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Teaching |
In addition to my writing, I teach in the Journalism
Department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
All of my classes are part of the Certificate of Online
Journalism, but open to all.
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Online Classes |
| SUMMER 2010: |
| Writing About Sports (Journal 391-A) |
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This course examines the history of sports writing in its evolution both as a form and as a profession and looks at some of the classic and contemporary examples of the genre. Eschewing the genres of as-told-to sports bios, teaching books, and coffee-table volumes, we will move back and forth from work that is both lyrical and idealized to writing that is satirical or probing. We will read selected writings, current magazine and newspaper sports journalism, and our own class work in the form of drafts that students will post for one another online. Each student will be required to complete several short papers and an extended sports story.
Register for this class |
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| Online Reviewing: New Perspectives in Criticism (Journal 392G) |
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With the spate of online journals, web pages, and blogs that cater to tastes of every kind, the very parameters of criticism published on the Internet have revolutionized the basic tenets of the craft. Whether reviewing books, movies, music, or the local arts scene, the online reviewer must not only know his or her subject but also be capable of adapting to an ever-changing electronic landscape of readers and outlets. A fascinating journey through the new world of opinion-making in cyberspace, the course will include reading and analysis of numerous online reviews and blogs, with frequent written assignments.
Register for this class |
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Reviewing Movies and Music (Journal 395-F)
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This course examines the history of sports writing in its evolution both as a form and as a profession and looks at some of the classic and contemporary examples of the genre. Eschewing the genres of as-told-to sports bios, teaching books, and coffee-table volumes, we will move back and forth from work that is both lyrical and idealized to writing that is satirical or probing. We will read selected writings, current magazine and newspaper sports journalism, and our own class work in the form of drafts that students will post for one another online. Each student will be required to complete several short papers and an extended sports story.
Register for this class |
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| FALL 2010 |
The Writing Life (Journal 395-J) |
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At once experiential and professional, hands-on and intellectual, The Writing Life will explore how a journalist/writer lives, what s/he does each day, the books s/he reads and writes, the interactions with editors and publishers, the travel, the solitary laptop hours, the joys, the pains, the hopes, the disappointments...the ambitions, the doubts, the thrills, the deep satisfactions. Encompassing content as diverse as Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, essays by Joan Didion, Stanley Crouch, and E.B. White, and Kerouac’s letters, The Writing Life will do what it discovers, as the course itself will become an online version of the very thing it celebrates. Incorporating a component of the evolving online writing life, this new course will be taught by a longtime newspaper reporter/magazine writer/book author who has himself lived a writing life for more than 25 years. Frequent papers will grow out of intense online discussion and a wide variety of fascinating, inspiring reading.
Registration Begins July 21, 1010
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