Butler University’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program will offer two courses this summer that are open to the general public.

Intensive Screenwriting: Make a Movie in Three Weeks will meet Monday through Thursday from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. May 18–June 5. Writing Poems That Don’t Fit: An Intensive Workshop will meet Monday through Friday from 6:00 p.m. to 9:40 p.m. August 3-14. Both classes meet in the Efroymson Center for Creative Writing, 530 West Hampton Drive.

Cost for each class is $500 if taken for enrichment (no credit) or $2,190 for three graduate credit hours.

For registration information, email Mindy Dunn at mdunn1@butler.edu.

Course descriptions and information about the professors follow.

Intensive Screenwriting: Make a Movie in Three Weeks
Taught by Booth Tarkington Writer in Residence Alix Lambert

This intensive will NOT teach you how to use equipment. This intensive will push you off the edge of the cliff into creative free-fall, and ask you to complete a film before you hit the ground. This is what it usually feels like to make a movie – so why not start now? We will work on your individual films while assisting on the films of your classmates and we will learn the importance of collaboration in the art of filmmaking. This course will also allow you to understand the perspective of different roles that filmmakers often fill: writer, director, story-teller, actor and producer. Finally, the intensive nature of this course mirrors the experience of making a professional film.

Alix Lambert has directed and produced three feature length documentaries: The Mark of Cain, Bayou Blue, and Mentor, as well as numerous shorts. She was a writer on the HBO shows Deadwood and John from Cincinnati. She has conceived, written and directed two short series for MOCA tv: Crime: The Animated Series, and Ambiance Man. She is the author of Crime, and The Silencing.

Writing Poems That Don’t Fit: An Intensive Workshop
Taught by visiting faculty member Daisy Fried

Does it sometimes seem as if the poetry world is divided into camps determined to prove that the other camps have nothing to offer? And where do you fit in? This workshop recognizes that the best poetry often doesn’t fit into any stylistic mode, and uses what techniques it needs as it finds them. You’ll generate new poems and revise your work for supportive, frank, detailed critique by the instructor and group, and you’ll read and discuss relevant work by modern and contemporary poets, with the goal of failing, wonderfully, to fit in. In addition to workshopping, you’ll undertake a series of kamikaze revision exercises. You’ll consider—in magpie spirit, and in hopes of embracing confusion as a way to work towards clarity—strategic, formal and thematic questions designed to provide focus but leave most choices up to you. While we will likely make plenty of suggestions for specific edits as you revise, the most important revision questions will be: “Who are you? Who do you want to be? What do you want your poems to be?”

Daisy Fried is the author of Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice (2013), named by Library Journal one of the five best poetry books of 2013, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again (2006), National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, and She Didn’t Mean to Do It (2000), Agnes Lynch Starrett Award winner. She’s been awarded a Pushcart Prize, received Guggenheim, Hodder and Pew Fellowships, and the Cohen Award from Ploughshares.

She’s recently published poems in the London Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, Poetry, The Threepenny Review and Best American Poetry 2013. She was awarded Poetry’s Editors Prize for Feature Article in 2009 and won the Editors Award from Poetry for “Sing, God-Awful Muse,” an essay about reading Paradise Lost and breastfeeding. She reviews books of poetry for The New York Times, Poetry and the Threepenny Review. She is on the faculty of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.

 

Media contact:
Marc Allan
mallan@butler.edu
317-940-9822