Course Title: Not Even Past: Fictions of Time and Memory
Instructor: Carlee Jensen, A&S '24 (MFA)
Brought to you by Odyssey
October 20, 2025 - November 17, 2025 (5 Sessions)
Mondays, 8:00PM - 10:00PM ET
Virtual via Zoom
Course Description: The past is never dead,” wrote William Faulkner. “It’s not even past.”
So often—in fiction as in life—the most important things have already happened: the devastating betrayal, the epic heartbreak, the small-but-accumulated fractures from which characters struggle to recover. Like the surface of the earth itself, human beings gain our texture from the wind and weather through which we’ve lived.
In recent years, scientists have begun to acknowledge what artists have always understood: that memory lives in the body as well as the mind, in the inarticulate stirrings of our hearts and the epigenetic manifestations of our ancestors’ trauma. In a work of fiction, it may become the central plot—a problem that demands confrontation, the only thing anyone can talk or think about — or it may lurk at the margins of a vivid, demanding present, barely acknowledged but inexorably there. The past may become an object of longing or fantasy, more dreamed about than understood, or it may announce itself with painful specificity. These are the choices the writer must make, and each one shapes the experience and meaning of the story.
This course will explore the multifaceted role of memory in fiction, considering the aesthetic and thematic impact of those specific narrative strategies by which authors unspool and explore their characters’ pasts. Through this lens, we will also discuss narrative shape, characterization, and sources of tension outside plot itself. Readings will engage with individual, familial, cultural, and environmental memory, and may include works by Leslie Marmon Silko, Carmen Maria Machado, Justin Torres, Claire Vaye Watkins, and Edward P. Jones, among others. Students will also explore memory through in-class writing exercises, shared voluntarily for peer and instructor feedback.
While this course focuses on fiction, many of the concepts and techniques will be relevant to those interested in memoir and personal essay. Students are welcome to work on life-writing projects during class, and supplemental nonfiction readings will be available for those who are interested.
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