Instructor: Sabina Khan-Ibarra
How do you know when a piece is finished, and how do you find the right place to leave the reader?
Endings carry enormous weight. A final line can return us to the beginning, shift the meaning of everything that came before, leave us with an image, open a new question, or stop just before we expect it to. The strongest endings feel both surprising and earned.
In this four-week generative class, we will study how contemporary poets and prose writers such as Ada Limón, Ross Gay, Ocean Vuong, and Lydia Davis bring their work to a close.
Each week, we’ll explore a different approach to ending: the turn or surprise, the return and echo, the image or gesture, and the unresolved or open ending.
Through close reading, discussion, and writing exercises, students will experiment with endings in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. We’ll also take existing drafts and try multiple endings, asking how changing the final lines can change the entire piece.
Students will:
* study different approaches to endings across poetry and prose;
* experiment with turns, echoes, images, gestures, and open endings;
* learn to recognize when an ending is over-explaining or arriving too soon;
* write multiple endings for the same piece and examine how each changes its meaning;
* revise existing work with greater attention to where and how it ends;
* generate new work and leave with practical strategies for finishing future drafts.
Sabina Khan-Ibarra is a Pakistani Pashtun American writer, poet, and educator whose work explores family, memory, migration, faith, and inheritance across poetry and prose. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in AGNI, SWWIM Every Day, Anomaly, FERAL, andPanoply, among others, and has been named a strong semifinalist for the University of Wisconsin Press’s Brittingham and Felix Pollak Poetry Prizes, longlisted for Palette Poetry’s Love & Eros Prize, and shortlisted by SmokeLong Quarterly. Sabina holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and also teaches creative writing with San Diego Writers, Ink, and Litquake.