User:Awelch

Course Overview
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.

Course Facts
Department: Journalism

Type:online using WebCt

Professor: Carl Vigeland

Credits: 3

Size: about 15 students

Work load: weekly readings (about 10-20 pages)and discussions, periodic articles

About Carl Vigeland
Carl Vigeland has combined lifelong interests in music and sports to create a body of work that explores the phenomenon of performance at its highest level.

He is the author of six books: Great Good Fortune, In Concert, Stalking the Shark, Jazz in the Bittersweet Blues of Life (with Wynton Marsalis), Letters to a Young Golfer (with Bob Duval), and Release (forthcoming). A former newspaper reporter, Vigeland has written about many different subjects for a wide variety of magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, Boston Magazine, The Boston Globe Magazine, Conde Nast Traveler, Country Journal, DoubleTake, Downbeat, Fast Company, Golf Digest, Harvard, New England Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, Playboy, Sports Illustrated, and Yankee.

In addition to his own writing, Vigeland has served as a consultant and ghost writer on a wide range of projects, including the memoirs of a retired circus performer. A graduate of Harvard, he is a lecturer in journalism at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where he and his family live. An amateur pianist and trumpet player, Vigeland is also an expert skier and golfer and has written extensively about those passions and the travels they have inspired.

contact: cvigelan@journ.umass.edu

website: www.carlvigeland.com

Register
You can register for this class through Spire and through Carl Vigeland's website under teaching.

spire.umass.edu

www.umass.edu