As we work on and share new and continuing creative writing projects, we will also mull over theories and practices of literary adaptation, including narrative, biographical, generic, and formal iterations. What are the pleasures, payoffs, and perils of retelling familiar stories? Of adapting an existing work to another genre or artform? Of telling others’ stories or using others’ writing as a basis for our own? And, importantly, what are the critical distinctions between adaption and appropriation? Some of the ways in which we consider adaptation may be genre-specific (e.g. what do we make of the proliferation of haiku or ghazals in American poetry?), but everything we read, watch, and discuss will be of interest to creative writers in any genre.

Among the works we might engage include James Baldwin’s “Letter to My Nephew” and adaptations by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Kei Miller, and Kiese Laymon; Neil Gaiman’s Sandman; Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird; Louise Gluck’s Vita Nova, Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice; Derek Walcott’s Omeros; staged musical works by Mathew Aucoin and Anais Mitchell; and theory by Kathryn Hume, Linda Hutcheon, Julia Kristeva, and Julie Sanders.