A nightmare was once believed to be a female spirit or monster who settled on and produced a feeling of suffocation in a sleeping person or animal. If most of us no longer believe in monsters, then why do nightmares still plague us? What makes nightmares scary? Are they distorted expressions of our deepest fears, or frightful fulfillments of our forbidden desires? In this course, we will examine the blurry line between fear and desire and consider the ways in which the “ugly” aspects of our unconscious unleash themselves into our consciousness in uncontrollable ways. Many works of literature present us with scenarios that resemble the surreal, anxiety-producing nightmares we’ve all experienced during otherwise peaceful and protective sleeps. As we probe these texts, we will explore the ways in which we are sometimes subject to the powers of our own imaginations. Texts will include William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Franz Kakfa’s The Metamorphosis, Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, and selected works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Nicolai Gogol, Jorge Luis Borges, and others. We will filter our discussions through the theoretical lenses of Sigmund Freud and other psychoanalysts.

As you think about leaving home and childhood’s end, you may find yourself reflecting on your life to date.  The liminal state of the spring-term senior presents a ripe opportunity for memoir.  In this course, we will explore the range of genres, styles, and techniques evinced in the work of great memoirists – from Hemingway to Joan Didion to Jimmy Santiago Baca and Sarah Suleri. While reading prose memoir, poetic memoir, food memoir, and memoir-comic, we will produce our own autobiographical compositions through a term-long writing process.  Shorter-term analytical assessments, a creative imitation, and presentation projects will help us engage with and learn from the best in the field.  As part of our culminating experience, we will share selections from our stories with the broader Catlin Gabel community.

To choose or not to choose: that’s the real question. This course explores the power human beings have to choose, and the extent to which we use, or choose to use, that power. How much control do we have over our lives? What role does choice play in our search for meaning? What are the causes and effects of agency and passivity? We’ll struggle with these questions as we meet characters who struggle with their decisions. We’ll also dabble into a bit of existentialist philosophy.

Creative Writing is a course in which students will explore a variety of genres, creating their own work across those genres. This course supposes that writing creatively should be a little more like messing around with a chemistry set and a little less like playing by a set of rules. That ham-handed analogy is to say that Catlin Gabel's writing students should be free to sense the wide-open possibilities of creative prose, poetry, drama, and journalism; most of the great pieces of literature we read at Catlin Gabel came to be because an author decided to break convention, instead of abiding by it. That said, it’s always good to know what rules you’re breaking before you go ahead and break them. The class will spend some time reading, but we’ll mostly use our reading to see how published writers deal with all the possibilities they see before them, and the bulk of the class will be spent writing, usually from prompts to free up the students' imaginations. We’ll seek larger audiences beyond the Catlin Gabel community, and students should leave the class with a surprising bundle of their own work. Students may even find themselves published in various outlets by the end of the year.  Creative Writing is a half-credit class that meets twice a week all year long, and covers poetry, prose, drama, creative non-fiction, and maybe even some aural media (read: radio). Students should expect to get comfortable in a workshop setting, reading and then commenting honestly (but gently!) on the work of their peers. Creative Writing will be a lot of fun, and only as stressful as you would like it to be.