WRITING WATER

Human beings have always been drawn to water. We rely on it to survive, but we also set sail on it, extract its resources, swim in it, and walk down to its edges to contemplate its beauty. Water has long been a potent source of meaning and imagination for writers, but in the last thirty years water has taken on new associations. As the oceans rise, as rivers dry up, as migrants boats capsize at sea, and as we reappraise histories of empire and colonization, writers are more than ever before turning their attention to water and learning to tell new stories about it.

This class will investigate the relationship between one of the most important elements of the natural world – water – and the stories that human beings choose to tell about it. We will read and think about swimming, migration, rising oceans, extraction, sea creatures, and ghosts. Students will produce both critical and creative work, and while this is a fiction class, we will take our lessons from writers working across many different formats. By considering novels, essays, poetry, and short stories that embody and describe the human relationship to water, students will learn to consider the ways in which we, as writers, can address ourselves to the natural world as it changes around us, and how water in all its forms can be both a source of fear and a source of consolation.