Types of Creative Writing

ENG 313 Section 5

TR 130-245pm

KUY 407

 

For Heartache (from “Bani Roy’s Recipes for Excellent Bengali Meals,”Anjoli Roy)

 Rice

Translation: For grandchildren, who otherwise might not know anything.

1 cup of uncooked Mahatma Basmati rice

2 cups of water

Put both together in a pan. Cover and bring it to boil. When boiling, put it to simmer. If you add a little oil in the water after putting it to simmer, it won’t boil over so much. Check, when there some small holes appear or depressions on the surface and hardly any water could be seen, put off the stove, having the pot on the range. The rice will be done in a minute.

 

The thing is to watch time.

O.K.?

Right?

Now, cook fluffy rice and enjoy yourselves.

 

In this course, we will treat what are usually considered distinct genres (short fiction and poetry) as spaces that carry images of hunger, truth, desire – namely, work with food imagery as an endless incarnation of hunger, time, family, culture, love, what have you. In the spirit of deepening our reading and writing practices, we consider, for example, how Anjoli Roy’s recipe (quoted above) reads more as love letter than list.

We will write, read, and treat as constant food imagery, given its frequent and easy to understand correlation with the material and real, and through our writing practice, pose the question of what is constant or true, regardless of genre, even as we structure, support, and situate images in forms of fiction and poetry. And of course, in the first place, we want to get at how and why the question of constancy or truth is a crucial question for writers to explore.

Requirements: Attendance (mandatory); weekly writing; one short critical essay; final portfolio

Reading list: TBD (all readings will be made available as PDF’s)