This workshop is designed to help writers who have completed a draft of a memoir take their manuscript to the next level. We will do this by uncovering and refining the structure and significance of your piece. We will work on structure by looking at beginnings and endings, first and last chapters, to find the narrative arc of your memoir. We will work on significance by discovering and enlarging the themes inherent in your story, bringing out the universal in the specific. In addition to working on our own writing, we’ll read memoirs by Fenton Johnson, Richard Shelton, and others, observing their techniques so that we may apply them to our own memoirs. Finally, depending on availability, local authors of memoir will visit the class to discuss their writing.

Participants are required to bring to the first class meeting a complete draft of a memoir (either a book-length manuscript of 150–200 pages, or a substantial essay of 30–50 pages). Participants should also be familiar with the writing workshop setting.

When Ken Lamberton published his first book, Wilderness and Razor Wire (Mercury House, 2000), the San Francisco Chronicle called it “entirely original: an edgy, ferocious, subtly complex collection of essays…. Reading it is like chatting with someone on the street and suddenly noticing there is blood running down his side.” The book won the 2002 John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing. He has published four books and more than a hundred articles and essays in places like the Los Angeles Times, Arizona Highways, Manoa, Puerto Del Sol, The Gettysburg Review, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2000. In 2007, he won a Soros Justice Fellowship for his fourth book, Time of Grace: Thoughts on Nature, Family, and the Politics of Crime and Punishment (University of Arizona Press, 2007). Currently, he is finishing a book about hope and redemption on Arizona’s “dead” Santa Cruz River. He holds degrees in biology and creative writing from the University of Arizona.

Ecology deals with relationships and interactions of many kinds. Poetry does too. So, what is the ecology of poetry? In this discussion-based class, we’ll explore the burgeoning field of ecopoetics and examine what it means to consider a poem as an ecopoem: Does ecopoetry have to take place in nature? What is nature? What role does poetry play in a time of climate change and unprecedented species loss? What are the ethical considerations in a poem that addresses the non-human? What about place-based writing? How do science and mysticism interact in ecopoetry? How does ecopoetry intersect with postmodernism and language poetry?

With these and other questions in mind, we’ll read and examine work from a range of poets, including but not limited to A.R. Ammons, Linda Hogan, Brenda Iijima, Lisa Jarnot, W.S. Merwin, Lorine Niedecker, Gary Snyder, and Arthur Sze, as well as a number of poets from the Poetry Center’s fall reading series, such as Alison Deming, Juliana Spahr, and Lila Zemborain. We’ll also look at some contemporary criticism and Jonathan Skinner’s journal ecopoetics. This class is open to students of all skill levels and backgrounds. Both scientists/naturalists and poets/artists are encouraged to join.

Eric Magrane has been an Artist in Residence in three national parks. A naturalist and birder, he has taught both poetry and environmental education, and is a Senior Hiking Guide and Staff Naturalist for Canyon Ranch in Tucson. His poetry has appeared in such places as Terrain.org, you are here: the journal of creative geography, and Café Review. He is also a visual artist whose work with language on glass and mirror can be found at Bohemia. He holds his MFA from the University of Arizona and has received grants from the Arizona Commission on the Arts and Tucson Pima Arts Council.

How do you know if a poem is good or bad? Where did we get our ideas about what is good and bad in poetry? How much of what we think we know is useful to our ability to appreciate and create poems?

In this course we will discuss the good poem/bad poem problem in the tradition of good cop/bad cop. Each participant will be given a packet of poems, written by famous and unknown poets alike, presented without attribution. We will use this packet to explore our ideas of aesthetics, in the hopes of finding that each person ultimately brings a great deal of subjectivity to their reading of poems, but also a great deal of intuitive wisdom. We will re-learn how to read and think about poems, and those of us who find poetry intimidating will realize that they are smarter and more creative-minded than they know. By the end of the course we will have found a new way to articulate our likes and dislikes about poems productively and constructively.

Each week we will spend the first part of class discussing and analyzing the anonymous poems and then completing one in-class poetry writing exercise (the first being to write an intentionally “bad” poem) relative to a brief talk on the rhetorical modes of syntax, line breaks, articles (for example, the/an/that), clichés, and pathos (emotion). Each week we will also bring in a poem to workshop. The goal of this class is three-fold: to relax our ideas about how we must “understand” poetry, to learn how to talk about poetry without fear, and to become inspired to write new poems with fresh thinking.

Ann M. Fine’s first book of poems, A Nest This Size, will be published in November 2009 by Shearsman Books. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Diner, Nocturnes Review of Literary Arts, Sonora Review, Cue, online at NoTell Motel, La Fovea, The Drunken Boat, Moria, and elsewhere. She attended undergraduate school at The University of Tampa in Florida, and graduated with an MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars in Vermont, where she studied poetry and architectural history and theory. She has been the director of two community writing centers, Casa Libre en la Solana in Tucson, Arizona which she also co-founded, and InkTank World Headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio. Along with artifice rhetoric and postmodern theory, Ann’s passions include architecture and the history of fools/folly/and other humorous literary fodder.

How do facts and events inspire literary nonfiction, how can writers effectively incorporate research into works of creativity and imagination, and how can writers balance the imperative to tell a good story with the responsibility to be a good historian?

Acclaimed UA Creative Nonfiction Faculty Fenton Johnson and Ander Monson will lead an evening lecture and generative workshop on the use of research in creating essays and memoir. This event will include lecture, discussion, and exercises. All proceeds of this event will go to support a fellowship fund for MFA graduate students.