from the University of New Hampshire and an MFA from the University of Virginia. He is the author of Forgive Us Our Happiness (1999), co-winner of the Bakeless Prize; The Actual Moon, The Actual Stars (2003), winner of the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize and the Washington State Book Award; and Black Leapt In (2009), winner of the Barrow Street Press Book Prize and 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: Greg Schwipps
Wednesday: 6:30-9:00

Fictionalizing Life:  While all fiction writers draw from real life experience when writing short stories and novels, what they create is not - or should not be - creative nonfiction merely labeled as fiction.  This class examines the way writers turn life into art.   Students will study fiction that draws heavily from the author's personal experience, like Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, fiction that uses a setting the author knows well, like Bonnie Jo Campbell's American Salvage,and fiction that relies on intimate conflict to examine the link between real and imagined lives.  Students will then write both creative nonfiction pieces and short stories that spring from their own lives.

Greg Schwipps is the author of the novel What This River Keeps, winner of the 2010 Indiana Authors Award in the Emerging Writer category, and co-author of Fishing For Dummies,2nd Edition.  He received his MFA from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and teaches at DePauw University.

Instructor: Sutherlin, Susan J
TR     01:00 PM - 02:15 PM

Writing in the Schools - Writing in the Schools is a service learning course that emphasizes of the teaching of writing alongside the mentoring of elementary, middle, and high school students. The chief concerns of the course are to introduce Butler students to community program building, to provide leadership opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students in partnership with an urban educational institution, and to further the aims of placing writing as a centerpiece within current education models.

Instructor: Allison Lynn
Thursday: 6:30-9:00

Reading Like a Writer In this class, we'll look at a wide array of contemporary and 20th-century fiction, keeping a focus on the writer's craft. We'll suss out the author's intention in writing each piece, and determine how s/he uses and manipulates literary elements - language, syntax, point of view, structure, etc. - to achieve those goals. It will be a semester of up-close reading, in the hopes that each member of the class will gain tools that s/he can employ in his/her own creative writing.

Allison Lynn holds a BA from Dartmouth College and an MFA from New York University. Her novel Now You See It (2004) won the William Faulkner Medal from the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society and the Chapter One Award from the Bronx Council on the Arts. Her essays and reviews have appeared in publications including The New York Times Book Review, The Chicago Sun-Times, People, InStyle and Post Road, as well as several anthologies.

Instructor: David Shumate
Thurs. 6:00-8:30 ECCW

The boundary between poetry and fiction is often thought of as clear and distinct.  However, over the course of the last century poets and fiction writers have explored the frontier in between these genres with intriguing results.  In this course, students will survey this often-neglected literary realm, studying the work of writers who have ventured into this area and composing a significant body of their own prose poems and/or very short stories.

David Shumate holds a bachelor's degree in English from Kansas University and a master of arts in English from Indiana University. He serves as Marian University's poet-in-residence. Shumate is the author of High Water Mark (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004), winner of the 2003 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and the 2004 Best Books of Indiana, poetry category. His second collection of prose poems, The Floating Bridge, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in January, 2008. His poetry has appeared widely in literary journals and has been anthologized in Good Poems for Hard Times and The Best American Poetry 2007.

Instructor: Ben Winters
Wednesday 6:00-8:30PM
ECCW Basement

Graduate level prose creative writing workshop, Fiction. Open to MFA in Creative Writing Students only.

Ben H. Winters is the author of six novels, including most recently The Last Policeman (Quirk), one of  Slate's best books of 2012 and an Edgar Award nominee for Best Paperback Original. Ben's other books include the New York Times bestselling parody novel Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (Quirk) and a novel for young readers, The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman (HarperCollins), which was a Bank Street Best Children's Book of 2011 as well as an Edgar Nominee in the juvenile category. Ben has also written extensively for the theater, and his journalism has appeared in The Chicago Reader, The Nation, In These Times, and elsewhere.

Instructor: Hilene Flanzbaum
Thursday 6:00-8:30PM
ECCW Sunroom

Graduate level prose creative writing workshop, Creative Non-Fiction. Open to MFA in Creative Writing students only.

Hilene Flanzbaum earned her BA from Brandeis, MA from Johns Hopkins, and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.  She is the editor of the Norton Anthology of Jewish-American Literature, and The Americanization of the Holocaust, published by Johns Hopkins UP in 1999.  Her essays and poetry have been widely published in venues such as O, The Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, and Tikkun.

Instructor: Allison Lynn
Tuesday 6:30-9:00PM
ECCW Basement

Graduate level prose creative writing workshop, Fiction. Open to MFA in Creative Writing students only.

Allison Lynn holds a BA from Dartmouth College and an MFA from New York University. Her novel Now You See It (2004) won the William Faulkner Medal from the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society and the Chapter One Award from the Bronx Council on the Arts. Her essays and reviews have appeared in publications including The New York Times Book Review, The Chicago Sun-Times, People, InStyle and Post Road, as well as several anthologies.

Instructor: Alessandra Lynch
Wednesday 6:00-8:30PM
ECCW Living Room

Graduate level workshop in poetry. Open to MFA in Creative Writing students only.

In this Graduate Seminar, you will continue to read, write, mull and muse over poetry-the art and craft of it and its myriad joys and challenges, frolics and foibles. We will spend at least half of the classes "workshopping" each other's poems-paying respectful attention to the formal elements and individual voices of the poem and exchanging observations and suggestions in order to help the poems sing full-throatedly-wholly and deeply. Our goal is to heed the essential nature of each poem and offer suggestions that might further it along in its journey.  The purpose of the workshop is to nurture these poems, coax them out into the light where a reader might more fully feel their diverse resonances.  We will understand, along the way, that some of the poems will be "formed" more or less than others. In addition to workshopping, much of this seminar will involve close, frequent, avid readings of poems.

Throughout this course, I will be encouraging you to cultivate your individual poetic sensibilities, to keep your senses awake and alert.  Ultimately, I hope you will deepen your experiences and responses to the world as poets.

Alessandra Lynch holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers's Workshop. Her poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Antioch Review, Ploughshares, and other journals.  She is the author of of Sails the Wind Left Behind (2002), winner of the Alice James Books New England / New York Competition, and It was a terrible cloud at twilight (2008), winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize.

Instructor: Rob Stapleton
Monday 7:00-9:30PM
JH305 (Publishing Lab)

This course introduces students to the production of literary publications. Through lectures and discussions, we will examine everything from the evaluation of manuscripts to the marketing of a finished product. We will also survey the evolving field of literary magazines and related ethical concerns.

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: Hilene Flanzbaum
Tues/Thurs 9:35-10:50AM
ECCW Sunroom

Special Topics in Literature: Visiting Writers Series

In this course we will be studying works by writers who visit campus during the fall semester as part of the Visiting Writers Series.  We will also attend Series events and play a primary role in interviewing and questioning the visiting writers.

Hilene Flanzbaum earned her BA from Brandeis, MA from Johns Hopkins, and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.  She is the editor of the Norton Anthology of Jewish-American Literature, and The Americanization of the Holocaust, published by Johns Hopkins UP in 1999.  Her essays and poetry have been widely published in venues such as O, The Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, and Tikkun.

Instructor: Unassigned
Tues/Thurs 2:25-3:40PM
JH304

Writing in the Schools is a service learning course that emphasizes of the teaching of writing alongside the mentoring of elementary, middle, and high school students. The chief concerns of the course are to introduce Butler students to community program building, to provide leadership opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students in partnership with an urban educational institution, and to further the aims of placing writing as a centerpiece within current education models.