Tag: Dr. Kay Cosgrove

Summer 2025 Course Offerings

By In A Writing Life, Stuff You Oughta Know

Tuesdays & Thursdays, 6:30-7:45 pm, Synchronous/Online
ENG 668: Creative Nonfiction Workshop – To Tell a Story
Instructor: Professor Robert Wilder
CRN: 20539
(Area III)

Nonfiction (essay, article, column, memoir, personal narrative, creative nonfiction, Substack) is a form of storytelling. Whether you are writing about learning to drive, odd insect mating practices, or your obsession with exotic sea salts, you are telling a story you want the reader to fully inhabit and experience. As a small, supportive community of writers, we will discuss the vital storytelling elements—scene, dialogue, conflict, structure—that help bring out the elements already present in the story you are trying to tell. Our goal is to meet each workshop piece on its own terms, understanding the authorial intent while trying to help the writer toward the next, more fully realized draft. In addition, we will examine exemplary published pieces of nonfiction, hoping to learn from them for the benefit of our own work.

 Summer II 7/7/25 – 8/22/25

 Tuesdays & Thursdays, 6:30-7:45 pm, Synchronous/Online
ENG 669: Poetry Writing Workshop
Instructor: Dr. Kay Cosgrove
CRN: 20538
(Area III)

Get ready to fall in love with writing poetry. In this class, we’ll embrace the traditional workshop style where you’ll be submitting your poems regularly, weekly or bi-weekly. Your peers and I will offer comments on your work that will be both verbal and written.  At the start of each workshop, I’ll kick things off with a brief poem, sparking inspiration for a craft related prompt. These exercises aim to unleash new ideas, hone your craft, and pave the way for exciting new poems throughout the semester. The goal of this workshop is to give you an opportunity to hear thoughtful readers’ responses to your poems, generate work and to be enthralled. I’ll be cheering you on to take risks, pushing you beyond the subjects, gestures, and forms with which you are already comfortable.

Writing Studies Summer 2022 Course Offerings

By In Stuff You Oughta Know

 

 

 

 

 

Summer I: CRN 20092

ENG 621: Horror in Literature & Film

Online & Asynchronous

Instructor:  Dr. Paul Patterson

(Area I)

Have you ever asked yourself: “Why do I like to be scared?” When the novel came into being in the middle of the eighteenth century, its most popular genre was the Gothic—the novel of horror. In fact, the modern era—the era of science, reason, and democracy—has been obsessed with terror, fear, and the unknown since its very inception. So, why do we like to be terrified? What is it about horror fiction that so appeals to modern culture? We often avoid delving into such questions because they reveal to us that our pleasures often seem woefully uncivilized and unseemly. Beginning with one of the earliest Gothic horror novels, the course will trace out a literary, philosophical, and filmic history. Each unit of the course will explore how a different psychological/cultural concept of terror plays out in an aesthetic context.

 

 

 

 

 

Summer II: CRN 20267

ENG 600: Poetry Today

Online Tuesdays & Thursdays, 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Instructor:  Dr. Kay Cosgrove

(Area I)

 This course will serve as an exploration of the current poetry scene in America, beginning with Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, and reading through the High Modernist period to present day. We will focus in particular on how 20th and 21st century poets seek to define a distinct American poetics through experimental form and narrative structure. We will undertake a close study of the schools and theoretical concepts that define these centuries. Movements covered will include Imagism, the New York School, the Harlem Renaissance, the Neo-Confessional, the Contemporary lyric, and Language Poetry. We will practice our own creative imitations in an effort to understand how to “make it new” as Ezra Pound suggested the modern American poet ought to do. We will have a ball.

 

 

 

Writing Studies Course Offerings – Fall 2021

By In Stuff You Oughta Know

We have a great lineup coming this fall!

ENG 646: Multimedia Writing

Professor Paula Levine

Mondays, 6:30-9:15 pm – online synchronous Zoom sessions

CRN: 41897

(Area II or III)

This course is an intensive writing workshop that focuses on writing for multiple media platforms, long-form writing, and building a writing portfolio. Students will be guided in exploring, discovering, and strengthening their voices and writing styles with the goal of enhancing and expanding their analytical and creative communication skills, and preparing them for real world jobs.

A writer’s work can be incredibly varied and provide a multitude of challenges and opportunities for creativity.  Writers may draft a script for a storyboard developed by a graphic artist.  They may also create the text for Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram posts.  They might write copy for a news broadcast, or their own blog.

The goal of this course is to introduce the many facets of multimedia writing while encouraging each student to find their own method, approach, and voice within the structures of each multimedia platform.

ENG 620: Special Topics in Literature:  American Voices

Dr. Owen Gilman

Tuesdays, 6:30-9:15 pm – online synchronous Zoom sessions

CRN: 41896

(Area I)

From early American voices of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson to strong voices of today in Rita Dove and Joy Harjo, this course involves looking for and listening to writers who represent the American spirit of innovation and independence.  Hemingway is not Faulkner; Richard Wright is not Toni Morrison.  Yet they all reflect America deeply and provocatively.  Besides reflecting on a diverse set of writers (poets, novelists, essayists), students will also workshop a piece of writing that presents their own distinctive voice.

ENG 550: Practice of Writing

Dr. Kay Cosgrove

Wednesdays, 6:30-9:15 pm – online synchronous Zoom sessions

CRN: 41895

(Core Class)

This course is designed as an Introduction to the Writing Studies Program, and it allows students to explore a variety of genres while they explore career options within the writing/publishing world. Students will literally “walk in the shoes” of different writers, playing the role of columnist, reporter, editor, poet, and fiction writer. At the end of the course, students will reflect on these different roles and begin brainstorming a possible thesis project in one area.

ENG 676: Writing for Publication

Professor Gina Tomaine

Thursdays, 6:30-9:15 pm – online synchronous Zoom sessions

CRN: 41898

(Area III)

Successful freelance publishing begins with an awareness of what editors and their readers want. It demands knowledge of the manuscript market and familiarity with the requirements of specific publications: subject, length, organization, style. Unpublished writers can perfect their skills by analysis and imitation of authors who already write for the publications in which learners wish to appear. The course requires that assignments be composed—from the beginning—for specific publications and that completed work will be submitted for publication. Content can be fiction, nonfiction, or journalism and varies with the instructor.

 

Writing Studies Summer 2021 Course Offerings

By In Stuff You Oughta Know


Summer I: ENG 621: Horror in Literature and Film (Area I)
Dr. Paul Patterson
Online and Asynchronous
CRN: 20024

 

From the horrors of Hell in Dante’s Inferno to the meta-narrative of Joss Whedon’s and Drew Goddard’s The Cabin in the Woods, this course explores the production, reception, aesthetics, politics, and evolution of the horror genre in both fiction and literature. In this course we will explore the shifts in the genre’s paradigm as landmark films and books are considered and contextualized. We will read the literary works and films against the historical, political, and industrial settings in which they were produced. The course will move in chronological order through the films, beginning with the classic films of the 1930s and 40s. We will next examine Cold War politics and how it influenced the genre, then the apathy of the Clinton ’90s as reflected in such films as I Know What you Did Last Summer and Scream. We will conclude by considering the trauma of lost bodies in both Dante’s Inferno and such post-9/11 films as Speilberg’s War of the Worlds, George Romero’s The Land of the Dead, and the 2006 remake of The Omen. The literary works of Dante, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Colson Whitehead, and the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Roman Polanski, Brian DePalma, David Cronenberg, Joss Whedon, and Mary Harron, among others, will be studied.

 

Summer II: ENG 640: Experiments in Narrative (Area II)
Dr. Kay Cosgrove
Tuesdays & Thursdays 6:00 – 8:00 pm (online meetings via Zoom)
CRN: 20233

 

In this course, students will carefully study specific approaches to craft and technique in creative writing, from long form narrative to minimalist poetry. Through detailed critical reading, analysis, and diagramming, students will explore the scaffolding that underpins creative writing, with special attention to form and genre. By analyzing the craft techniques used by other creative writers, students will learn to apply such approaches to form and technique effectively in their own work.

Summer 2019 Course Offerings

By In Stuff You Oughta Know

Summer I: (CRN 20784)

ENG 669: Poetry Writing Workshop (Area III)

Mondays & Wednesdays 18:30-21:45

Instructor:  Professor Eleanor Stanford

Poetry, many would agree, is language at its most intense and most alive. It asks us to push ourselves linguistically, spiritually, emotionally, with more intensity than perhaps any other genre. What better form, then, for any writer to learn from and engage with? In this course, we’ll read across a wide variety of styles, time periods, and cultures. We will consider what we can learn from these poems, as readers, writers and as human beings, that we can apply to other aspects of our work and our lives, and will try our hands at writing many different kinds of poems as well. We will cover meter and form (organic and received), and engage deeply with some of the greatest contemporary poets. By the end of the semester, you will be able to both identify and compose poems in various forms and metrical patterns; to read and discuss a poem on its own terms–structural, thematic, emotional, musical; to offer helpful feedback on classmates’ poems, based on the elements of poetic composition we’ll examine in the class; and to revise your own work using these same elements. This class will have a workshop element as well as an academic one.

 

Summer II: (CRN 20964)

ENG 640: Experiments in Narrative (Area II)

Hybrid class – Online/ Thursdays in person – 18:30-21:45

Instructor:  Dr. Kay Cosgrove (Gomes)

In this course, students will carefully study specific approaches to craft and technique in creative writing, from long form narrative to minimalist poetry. Through detailed critical reading, analysis, and diagramming, students will explore the scaffolding that underpins creative writing, with special attention to form and genre. By analyzing the craft techniques used by other creative writers, students will learn to apply such approaches to form and technique effectively in their own work.