IMF 51654 Fiction: Sports, Games, & The Shape of Narrative L

Instructor

Gene Pfeiffer

Class Type

Literature & Craft

Course Description

Roger Angell wannabes are welcome, but this is NOT a course in sports writing for newspapers, magazines or blogs. This course explores how various sports and games are used in literature. Physical competitions – like baseball, football, hockey, soccer and basketball will be looked at, as well as more solitary activities like fishing and hunting, and sit-down competitions like chess, poker and video games.

Whatever the sport or game, they can offer a depth to character, as well as fresh language, form and setting to an author. Relevant to writers: Sports and games provide living examples of great timing, grace and form. Players in competition can experience the highest moments of tension, courage and impact--all qualities of action we look for in our writing.

Players also must cope with adversity, overcome obstacles, deal with conflict, and constantly act and react to changing situations. Their skill, strength, speed and intelligence serve them in their endeavors. And when they fail, they often are offered redemption through second chances. For these reasons, sports and games lend themselves to story and character study, and during the term we’ll be examining them as appropriate subjects for literature. We’ll also explore the connections between the origins of cognitive play, sports and storytelling in human beings, and how these connections might be enlightening to the craft of writing.

In this course we will hit and run on modern and contemporary literature from early 20th century baseball and fly fishing to the story of a female chess champion to early 21st century hockey, and even some speculative sporting fiction from the future. (Authors included: Don DeLillo, John Cheever, Fredrik Backman, Norman Maclean, Walter Tevis, Sam Miller, J.K. Rowling, Susan Collins and Annie Proulx.)

We’ll schedule journal writing exercises to stimulate your own work no matter what your sport or game, and the team will take a swing at workshopping a short piece by each player. So, the coach expects you to emerge with a few winning pieces to send out for publication!