Course Catalog

T. S. Eliot once said, “good writers borrow, great writers steal.” In this class we will look at modeling as a springboard for creativity. What makes a piece of writing original? Is it possible to borrow a famous writer’s story structure, theme, or even attempt their voice, yet produce something wholly original? How specifically are writers influenced and then inspired? Readings will pair writers with the influences they’ve talked or written about, such as Yiyun Li and Anton Chekhov; Edward P. Jones and Alice Walker, and George Saunders and Nikolai Gogol.

This course explores the characteristics and features of non-democratic regimes and tyrannies as they are reflected in literature and film: how and why they come about, what sustains them, why some resist them and others do not, and how/why they fall. Analyzing films, novels, and articles left in the wake of dictatorships like those of Julius Caesar, Hitler, and Rafael Trujillo, we will investigate the effects of absolute authority, how ordinary people react to repression, and the shaky transition from despotism to freedom. We will consider a diverse range of writers including Suetonius, Shakespeare, Mario Vargas Llosa, Hannah Arendt, and George Orwell. Assignments include critical essays, creative exercises, and a presentation.

This course invites writers to reconsider the narration of Chicago’s shared and public spaces, but in a city re-imagined within the force of climate change. Borrowing from Kim Stanley Robinson’s title, how does one tell the story of “Chicago 2140?” Where does one narratively remap the boundaries between water and wetland in this redrawn city? Is there a “Chicago epic” of the city’s natural boundaries and constructed spaces? To these ends, we will examine work by writers utilizing impulses from journalistic account to the fictional energies of Africanfuturism and post-apocalyptic storytelling. These writers include Dan Egan, Eric Klinenberg, Ed Roberson, Ava Tomasula y Garcia and Fernanda Trias. Building on editing skills and critical approaches in a workshop environment, participants will develop their own creative responses to this “prairied Paris” in poem, fiction, and nonfiction.

Gossip, rumor, scandal, hearsay: from Heian period Japan to contemporary gossip columns, marginal channels of information have been an essential vehicle for storytelling, information transmission, and entertainment. In this class, we will explore the role of marginal, subversive, and communal forms of communication as both a tool and a topic in literature. From pushing plot forward to challenging power dynamics, we will examine the practical and ethical potential of gossip in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Students will read broadly across genres and styles then apply what they've learned in two creative pieces culminating in a final reflective paper that details the writer’s choices in revision and their creative pieces’s connection to the class topic.

“The novel is exhaustive by nature,” Steven Millhauser once wrote. “The short story by contrast is inherently selective. By excluding almost everything, it can give perfect shape to what remains.” The short story label, however, often feels imperfect, since it covers such a broad swath of literary forms. While micro- and flash-fiction renditions can resemble poems, longer prose narratives often press into murkier territories such as that of the novella or the connected collection. Through readings and workshops of students’ own fiction, this course will explore the parameters of the short story, its scope and ambitions, its limitations as well. We’ll read established masters alongside newer literary voices, breaking down their work not simply as examples of meaningful fiction, but as road maps toward a greater awareness of what makes a short story operate. Discussion will revolve around basic elements of narrative craft—point of view, pacing, language, etc.—in an effort to define the ways in which any story can be conveyed with economy, precision, and power.

In this course, we’ll treat Africana Speculative Fiction as a critical case study, reading and analyzing novels, short stories, film, music, and visual art that posits alternative histories, surrealistic dream states, and fantastical futures in the context of the Black imaginary. We’ll navigate the many routes of the imagination—folklores, mythologies and cosmologies; histories and futures; politics, theories, and philosophies; and the material reality. You’ll be asked to read and analyze Africana speculative fiction in short papers. Then, using these works as models, Hyde Park will be our springboard for inquiry and investigation, and you will write your own speculative fiction that engages both your imagination and the material reality.

Yearning and love are universal. But what becomes of yearning when all stops are pulled? What becomes of love when it loses sight of all else? This class will look at obsession in narrative and poetry, both as a driving force and as a lens through which to examine the human condition. We will also explore how might we channel our own obsessions to fuel our own work. Through reading and analyzing the techniques behind various works of fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction, we’ll explore how obsession can intersect with such elements of craft as point of view, narrative distance, setting, plot, voice, detail, irony, perspective, rhyme, meter, and figurative language, and how these elements might be employed to effectively write about, into, and from obsession. Writers and poets we might read include Julio Cortazar, Ha Seong-Nan, Thom Gunn, Tom McCarthy, Sylvia Plath, JG Ballard, Patricia Highsmith, George Saunders, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and others. Expect to turn in weekly reading responses and/or writing exercises, do a short presentation, and write a final hybrid creative and analytical project based on work you’ve done throughout the quarter.

In fiction, it is often said that an effective character must have a clear desire. Kurt Vonnegut famously advised, “Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.” The idea is that desire is an animating, energizing, and focusing force in storytelling. In this course, we’ll attempt to apply the animation, energy, and focus of desire to personal essays, poems, and fiction, and explore how writers depict desire and longing in a wide range of work. We’ll also attempt to catalog different kinds of desire: crushes, obsessions, nostalgia, and farsickness, to name a few. We'll pay special attention to how we can write about strong emotional experiences without resorting to cliches or sentimentality.

This course introduces students to poetry writing by guiding students through generative exercises focused on imagery and diction, then revising the material with an eye toward formal shaping choices. We read diverse contemporary and classic poets, write several poems, and workshop peer work weekly, culminating in a portfolio of new poems as a final project. 

This workshop-centered course introduces writers to foundational concepts and tools in the craft of poetry, including form, diction, voice, line, and meter.  Regular assignments include both prompts and imitations in poetry writing, and will culminate in a final portfolio developed in working consultation with the instructor. In particular, we will explore the construction and sounding of image within poems, including the Imagists’ legacies, concrete poems, and ekphrastic impulses in writing. Poets and writers whose work will be discussed include H.D., Jamaal May, William Carlos Williams, C.D. Wright, James Wright, Pedro Xisto, and poets visiting the UChicago campus.

“Write what you know,” as a literary motto, doesn’t mean writers focus narrowly on their own experiences. Thankfully, we can get to know other people as well—through conversations, careful observation and research. Writing a profile is an act of empathy. Students in this profile writing workshop will learn how to conduct interviews and do basic reporting, and they will hone their skills as nonfiction storytellers. Some of the reading, reporting and writing will look at Chicago and Chicagoans—getting to know and make sense of people around us. Other subjects will visit during class time. In considering the extent to which we can’t fully know the people we portray, students will also explore how writers (along with documentary filmmakers, historians, journalists, obituary writers) address these limitations creatively in their work. Students will complete a short profile each week, and they will write one longer and revised profile as a final.

Beginning Workshops are intended for students who may or may not have previous writing experience, but are interested in gaining experience in a particular genre. These workshops focus on the fundamentals of craft and feature workshops of student writing. 

Beginning Fiction Workshop: Larger Than Life explores the concept of the indelible—that hard-to-define quality that makes an element of fiction “jump off the page” and become instantly memorable. We’ll explore hyperbole, duality, idiosyncrasy, narrative voice, the sublime, and many other techniques, then put them into practice to make our own fiction “larger than life.” 

Popular notions of “the fairytale” are often synonymous with childhood: bedtime stories, adventuring children, and cautionary tales warning young people away from wayward behaviors (“Never go into the woods at night”; “You must be wary of strangers”). In many ways, however, fairytales serve as a vital link between historic and contemporary storytelling traditions: In the words of Angela Carter, “[…] the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labour created our world.” In this course, we will explore how authors such as Sabrina Orah Mark, Helen Oyeyemi, Lily Hoang, Kiik Araki Kawaguchi, Benjamin Niespodziany, and Sarah Shun-lien Bynum have used fairytales as foundations for their own stories, gleaning inspiration from—and finding creative freedom within—pre-existing narratives, tropes, and characters. Each student will also write their own fairytale revision and receive critical oral and written workshop feedback. 
 

This genre-blurring workshop will explore elements of the history and practice of the prose poem. We will also read texts that are difficult to classify in terms of genre. “Flash Fiction,” “Short Shorts,” the fable, the letter, the mini-essay, and the lyric essay will be examined, among others. We will discuss the literary usefulness (or lack of it) of genre and form labels. The class will be taught as a workshop: students will try their hand at writing in their choices of hybrid forms, and will be encouraged to experiment. Writers from all genres are welcome, as what we will be studying, discussing, and writing will involve the fruitful collision of literary genres.

In this generative advanced poetry workshop we will find inspiration for our own poetry by engaging with the visual arts. We will read poems that respond to, reflect, and refract the arts, and exercises will be based on our own encounters in museums, at the movies, in the realms of fashion, architecture, landscape, and elsewhere. We will ask ourselves about artifice and making, the materiality of the written word, the relationship between observation and expression, the emotive qualities of the image, and the sonic qualities of words. Most of our course reading will be contemporary poetry, but we will also explore a range of exciting earlier examples. Each class meeting will include workshops of student poems, discussions of assigned literature, and conversations about art practice and art community. In addition to reading deeply, looking closely, and writing wildly, students are expected to be lively participants in the arts community on campus, and will attend exhibitions, concerts, readings, screenings, and other events and experiences that bring us into contact with various modes of expression. Texts may include poems by, Harryette Mullen, James Schuyler, Brenda Shaughnessy, David Trinidad, and Virgil.

This writing and reading course will allow us to explore the city of Chicago and many approaches to studying it and responding to it in prose both fictional and nonfictional. We’ll think about issues like crises in housing, asylum, incarceration; about art and space in photographs, public murals, sculpture, architecture; and about plants, animals, and waterways. Students will write shorter exercises, keep a Chicago notebook, and write a longer piece for workshop. Readings may include Eve Ewing, Lori Waxman, Frank London Brown, Gwendolyn Brooks, Rosalyn LaPier, Stuart Dybek, Saul Bellow, Sandra Cisneros, Aleksandar Hemon, Jeanne Gang, Rebecca Zorach, Studs Terkel and more.

What does it mean to make sense out of lived experience? How do we claim ownership of our own stories, and shape those narratives on our own terms, independent of pressures that originated elsewhere? How do we craft narrative personas that readers deem trustworthy; how do we capture voices that feel compelling, urgent, and help to reorder the fallout of our lives into a coherent structure that can offer insight, even to readers we have never met? In this advanced nonfiction workshop, we will attempt to grapple with some of these concerns. With a particular emphasis on memoir and personal essay, we will explore what it means to excavate the self and map out the vast terrain contained within. Readings will include Vivian Gornick, Leslie Jamison, Aleksander Hemon, James Baldwin, William Maxwell, Orhan Pamuk and Thomas Browne. Class time will be split between discussion of readings and student led workshops of original essays/memoirs in progress. By the end of the quarter, students will have workshopped two pieces of writing and submitted a final portfolio.

In this workshop-based course we'll investigate how strangeness and magic function in short fiction. We'll explore concepts like defamiliarization, versimilitude, and the uncanny. We will contemplate how magical realism and surrealism differ from sci-fi and fantasy genre writing, and ask how we, as writers, can make the quotidian seem extraordinary and the improbable seem inevitable, and to what end? Students will complete several short creative exercises and workshop one story that utilizes magic or strange effects. Students will also be expected to write thoughtful, constructive critiques of peer work. Throughout the course, we'll consider how the expectations of literary fiction might constrain such narratives, and we can engage with and transcend these archetypes.

Beginning a novel can be daunting, but this class aims to both remove some of the mystery behind the process and encourage students to break through whatever barriers may be there, and start writing. This class will examine the early stages of developing and writing a novel: choosing the POV and narrative voice, establishing the setting, developing the main characters and the dynamics between them, setting up the conflicts and seeding themes, choosing areas to research, etc. As a class we will read, break down, and discuss the openings of several published novels as you work on your own opening chapters, which will be workshopped during the latter part of the course. In addition to reading and discussing a selection of published novel openings, expect to write and submit two of your own opening chapters of a novel-in-progress, read chapters from your peers to discuss during workshop, and turn in a revision of one of your chapters at the end of the course.

In some ways, writing a first-person narrator seems like the most straightforward and natural kind of storytelling in the world. But as any writer who has made the attempt knows, that simple little “I” comes with an array of pitfalls – and possibilities. In this advanced fiction workshop, we will look at the many styles and approaches to first-person point of view: central narrators who are at the heart of the plot, peripheral narrators who witness and stand a little apart, the singular “I” vs. the plural “We,” direct address (often mislabeled as second-person narration), and the spectrum of unreliability. We will read and discuss fiction by writers like Jamaica Kincaid, Haruki Murakami, Kazuo Ishiguro, Charles Portis, Alice Munro, Raven Leilani, Russell Banks, Evan S. Connell and others, drawing craft lessons from these writers to guide our own attempts at writing in first person. Much of our class time will be dedicated to evaluating student work and honing our skills of composition and critique. In addition to shorter writing exercises throughout the quarter, every student will complete a full-length first-person short story for workshop and compose critique letters for each of their peers. Students will be required to significantly revise their full-length story by the end of the quarter.

This workshop is for any student with a novel in progress or an interest in starting one. Our focus will be the opening chapter, arguably the most consequential one for the writer. Throughout the quarter, we’ll read the first chapters of a diverse mix of exemplary novels and examine how they effectively introduce key aspects of the work, like the characters and their world, the premise and central conflict, the novel’s thematic concerns, its form and storytelling strategy. How do these opening pages intrigue, orient, or even challenge the reader and begin teaching them how to read the book? And if this was the author’s actual starting point, how might it give them a better picture of the rest of the book, of aspects they haven’t yet figured out? As everyone workshops the first chapter (or prologue) of their own novel, we’ll ask the same questions and discuss how the author might adjust or rethink things to better understand the project overall and build on the promise of the material they have.

This thesis workshop is for students writing a creative BA or MA thesis in poetry, as well as creative writing minors completing the portfolio. Because it is a thesis workshop, the course will focus on various ways of organizing larger poetic “projects.” We will consider the poetic sequence, the chapbook, and the poetry collection as ways of extending the practice of poetry beyond the individual lyric text. We will also problematize the notion of broad poetic “projects,” considering the consequences of imposing a predetermined conceptual framework on the elusive, spontaneous, and subversive act of lyric writing. Because this class is designed as a poetry workshop, your fellow students’ work will be the primary text over the course of the quarter.

This thesis workshop is for students writing a creative BA or MA thesis in nonfiction, as well as creative writing minors completing the portfolio. Student work can be an extended essay, memoir, travelogue, literary journalism, or an interrelated collection thereof. It’s a workshop, so come to the first day of class with your work underway and ready to submit. You’ll edit your classmates' writing as diligently as you edit your own. I focus on editing because writing is, in essence, rewriting. Only by learning to edit other people’s work will you gradually acquire the objectivity you need to skillfully edit your own. You’ll profit not only from the advice you receive, but from the advice you learn to give. I will teach you to teach each other and thus yourselves, preparing you for the real life of the writer outside the academy.

This workshop is for BA, MA, and Minor students writing a creative thesis or portfolio, or any advanced student working on a book-length project. Everyone will workshop two different excerpts from their project, which can be a story collection, novel, novella, or hybrid work involving fiction. These workshops will be the focus of our quarter, and along with the specific needs of each excerpt, we’ll look in particular at aspects of its form (like its point of view, narrative style, or genre) that are most consequential to the larger work and to the longer form the author has chosen. Everyone will also give two brief presentations: one on the writer who has most influenced their fiction, and one on a literary magazine of their choice. And depending on time and interest, we can have conversations on topics that come out of these presentations—like cultivating your voice, writing after graduation, working towards publication, etc.

This thesis workshop is for students writing a creative BA or MA thesis in fiction, as well as creative writing minors completing the portfolio. It is primarily a workshop, so please come to our first class with your project in progress (a story collection, a novel, or a novella), ready for you to discuss and to submit some part of for critique. As in any writing workshop, we will stress the fundamentals of craft like language, voice, and plot and character development, with an eye also on how to shape your work for the longer form you have chosen. And as a supplement to our workshops, we will have brief student presentations on the writing life: our literary influences, potential avenues towards publication, etc.

This thesis workshop is for students writing a creative BA or MA thesis in fiction, as well as creative writing minors completing the portfolio. It is primarily a workshop, so please come to our first class with your project in progress (a story collection, a novel, or a novella), ready for you to discuss and to submit some part of for critique. As in any writing workshop, we will stress the fundamentals of craft like language, voice, and plot and character development, with an eye also on how to shape your work for the longer form you have chosen. As a supplement to our workshops, we will continue to read fiction and learn about authors' writing practices. 

This thesis workshop is for students writing a creative BA or MA thesis in fiction, as well as creative writing minors completing the portfolio. It is primarily a workshop, so please come to our first class with your project in progress (a story collection, a novel, or a novella), ready for you to discuss and to submit some part of for critique. As in any writing workshop, we will stress the fundamentals of craft like language, voice, and plot and character development, with an eye also on how to shape your work for the longer form you have chosen. And as a supplement to our workshops, we will have brief student presentations on the writing life: our literary influences, potential avenues towards publication, etc.

This technical seminar examines the dialogue between poets and other artists by focusing on working conversations and contexts set up within Black Mountain College in the mid-twentieth century. How do poets and painters conceive distinct possibilities for “images?” How do musicians and dancers frame poets’ grasp of sound/silence in writing? Our discussion will be initiated within possibilities established by Black Mountain writers and artists, including Ruth Asawa, John Cage, Robert Creeley, Merce Cunningham, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Hilda Morley, Denise Levertov, Charles Olson, and Robert Rauschenberg.

How do we convincingly recreate important episodes from our life? How do we help our readers inhabit those moments that continue to live so urgently within our memory? How much invention are we allowed to employ, and how do we ensure that such accounts remain “truthful”? In this technical seminar in nonfiction, we will explore the craft of dramatization in personal essay and memoir. We will discuss many tools that are familiar to the fiction writer, including scene-building, characterization, and dialogue, as well as aspects unique to the art of nonfiction, such as the incorporation of testimonials, research, and letters, all in the service of dramatizing significant moments from our lived experience. Students will produce reading responses, craft analyses, and short creative exercises putting learned skills into practice.

John Gardner said that the writer’s task is to create “a vivid and continuous fictional dream.” This technical seminar will focus on the role of detail in maintaining this dream. In this course we will deconstruct and rebuild our understanding of concepts like simile, showing vs. telling, and symbolism, asking what these tools do and what purpose they serve. Drawing from fiction and essays from Ottessa Moshfegh, Barbara Comyns, Zadie Smith, and others, students will practice noticing, seeing anew, and finding fresh and unexpected ways of describing. We will also examine what is worthy of detail in the first place, how detail functions outside of of traditional scene, and the merits and limits of specificity, mimesis, and verisimilitude. Finally we will consider what it means to travel across a landscape of vagueness and euphemism as we search for the quality of "thisness" that James Wood claims all great details possess. In addition to assigned readings, students will be responsible for reading responses, short craft analyses, vigorous class participation, and several creative exercises and peer critiques applying these lessons.

This course traverses the overlap of works of lyric and narrative poetry with works of autofiction to identify a range of storytelling and formal techniques for the writer curious to write in verse and prose forms as a method of cataloging the self. We will investigate the subjects (the self in the world, war, domesticity, history), forms (the ballad/song/rap, monologue, and short prose (flash fiction, prose poem)), and movements (Black Arts, Confessionalism, Infrarealism, New Narrative, AI) that expand, complicate, and borrow from ideas of narrative modes of self-expression. Sources include: Catullus, Nikki Giovanni, Alex Da Corte, Roberto Bolano, Lydia Davis, Hilton Als, Hito Steyerl, Robyn Schiff, Jenny Zhang , and others.

From 19th century penny dreadfuls to the more recent explosion of podcasts and documentaries, true crime has long endured as a popular narrative genre. Yet, despite the genre’s popularity, there is contention around its potential exploitation of victims, romanticization of violence, and lurid positioning as “entertainment.” This course aims to critically examine the narrative tropes, appeals, and language of the true crime genre by engaging with works of true crime fiction, including both works of fiction based on “true” events (such as Underneath by Lily Hoang, Butter by Asako Yuzuki, and My Men by Victoria Kielland) and entirely fictionalized works that develop themselves as convincing True Crime facsimiles (such as Defiance by Carole Maso, My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite, and Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh). The course will include reading discussions, short weekly written responses, and a project wherein students compare and contrast two alternate “versions” of a true crime story.

Perhaps no other narrative genre is more compelling or popular than the mystery. True Crime, Thrillers, and Whodunits consistently top the charts of bestsellers each year. In this Arts Core class, we will explore the mechanics of this fascinating genre. We will take the classic mystery tale written by masters like Arthur Conan Doyle and Raymond Chandler as an archetype, then examine what can be done with them. Together, we’ll dive into tales of intrigue by Poe and Kleist, psychological thrillers by Patricia Highsmith and Jeffery Eugenides, neo-noir films such as Chinatown, noir-poetry by Deryn Rees-Jones and Sean O’Brien, and postmodern mystery-parodies like those of Jorge Luis Borges. Together, we'll look at the way they hang together, the desire and fear that drives them, and the secrets they tell—or try to keep hidden. Along the way, we will attempt to design and plot our own mysteries, and find ways to improve them in a workshop setting.

In this course, we will study the range of aesthetic possibilities in concept-driven, procedural, aleatory, constrained, and avant-garde poetry. Questions of authorship, emotion, creativity, politics, imitation, and craft will be shifted by readings from Diderot and Mallarmé, the Oulipians, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, ritual-based poetics, and postconceptual/digital poetics, among others.

This course will be a close examination of the use of spectral imagery as a craft element in narratives across genre and time. From Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” to Emily Carrol’s A Guest in the House, students in this course will be expected to put the fantastical metaphor under a microscope and explore its potential through their own creative and critical work. 

Some of our most potent impressions and anecdotes are the ones made in childhood and adolescence. Even blurry memories can be rich material when woven into a larger personal history. In this fiction and nonfiction course, we’ll explore how writers tell universal and often quite common stories of childhood and coming of age in new, inventive and surprising ways, and try out their strategies and techniques. This class may be especially beneficial for aspiring fiction writers of even semi-autobiographical stories. We’ll also spend a good amount of time working through techniques of remembering; don’t let having a so-called “bad” memory turn you away.

Beginning Workshops are intended for students who may or may not have previous writing experience, but are interested in gaining experience in a particular genre. These workshops focus on the fundamentals of craft and feature workshops of student writing.

In "Beginning Nonfiction Workshop: Travelogues," we'll explore how travel writing uses place as a lens for understanding ourselves and the wider world. We'll read authors like Rebecca Solnit, Annie Dillard, and Sabrina Imbler and analyze how their travelogues blend personal experience with exploration. We'll consider the ethics and complexities of writing about travel and tourism and challenge our own definitions of what place can mean. In the first half of the term, students will have the opportunity to apply techniques from our readings to their own travelogues, focusing on their experiences as travelers here in Chicago. The second half of the term will be devoted to workshops of each student's original work, which will allow us to practice giving and receiving feedback and incorporating that feedback into our own creative processes.

Describing fiction writing as an “art” is perhaps a misnomer. Depending on who’s describing it, the process of creating a narrative is more like driving in the dark, or woodworking, or gardening. The metaphors abound, but the techniques for creating effective fictional prose are often quite consistent. This course will begin with a weeks-long consideration of selected works of fiction where discussion will aim to distinguish the basic devices of effective storytelling. Weekly topics will range from subjects as broad as point of view and plot arrangement to more highly focused lessons on scene design, dialog, and word choice. Throughout the term, the writing process will be broken down into stages where written work will focus on discrete story parts such as first pages, character introductions, and dialog-driven scenes before students are asked to compose full-length narratives. Along the way, students will chart their processes of conceptualizing, drafting, and revising their narratives. Finally, in the latter weeks of the quarter, emphasis will shift to the workshopping of students’ full stories.

"Beginning Fiction Workshop: Am I Alone Here?" focuses on writing the introspective character. How can we keep our stories engaging and eventful even while our characters remain largely in their own thoughts? How can we transform loneliness and contemplation into luminous and transformative writing? 

Purple, lean, evocative, muscular, literary, exuberant, lucid, stilted, elliptical. These are all labels that critics and reviewers have used to characterize prose styles that call attention to themselves in distinct ways. Of course, what constitutes style not only changes over time, but also means different things in different literary traditions. How, then, do translators carry style over from one language and cultural milieu to another? And to what extent does style structure storytelling? We will explore these questions by reading a variety of modern and contemporary stylists who either write in English or translate into English, paying special attention to what stylistic devices are at work and what their implications are for narration, characterization, and world building. Further, we’ll examine the range of choices that each writer and translator makes when constituting and reconstituting style, on a lexical, tonal, and syntactic scale.

This class invites students to explore various relationships between science and poetry, two domains that, perhaps counter-intuitively, often draw from each other to revitalize themselves. As poets, we’ll use, misuse, and borrow from science in our poems. We’ll approach poems like science experiments and aim to enter an “experimental attitude.” From a practical point of view, we’ll try to write poems that incorporate the language of science to freshen their own language or to expand the realm of poetic diction. Furthermore, we’ll work with tropes and procedural experiments that may result in revelation, discovery, and surprise. Readings may include work by Aimé Césaire, Kimiko Hahn, Ed Roberson, Dean Young, Joyelle Mcsweeney, and Will Alexander. Students can expect to write several poems, participate in discussion forums with both initial response papers and follow-up comments, critique peers’ work, and submit a final portfolio. A substantial amount of class time will be spent workshopping student work.

Fiction writers say “If there’s no trouble, there’s no story”—an easier adage without the presumption of truth. This class will consider techniques for rendering “trouble” in narrative nonfiction. How can we write about the wrongs of others—and the wrongs we ourselves have committed—in a way that makes for a compelling story and an ultimately likable narrator? What makes a rendering of hate, abuse, indifference, ingratitude, or jealously compelling or empathetic in the end? What techniques—of persona, characterization, humor, pacing, or form—might help us write honestly and generously at the same time?

Writing about dreams is a commonly espoused no-no for inexperienced writers, often associated with lazy storytelling (“I don’t need to explain that: it was all a dream!”) and a lack of verisimilitude (“Dreams don’t need to make sense; they follow their own dream-logic”). For experienced writers, however, dreams can not only serve as compelling storytelling vehicles, but as valuable windows into our narrative processing. Mining the dreamy fictions of Marianna Fritz, Amparo Davila, Clarice Lispector, Vanessa Onwuemezi, and Leonora Carrington, we will develop inspirational templates for our own dream-focused fictions. This course will incorporate a mix of craft lectures, reading discussions, dream diaries (and other generative writing), along with formal workshopping of dream-inspired short stories.

This workshop-based course proceeds from the premise that disorder and disruption are fruitful aesthetics that might be applied to numerous elements of fiction to unlock new possibilities in our work. Students will seek to identify typical narrative conventions and lyrical patterns and then write away from them-or write over them, toward subversion, surprise, and perhaps even a productive anarchy. Students will search for hidden structures in work by Taeko Kono, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Diane Williams, Garielle Lutz, and others, examining the methods these writers use to lead readers to unexpected, original, and transgressive places. Students will also complete several short creative exercises in which they practice various disruptions and disorders (temporal, syntactical, etc.) In the second half of the course, students will workshop one story or excerpt and write thoughtful, constructive critiques of peer work. Revision is also a crucial component of this class, as it is an opportunity to radically warp and deviate from our prior visions.Throughout the quarter, we will attempt to interrupt and shake up our own inclinations as artists.

“If you want a compelling story, put your protagonist among the damned.” --Charles Baxter

While crisis is to be avoided in life, when it comes to narrative, trouble is your friend. In this advanced workshop we'll explore the complex ways writers create conflict in their stories, be it internal or external, spiritual or physical, romantic, financial or familial. We'll read masters of the form like Edward P. Jones, George Saunders, ZZ Packer, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Yiyun Li, and discuss how they generate conflict that feels organic, character-driven, and inevitable. Weekly writing exercises will encourage you to take creative risks and hone new skills. Each student will workshop two stories, with strong emphasis on focused and productive peer critique and in-class commentary.

From ancient Sumerian temple hymns to 7th-century Japanese death poems to avant-garde ekphrasis in the 21st century, the history of poetry is as rich in genres as it is in forms. Why does it feel so good to write a curse? What is an ode and how is it different from an aubade? In this technical seminar we will study the origins, transcultural functions, and evolving conventions of some of the oldest-living genres of lyric poetry – the ode, the elegy, the love poem, the curse, to name a few. We will read living writers such as Alice Oswald, Danez Smith, Kim Hyesoon, and Natalie Diaz alongside historical forerunners including Aesop, Sei Shonagon, John Keats. Federico Garcia Lorca, Sylvia Plath, and Paul Celan. Students will write weekly experiments of their own in response to our readings, and for a final project they will edit a mini-anthology of a genre of their choice, including a short critical introduction.

In "Technical Seminar in Nonfiction: Breaking the Frame," students will explore the creative possibilities of narrative structure in nonfiction, from traditional forms like the pyramid and the circle to experimental and unconventional shapes. Through close readings of works by authors like John McPhee, Maggie Nelson, and Lauren Russell, students will analyze how structure shapes meaning and craft their own uniquely structured pieces. Weekly exercises will culminate in a final project that challenges the boundaries of traditional narrative forms.

Among the foundational elements of a writer’s craft, dialogue is perhaps the most anxiety-inducing. After all, the very nature of writing dialogue requires that we defamiliarize—and fictionalize—something that we do almost every day. In this course, we will learn how to use dialogue as a strategy for developing character, hinting at subtext, and nourishing narrative ambiguity (“showing” scenes with different interpretive possibilities versus “telling” the reader what to think). We will also explore dialogue as a means of controlling the pace and flow of fiction (when and where we learn which bits of information). Finally, we will explore the ways fiction uses dialogue as a kind of sculptural blueprint, from variations between dense paragraphs and sparse lines, to stories made up solely of dialogue. Using the dialogue-driven models of writers such as Eileen Chang, Edwidge Danticat, Edward P. Jones, Nino Cipri, and Ottessa Moshfegh, writers will develop the use of dialogue in their own short fiction. The course will feature craft talks, reading discussions, week-to-week generative writing assignments, and a final presentation (on a dialogue-focused work of the student’s choice).

This technical seminar will investigate the purposes and possibilities of beginnings in fiction. Students will read opening lines, paragraphs, pages, and occasionally chapters, from Aimee Bender, Miranda July, Kobe Abe, and others, asking: what work do these beginnings do—and why, to what end? Of course, this means we will also read the stories that follow, to analyze these introductions in the framework of their narratives. How do openings guide—or mislead—the reader? How should they balance introduction and momentum? How do they orient us, not only to character, setting, and conflict, but also to elements like tone and sensibility, to a story’s own sense of itself? What archetypes or common “moves” can we identify and use? What are the implications and meanings of beginnings—of starting in a particular place and way, when a story might very well start in any number of places? And how do such authorial decisions ripple through the story? Students will be responsible for reading responses, short craft analyses, vigorous class participation, and several creative exercises putting what they learn into practice.

“It’s very boring to talk about winners,” Umberto Ecco once said. “The real literature always talks about losers.” In this class, we shall embrace all manner of failures, no-accounts, and deadbeats, those unlikely central characters around which good fiction often rotates, considering how they intrigue us with their flaws and failings, but also how they can present pitfalls at the levels of plot (lack of agency), tone (reward vs. punishment), and reader sympathy. Through an array of short fiction, as well as selected poems, films, and an illustrated novel, this course aims to uncover the ways narrative craft can infuse stories driven by shiftless and inept protagonists with a sense of curation, poignancy, and meaning. Students will also attempt their own short story versions of “loser lit,” to be workshopped by the class. All are welcome. Expectations will be very low.

Since the commercialization of the internet in the 1990s, the online space has evolved and fractured into different commodifications. In this course, we will look at depictions in contemporary literature of the experience of being online, of engaging with various platforms, and the mindsets that it creates. At heart in this course, we are looking at the ways in which fiction attempts to mimic, critique, mock, or even take pleasure in another medium, and what fiction is able to do by co-opting another medium. We may read works by Jaron Lanier, Tony Tulathimutte, Patricia Lockwood, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, and Ben Lerner. As an antidote to all of this thinking about onlineness, we will also engage in creative writing exercises, some inspired by or made possible by being online.

This course will introduce students to recent debates in the environmental humanities while exposing them to a range of works spanning fiction, documentary prose, poetry, and film that engage what has come to be called the Anthropocene era (despite substantive challenges to the term that we will address). We will read foundational texts in environmental perception and activism (John Ruskin’s “Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century” and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring) in dialogue with modernist work surrounding urban landscapes (William Carlos Williams’s Paterson). We will then open onto a wide range of contemporary texts that engage the natural and constructed environment in crisis. Students will be asked to conduct fieldwork on an environmental theme of their choosing (climate change, petrol economies, watershed issues, air quality, pandemics and the management of wild animals, species extinction, etc.) and to produce a portfolio of short creative pieces in response to an issue or debate that interests them. Students are asked to ponder possible topics of interest prior to the first class meeting.

"I love the thingness of things," Sylvia Plath wrote in her journal. By concentrating on poems that are rooted deeply in the material world, this workshop will focus beginning poets on the art of description and the importance of image-making. Poets will to attend to the intensity of the sensorium, grounding their art in the material world as a strategy, albeit a counterintuitive one, to access the emotional and abstract.

In this course, we'll design and develop a world and characters determined by a series of what if? questions or propositions based on the implications of real world events and climate crises. Student will independently compose stories and then we'll workshop them for our shared-world anthology.

Characterization in any literary form seeks to bring a person, their world, and their worldview to life. Doing that effectively requires more than imagination and knowledge of our genre and craft. It begins with cultivating a personal understanding of human beings and asking ourselves what it means, on the page as in life, to be a character and to have character. And more deeply, even when our characters are nothing like us, it involves looking inward at who we think we are as an individual and how we see the world and our place within it. In this course, we’ll examine the various lenses all of us use, for better or for worse, to define ourselves and others: like the lens of truth, of morality, of empathy, of desire. And in our readings in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry (as well as creative writing exercises and presentations), we’ll learn how to approach characterization not only as a vehicle for storytelling and self-expression, but as an inquiry into our own humanity and the kinds of people we’re most interested in bringing to life in our work. 

Most passionate readers and writers have literary touchstones --those texts we return to again and again for personal or aesthetic influence and inspiration. When we are asked what book we would want with us if we were stranded on a desert isle, our touchstones are the ones that leap immediately to mind. Some texts are fairly ubiquitous touchstones: The Great Gatsby, Harry Potter and the [take your pick], The Bell Jar, Little Women, Letters to a Young Poet, Leaves of Grass. Others are quirkier, more idiosyncratic. What -- if any -- qualities do these touchstones share, within and across genres? What lessons about writing craft can be drawn from them? In this course, we'll read texts that are commonly cited as touchstones, along with fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction that students bring to the table -- their own literary touchstones. In that sense, our reading list will be collaborative, and students will be expected to contribute content as well as an analytical presentation on the craft issues raised by their selections. Our assignments will include reading responses, creative writing exercises, short essays and presentations.

How do we hear the voice of a text when we’re reading in another language? What makes a voice intrinsically itself? And where can we locate those qualities in the language that the voice speaks in? This workshop explores what translators read for when constructing a narrative or poetic voice in English. Students will select a long-form literary text to translate, and we will work through the drafting process by breaking the text down into short extracts that we will close-read together each week in class. In doing so, we’ll listen through the translation for evidence of how the source wants to sound, in order to discern its voice, its tendencies, and how it behaves in language. Our own translation work will be accompanied by assigned readings that represent a range of contemporary world literature in translation, paying attention to what the translator does with English to sketch a cohesive voice. We’ll build toward the polished translation of a short prose text or a selection of poems, which students will submit as part of a final portfolio, along with a translator’s note that provides critical commentary on their reading of the source text and their treatment of it in translation. To participate in this course, students should have reading proficiency in a language other than English.

This course guides students in exercises that work with both the actual sounds of poetry, like alliteration and rhythm, and the inaudible, “imagined” music of the mind, to write and workshop poems. We read diverse contemporary and classic poets, write several poems, and workshop peer work weekly, culminating in a portfolio of new poems as a final project. 

This course seeks to develop your abilities in the writing of literary nonfiction as well as in the editing of your own and others’ prose in a workshop environment.  Through short assignments and shared readings, you will be introduced to basic considerations of craft in nonfiction, including style and narrative. Formally this quarter, we will explore the review—reconsidering reviews of movies, food, products, and even oneself. To these ends, we will examine work by contemporary writers including M.F.K. Fisher, Pauline Kael, Margo Jefferson, and Kevin Killian (including his collected Amazon reviews).

The personal essay is arguably the most protean form in literature. Highly elastic in shape and size, it can also take on any subject. From the inward-looking and intimate to the outward-facing and encompassing, the essay appeals to many writers because it is so multi-faceted and universally useful. Like a good pocketknife, essays can do just about anything. In this course, we will explore the personal essay through all it can do: meditate, argue, confess, study a person, go to a place and tell a story, to name some of the seemingly endless possibilities. We will consider classic and contemporary examples of the personal essay and write many, many of our own. 

Writers at all levels learn through the careful reading of works they admire. While this is a workshop class, we will spend about a third of our time reading stories worth learning from, both classic and contemporary,  with a focus on the choices that writers make, the nuts and bolts of craft, with special emphasis on point of view (who speaks and why?) while also covering tone, direct and summary dialog, setting, conflict, causality, and use of time. In-class exercises will further hone your understanding of specific techniques, fire your creativity and get you writing. We will then move to writing workshop, where you will have the opportunity to present your work to the group. Critique will be respectful and productive, with emphasis on clarity and precision. By the end of the course, you will have generated significant raw material and completed at least one story, which will be revised and handed in as a final portfolio.

According to Albus Dumbledore, "To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure." And to the well-organized fiction writer, it can be the same. In this class, we’ll explore mortality as a literary device, considering how it not only brings a measure of incident to our stories, but also how it infuses the pages with darkness, sentiment, and consequence. The downside, of course, comes when too much darkness swamps a story with pessimism; when sentiment tilts into sentimentality; or when the consequences of such high stakes test a reader’s ability to suspend disbelief. Through readings of mostly short fiction, we’ll uncover how death can trigger stories of aftermath, how it can operate as a climax to build toward, or how it makes space for unexpected outcomes. Students will also write their own stories—about death, containing death, starring the character Death, or perhaps something more death-adjacent—which we’ll workshop as a group, focusing on the ways in which mortality sets tone, drives plot, and influences style.  

“Rats who build the labyrinth from which they will try to escape” is how Raymond Queneau famously described the members of Oulipo, a group of international writers and mathematicians founded in France in 1960, and which still thrives today. The group’s aim is to use constraints and procedures to create new literary forms. (“Oulipo” is an acronym that stands for Workshop or Sewing Circle of Potential Literature.) In a similar spirit of playful experiment, we will take a hands-on approach, with students composing new drafts each week. We will experiment with a variety of methods, ranging from traditional verse forms to concrete poetry; creative translations; re-writing; erasures; collages; documentary and research-based poetics; site-specific and ritual poetry; incorporating film, sound, image; and a selection of stimulating Oulipian constraints (e.g. only using certain letters or writing three versions of the same poem, etc.). As we workshop students’ drafts, we will discuss topics including inspiration, authorship, form, copying and plagiarism; poetry, activism, and social justice; and the idea of “fact” in poetry. At the end of the quarter, you’ll revise your drafts and collect them in a portfolio.

Apart from not being fiction, a nonfiction feature is a lot like a short story: in terms of length, scenes, characters, world building and all the potential innovations of storytelling. In this writing workshop, students will go through each stage of composing a narrative nonfiction feature story. After generating a few ideas that seem original, surprising in their approach, and appropriate in scope, we will write pitches. After the class agrees to "assign" one of these features, each student will report, research and write a draft. The features will be workshopped in class, and students will go through an editorial process, polishing their stories and experimenting with style and form for a final assignment. Along the way, we will consider the mechanics, ethics and craft of this work as we read published nonfiction and talk to writers and reporters about their process. There will be an emphasis in the class on Chicago writers and their beats; in weekly writing assignments, students will also report on local stories.

What topics, ideas, or narratives merit a book-length exploration? In this advanced nonfiction workshop, we will explore the capacity of the book-length essay, the subjects that can sustain and justify such lengthy works, and the structures professional writers have employed to maintain the project’s integrity even as it expands across one hundred or more pages. Each week, we will read short, book-length essays, on topics ranging from the nature of beauty to the Salvadoran Civil War, analyzing the conventions of these manuscripts, the commonalities in their subject matter, and the tactics each writer uses to maintain and organize their project. Students will propose and write weekly on a topic of their choosing, and workshops will consist of collating and arranging sections of a potential book-length project using this written material. A final paper will lay out both a plan for completing a longer project as well as an analysis of the structures and conventions the writer has used or plans to use in their piece. 

Sigmund Freud defines "the uncanny" ("unheimlich") as something that unnerves us because it is both familiar and alien at the same time, the result of hidden anxieties and desires coming to the surface. In this advanced fiction workshop, we will explore how fiction writers use the uncanny to create suspense, lend their characters psychological depth, thrill and terrify their readers, and lay bare the darkest and most difficult human impulses. We will read and discuss fiction by writers like Shirley Jackson, Jamaica Kincaid, Octavia Butler, Kelly Link, Ben Okri, Haruki Murakami, and Victor Lavalle, drawing craft lessons from these writers to guide our own attempts at writing the uncanny. Much of our class time will be dedicated to evaluating student work and honing our skills of composition and critique. In addition to shorter writing exercises and "mini-workshops" throughout the quarter, every student will complete a full-length "uncanny" short story for workshop and compose critique letters for each of their peers. Students will be required to significantly revise their full-length short story by the end of the quarter.

Increasingly, the fantastical creeps into popular narratives, a rupture in the fabric of otherwise ordinary reality. This workshop will focus on the fantastical in contemporary literature and culture, and the logistical issues and questions that commonly arise around it. We will look at the role of fantastical in puncturing the veil of "realism." What is the fantastical doing that can't be done through other narrative techniques? How does the narrative metabolize this disruption? How should the fantastical be tempered by the mundane? Students for this course should not only have an interest in speculative fiction, but should have already made some efforts within this mode. Note that this course does not focus exclusively on fantasy or science fiction, though there may be some genre overlap. Come prepared to engage with free-associative creative exercises. Readings may include works by Rachel Ingalls, George Saunders, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. 

A story's end point determines its meaning. The history of a life can be covered in a sentence, a few pages or seven volumes. How do writers decide? In this advanced workshop, we'll look at different ways to handle narrative time, paying special attention to building blocks like direct and summary scene, flashback, compression, slowed time and fabulist time. We'll examine work by writers whose long stories feel like novels, like Alice Munro and Edward P. Jones, alongside those who say everything in a short single scene of a page or two, like Grace Paley and Kate Chopin. Students will be encouraged to experiment with time in both writing exercises and story revisions.By the end of the course, you will have generated significant raw material and workshopped one story. Two stories, one polished and one in draft, will be prepared for the final.