Who do we write for—or perhaps more to the point, who do we write to? The act of writing is not infrequently a message in a bottle endeavor, but in this course we come together across genre to consider not just audience but the roles of intimacy and distance, uncertainty and collaboration, the “I” and the second person, and correspondence as both a meaningfully material set of objects and a form that can be borrowed. Understanding writing as an act of witness and engagement, we will become pen pals with fan mail, love letters, mail art, open letters, and postcard essays. 

The letter writers we may encounter include Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Andrea Morningstar, Rainer Maria Rilke, Victoria Chang, Giorgia Lupi & Stefanie Posavec via Dear Data, Aimee Nezhukumatathil & Ross Gay in Lace & Pyrite, and Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems. Our workshops welcome the development of new and/or ongoing writing projects.

For permission to enroll in this section of English 8500, please contact Gabriel Fried, Director of Creative Writing, friedg@missouri.edu