WRITING YOUR WORLD WITH LYDIA DAVIS

“Take notes regularly,” Lydia Davis advises in Essays One. “Observe your own activity. . .Observe your own feelings (but not at tiresome length). . .Observe the behavior of others, both animal and human. . .Observe the weather, and be specific.”

This cross-genre seminar—fiction and nonfiction, with forays into translation—aims to uncover radical, imaginative, and accessible approaches to generating and refining creative work drawn from the world around us, using the good examples of Davis and writers she is in conversation with. Readings will include Davis’s The End of the Story, Essays One, Essays Two, Collected Stories, Our Strangers, and In the Weeds; her translations of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time; as well as the works of writers such as Franz Kafka, Marguerite Duras, Elizabeth Hardwick, Osama Alomar, Eliot Weinberger, Thomas Bernhard, and Italo Calvino, whose models she cites or follows (or whose works I find complementary to Davis). These readings will be supplemented by the occasional complementary craft essay by writers like Samuel R. Delany, George Saunders, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Ben Mauk. Using these models and guidance, students will be emboldened to apply these techniques to their own work, which will consist of brief weekly writing assignments (many of which will be creative) and generative in-class creative writing prompts. Students will also do short presentations drawn from independent visit to Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library, where Davis’s illuminating notebooks, revised manuscripts, and other papers are housed. Students will also learn to keep a daily writing journal, from which selections will serve as the midterm and final.