Course Catalog

A story's endpoint determines its meaning, yet the history of a life can be covered in a sentence, a few pages, or seven volumes. How do writers make these choices? We’ll look at different ways to handle narrative time, paying special attention to related building blocks like direct and summary scene, setting, point of view, prose rhythm and tense. More specifically, we’ll examine categories of time, including classic/straightforward, flashback, compression, slowed time, Swiss cheese time, and fabulist time. We’ll read and discuss long stories that have the sweep of novels alongside those that say everything in a single scene. You’ll be encouraged to experiment with time in writing exercises, story assignments and revision.

“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 ‘heroes’ 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 films and a hybrid novel, this course aims to uncover the ways narrative craft can infuse stories about 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. Expectations will, of course, be very low.

This course invites writers to reconsider the influence of Chicago's public spaces on artistic impulse.  In particular this quarter, we will examine aspects and depictions of a "fantastic Chicago."  If Chicago is a city that "dreams itself," what do its spaces of violence and environmental degradation say about that dream?  Students will analyze and explore Chicago writers' work in prose and poetry, then develop their own creative responses, building connections to adopted critical approaches.  To these ends, we will examine work by writers including Daniel Borzutzky, Barry Pearce, Sterling Plumpp, Ed Roberson, and Ava Tomasula y Garcia, as well as the city's rich legacies in documentary and the visual arts.

The main goal of this course will be to understand the reasons, traditions and methods behind the practice of literary adaptations. From Joyce Carol Oates's "Blue Bearded Lover," to Anne Sexton's "Cinderella", to Angela Carter's "Wolf-Alice" and Marina Carr's "By the Bog of Cats," there are stories that continue to resonate through the centuries, and others that are made to resonate through the labor of new story tellers. Each text will be explored both independently and within the context of its adaptive genealogy. Students will be expected to read each text carefully, come prepared to actively participate in class discussion and respond to both academic and creative writing prompts based on assigned texts and class lecture.

In this course, we will explore the embattled, yet perpetually alive relationship between writing and activism by reading canonical and emergent works of fiction, narrative prose, and poetry that not only represent social ills, but seek to address and even to spur social justice in some way. Students will be encouraged to choose an issue that they feel passionate about on which to research and respond for the entire quarter—and will be asked to produce works in a range of genres in relation to that issue. Authors to be encountered will include Percy Shelley, John Ruskin, Upton Sinclair, Audre Lorde, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Nick Drnaso, and more.

A course in which students learn close looking skills by going to a variety of galleries and museums in Chicago, and try out writing a range of written forms, including lyric essays, reviews, wall texts, catalog essays, artists' statements and interviews. Readings from recent exhibition reviews to long-form criticism, creative history to ekphrastic poetry to personal essay. 

Third-person narration is a valuable tool in the writer's toolbox, handy--and in some cases practically crucial--for a variety of tasks. Yet its use and various possibilities can seem intimidating to some writers who may be far more comfortable with the "I". In this studio, we'll examine third-person point-of-view, seeking to understand its capabilities more fully. We'll learn about free indirect discourse, psychic distance, artifice, tone, and omniscience. We'll carefully dissect a variety of texts from authors like James Agee, Tony Tulathimutte, Danielle Evans, Charles Yu, Mary Gaitskill, and others. Students will be responsible for reading responses, short craft analyses, vigorous class participation, and several creative exercises putting what they learn into practice.

Writing fiction is in large part a matter of convincing worldbuilding, no matter what genre you write in. And convincing worldbuilding is about creating a seamless reality within the elements of that world: from setting, to social systems, to character dynamics, to the story or novel’s conceptual conceit. And whether it be within a genre of science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, or even contemporary realism, building a convincing world takes a good deal of research. So while we look closely at the tools and methods of successful worldbuilding, we will also dig into the process of research. From how and where to mine the right details, to what to look for, to how to implement them. We will also focus on how research can make a fertile ground for harvesting ideas and even story. Students will read various works of  fiction with an eye to their worldbuilding, as well as critical and craft texts. In addition to readings and creative exercises each student will also be expected to make a brief presentation and turn in a final paper for the class.

T. S. Eliot once said, “good writers borrow, great writers steal.” In this studio 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,  even their voice, yet produce something wholly original? Do writers influence each other through language? Technical prowess? Use of plot? Place? All of the above? With special emphasis on James Joyce and Anton Chekhov--whose technical innovation has influenced pretty much every writer of the last hundred years--we'll spend time looking at both the immitated and the immitators, including Raymond Carver, George Saunders, I. B. Singer, Shirley Jackson, Edward P. Jones, Jhumpa Lahiri, Yiyun Li and many more. Students will write short literary essays, but the emphasis will be on writing and modeling. Ultimately we'll end with a short workshop.

This studio course will focus on literary texts, visual art, and time-based works that revel in the intersection of image + text. Students will explore a range of examples with the aim of discussing the historical context of the intersection of image and text, considering the works of contemporary practitioners, and creating several creative works that students will discuss in workshop. Some questions: What is the difference between conceptual text-informed visual art and, say, poetry, if any? How do we think of protest via the intersection of text + image? How do cartoons and graphic novels enter the discussion? Think of this course as a recent history of your current visual culture. 

How do we dramatize history? How do we recapture the past in a compelling way, or make it speak to the urgent questions of our present? In this class, we will explore ways to craft fiction around historical events. How should we conduct our research? How do we effectively position our characters within the wider struggles of the past? And how much are we allowed to deviate from the written record when writing our fiction? Readings will include Alessandro Manzoni, Georg Lukacs, Edward P. Jones, Olga Tocarczuk, and Alejo Carpentier. Meanwhile, assignments will include critical reading responses, creative exercises, and a final portfolio piece.

This creative writing course, focused on the art of writing and reading poetry, addresses the fundamentals of craft. Through creative writing exercises and assignments, students will explore precise imagery, unpredictable figuration, intentional musicality, the use of line and stanza, and the relationship between form and content. Students can expect to read deeply, respond creatively, and to engage with their peers in a workshop setting. This course is designed both for writers with a passion for the genre and those who are interested in gaining experience. Successful completion of Poetry Workshop I is a prerequisite for enrollment in Poetry Workshop II.

This creative writing course, focused on the art of writing and reading literary nonfiction, addresses the fundamentals of craft. Through creative writing exercises and assignments, students will explore narrative, voice, imagery, and the relationships between ethics and art, form and content, and the self and the subject matter. Students can expect to read deeply, respond creatively, and to engage with their peers in a workshop setting. This course is designed both for writers with a passion for the genre and those who are interested in gaining experience. Successful completion of Literary Nonfiction Workshop I is a prerequisite for enrollment in Literary Nonfiction Workshop II.

This creative writing course, focused on the art of writing and reading literary nonfiction, addresses the fundamentals of craft. Through creative writing exercises and assignments, students will explore narrative, voice, imagery, and the relationships between ethics and art, form and content, and the self and the subject matter. Students can expect to read deeply, respond creatively, and to engage with their peers in a workshop setting. This course is designed both for writers with a passion for the genre and those who are interested in gaining experience. Successful completion of Literary Nonfiction Workshop I is a prerequisite for enrollment in Literary Nonfiction Workshop II.

This creative writing course, focused on the art of writing and reading fiction, addresses the fundamentals of craft. Through creative writing exercises and assignments, students will explore characterization, point of view, plot, scene work, and worldbuilding. Students can expect to read deeply, respond creatively, and to engage with their peers in a workshop setting. This course is designed both for writers with a passion for the genre and those who are interested in gaining experience. Successful completion of a Fiction Workshop I is a prerequisite for enrollment in Fiction Workshop II.

This creative writing course, focused on the art of writing and reading fiction, addresses the fundamentals of craft. Through creative writing exercises and assignments, students will explore characterization, point of view, plot, scene work, and worldbuilding. Students can expect to read deeply, respond creatively, and to engage with their peers in a workshop setting. This course is designed both for writers with a passion for the genre and those who are interested in gaining experience. Successful completion of a Fiction Workshop I is a prerequisite for enrollment in Fiction Workshop II.

This creative writing course, focused on the art of writing and reading fiction, addresses the fundamentals of craft. Through creative writing exercises and assignments, students will explore characterization, point of view, plot, scene work, and worldbuilding. Students can expect to read deeply, respond creatively, and to engage with their peers in a workshop setting. This course is designed both for writers with a passion for the genre and those who are interested in gaining experience. Successful completion of a Fiction Workshop I is a prerequisite for enrollment in Fiction Workshop II.

This creative writing course, focused on the art of writing and reading fiction, addresses the fundamentals of craft. Through creative writing exercises and assignments, students will explore characterization, point of view, plot, scene work, and worldbuilding. Students can expect to read deeply, respond creatively, and to engage with their peers in a workshop setting. This course is designed both for writers with a passion for the genre and those who are interested in gaining experience. Successful completion of a Fiction Workshop I is a prerequisite for enrollment in Fiction Workshop II.

This creative writing course, focused on the art of writing and reading fiction, addresses the fundamentals of craft. Through creative writing exercises and assignments, students will explore characterization, point of view, plot, scene work, and worldbuilding. Students can expect to read deeply, respond creatively, and to engage with their peers in a workshop setting. This course is designed both for writers with a passion for the genre and those who are interested in gaining experience. Successful completion of a Fiction Workshop I is a prerequisite for enrollment in Fiction Workshop II.

Brevity is the soul of wit, and in some definitions, it’s also an essential characteristic of lyric poetry. In this course, we’ll read diverse examples of relatively brief poetic forms, such as  epigrams, aphorisms, haikus, tankas, prose poems, sonnets, and other “micro” or “tiny” poems. We’ll also consider the way short forms can be linked to form longer, iterative poetic sequences. Finally, we’ll also practice revising poems for economy: that is, cutting as many words as possible from every draft. Using our readings, students will try out several short forms, revise work, and complete short critical writing exercises. 

The very inception of nonfiction as a genre is irrevocably intertwined with the confessional mode. From St. Augustine to Rousseau, from Thomas DeQuincy to Maggie Nelson, from Mary McLane to Sarah Viren, Literary Nonfiction can hardly be conceived of without the sincere offering of personal vulnerability known as the confession. But what makes a confession a literary? What is considered a worthy revelation? What is the line between vulnerability and voyeurism? And how should we deal with nonfictional inheritance of guilt, religion and “Truth”? 

This course is designed to tackle these questions both abstractly and concretely by reading from the masters and applying these concepts directly to the essays produced within the workshop setting. Students will be expected to turn in 2-3 confessional essays, alongside reading responses and workshop letters throughout the course of the quarter. 

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, Aleksandar 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.

Writing about work, jobs, and vocational experiences may seem contradictory— or even antithetical—to our goals in fiction. After all, if we aim to inspire, to invigorate, to otherwise wield a narrative “axe for the frozen sea within us” (as Kafka wrote), why write about the very day-to-day tasks so often charged with numbing and blurring our sensation of life? In this workshop, we will explore and answer this question with our own work-focused fictions, developing strategies for defamiliarizing the mundane, and using routines to build dramatic tension. Utilizing a combination of creative workshops and exercises—and drawing upon models from the job-focused fiction of Sayaka Murata, Jamil Jan Kochai, Lucia Berlin, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Edwidge Danticat, and other writers—we will also deepen and develop our characters through precise depictions of their work environments.

Beginning a novel can be daunting, but this class aims to remove some of the mystery behind the process and get students started on that long journey into the unknown. We 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 a handful of published novels as you work on your own opening chapters, which will be workshopped as part of the course. Students are expected to submit two opening chapters of a novel-in-progress (and a revision of one) as well read and critique chapters from your peers for workshop. 

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.

This course explores short form screenwriting, as distinct from feature-length or episodic screenwriting. In addition to studying the essential elements of a screenplay, we will read, view, and discuss approaches to scripting brief documentary, poetic, and fictional time-based works. This work will prepare us for in- and out-of-class writing exercises in these modes, which students will often discuss in a workshop environment. Students will respond in creative and critical ways to the screenings and readings; present on a specific time-based work or creator; and write in the short screenwriting formats under study, culminating in a final creative project.

Beginning writers are often told to imitate ‘great authors’ to discover their voices. One way to reconcile imitation with originality is to copy works from literary history with a comic touch. In this course, students will satirize poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from the history of Western literature to learn how art works. Parodying Stein’s portraiture illuminates the workings of literary mimesis; satirizing Lispector’s proliferating points of view adumbrates perspectival horizons in narrative; satirizing Tanizaki’s praise of shadows illustrates the mechanics of nonfiction polemic. Students will write imitations of literary works and a final mock-academic essay on parody and mimesis.

This studio course introduces students to essential graphic design skills and concepts. Through a series of hands-on assignments, we’ll explore how graphic information—type, image, composition, and layout—shapes the way we communicate and understand the world. You will experiment with accessible tools like photocopiers and laser printers, and work through the phases of the design process: from research, conception and ideation, to sketching, evaluation and the development of form, to final execution and production. 

Some of the most compelling pieces of writing across all genres deal with, and often feature, the concept of Evil at their center. Whether they address it directly through a character, like Bulgakov’s Professor Woland in Master and Margarita, or as a concept in Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. Whether the narratives are anchored in the concreteness of real crime, like in Capote’s In Cold Blood, and sometimes they revel in the abstraction of sin, as in Milton’s Paradise Lost, they always dare to ask, “What and why is evil?” Why might character cower at the thought of that which awaits us in the dark, like in HP Lovecraft’s Dagon, and why might a real 19-year-old woman in Bute, Montana anticipate it with bated breath, like in Mary MacLane’s I Await the Devil’s Coming. This course is designed to explore this question alongside authors who devoted their lives to understanding the role of evil in literature and life, to contemplating its necessity, its appeal, its frivolity, and its betrayal. The course will be divided into three sections, each section devoted to a specific genre during which two to three texts will be explored, discussed, and analyzed in class, and at the end of which one analysis paper will be due, culminating in a final analytical and creative piece. 

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.

This workshop-centered course invites writers to navigate the "sublime" in poetry and prose, that boundary between beauty and horror in contemporary writing. What defines a moment of insight or the impulse of horror? How does the sublime offer means of engaging the boundary between the human and nonhuman worlds in the present moment? What formal play has previously explored these boundaries? To these ends, we will examine work by writers including Angela Carter, Xi Chuan, Lauren Groff, Mona Susan Power, and Dubravka Ugresic.

What we call style is more than literary flourish. Control of a story begins with a writer’s characteristic approach to the line. Style dictates and shapes immersive and impactful worlds of our creation. It’s also indicative of a work’s larger themes, philosophies, and aesthetic sensibility. In this class, we’ll examine fiction by wordsmiths such as James Baldwin, Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison, and Marguerite Duras to explore the influence that elements such as diction, syntax, rhythm, and punctuation have on a writer’s style.

All excellent fiction is made of strong sentences, strong strings of words that tempt us to linger even as they push us toward the next strong string. This class will focus on how to make such sentences. We’ll read exemplary fiction by various authors—Garielle Lutz, Lydia Davis, Gayl Jones, Paul Beatty, J.D. Salinger, Jose Emilio Pacheco, and more—and discover and discuss how their sentences operate. We’ll do exercises, in and out of class, to master our intentions. We will read student sentences and take them apart. We will force student sentences to box and do yoga and sleep and sing opera. We will smash them up and twist them to find their strengths. If they have no strengths, we will put them to death, and feed their cold bones to other, better sentences in need of more calcium. We will find all the fun and have it.

This creative writing course, focused on the art of writing and reading poetry, addresses the fundamentals of craft. Through creative writing exercises and assignments, students will explore precise imagery, unpredictable figuration, intentional musicality, the use of line and stanza, and the relationship between form and content. Students can expect to read deeply, respond creatively, and to engage with their peers in a workshop setting. This course is designed both for writers with a passion for the genre and those who are interested in gaining experience. Successful completion of Poetry Workshop I is a prerequisite for enrollment in Poetry Workshop II.

This creative writing course, focused on the art of writing and reading fiction, addresses the fundamentals of craft. Through creative writing exercises and assignments, students will explore characterization, point of view, plot, scene work, and worldbuilding. Students can expect to read deeply, respond creatively, and to engage with their peers in a workshop setting. This course is designed both for writers with a passion for the genre and those who are interested in gaining experience. Successful completion of a Fiction Workshop I is a prerequisite for enrollment in Fiction Workshop II.

This creative writing course, focused on the art of writing and reading fiction, addresses the fundamentals of craft. Through creative writing exercises and assignments, students will explore characterization, point of view, plot, scene work, and worldbuilding. Students can expect to read deeply, respond creatively, and to engage with their peers in a workshop setting. This course is designed both for writers with a passion for the genre and those who are interested in gaining experience. Successful completion of a Fiction Workshop I is a prerequisite for enrollment in Fiction Workshop II.

This creative writing course, focused on the art of writing and reading fiction, addresses the fundamentals of craft. Through creative writing exercises and assignments, students will explore characterization, point of view, plot, scene work, and worldbuilding. Students can expect to read deeply, respond creatively, and to engage with their peers in a workshop setting. This course is designed both for writers with a passion for the genre and those who are interested in gaining experience. Successful completion of a Fiction Workshop I is a prerequisite for enrollment in Fiction Workshop II.

Might there be a kind of poem that acts like a parasite latched on to a host body? A poem whose very life is the fusion of various sources, voices, discourses? This poetry workshop invites students to read and write poetry that, either overtly or subtly, engages with other texts. We’ll examine ways that poems create intertextual relationships (e.g. quoting, voicing, alluding, echoing, stealing, sampling, imitating, translating…) and test out these methods in our own writing. Students should expect to engage with the basic question of how their work relates to other poets and poems. Expect to read a substantial amount of work by modern and contemporary poets, submit new original poems for workshop, complete intertextual writing exercises, 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.

Many are read to as children, some even learn to read before they show any interest in speaking, but most—regardless of language, background or nationality—will first experience stories by overhearing them. Most children’s first literature, in fact,  will come from grandparents, cousins and close friends retelling bits and pieces of their everyday lives. Later, when these children grow up to be writers, they will ask themselves questions about the mechanics and ethics of how to retell these stories that both are and are not our own. 

From Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago,” to Brian Doyle’s “Thirsty for the Joy,” from John Hershey’s “Hiroshima” and Art Spiegelman’s “Mouse” to Rebecca Skloot’s “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” the world of nonfiction writing is rife with second, third, and fourth hand stories in which the essayist must learn to negotiate the researched history of people and places, with the malleability of secondhand memory. How do we believably and respectfully tell others’ stories? How do we learn to find them? How do we draw these stories out, jot them down? How do we know when to make them our own and when to leave them in the liminal space of another’s inaccessible and inscrutable experience? This course is designed to tackle these specific questions through workshops, writing prompts and guided discussions of assigned texts.

In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway tells us that if a writer knows enough about what he is writing, “he may omit things that he knows, and the reader […] will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.” It sounds good, of course, and common sensical (no one needs to write everything they know about what they know!), but still: easier said than done. What exactly should we leave out when we write a story/a scene/a piece of dialogue? How do we decide what makes a detail crucial, and what’s best left unsaid? How much should we trust our readers? Through close reading, in-class exercises, and rigorous editing of your own writing, this workshop will help you acquire a better sense of what should go on the page and what might better be communicated between the lines. Readings will likely include Agota Kristof, Isaac Babel, Zadie Smith, Augusto Monterroso, Toni Morrison, Yiyun Li, and Patrik Ourednik.

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 George Saunders, Jan Jamil Kochai, and Rachel Ingalls. 

In this advanced fiction workshop, we will examine and write narratives set at college, the so-called campus and varsity novels (and, in our case, short stories). We will try to capture the attendant promise and uncertainty of life on the cusp of adulthood, asking what it means to come of age, to age, to experiment, and possibly, to regress. We’ll attempt to veer away from cultural cliché and caricature to portray the truth of life on campus and come to grips with the way you live right now, as we consider what it means—to borrow the title of one novel—to make our home among strangers. Students will read published works and submit two stories or novel excerpts for workshops. Please expect a rigorous but constructive workshop environment where being a critic and an editor is essential.

Prose Thesis Workshops are open to Creative Writing Intensive Majors, Creative Writing Legacy Majors and Minors completing an optional thesis, and MAPH Creative Writing Specialists, completing a thesis in either Fiction or Literary Nonfiction. Students will build off a project already in-progress to complete 15-30 pages of polished prose—typically in the form of essays, short stories, or an excerpt from a longer work. Students are expected to have at least 50% of an initial draft of their project completed prior to the first day of class.    

Poetry Thesis Workshops are open to Creative Writing Intensive Majors, Creative Writing Legacy Majors and Minors completing an optional thesis, and MAPH Creative Writing Specialists. Students will build off a project already in-progress to complete a collection of 10-15 polished poems. Students are expected to have at least 50% of an initial draft of their project completed prior to the first day of class.    

Literary Nonfiction Thesis Workshops are open to Creative Writing Intensive Majors, Creative Writing Legacy Majors and Minors completing an optional thesis, and MAPH Creative Writing Specialists. Students will build off a project already in-progress to complete 15-30 pages of polished prose—typically in the form of essays or an excerpt from a longer work. Students are expected to have at least 50% of an initial draft of their project completed prior to the first day of class. 

Fiction Thesis Workshops are open to Creative Writing Intensive Majors, Creative Writing Legacy Majors and Minors completing an optional thesis, and MAPH Creative Writing Specialists. Students will build off a project already in-progress to complete 15-30 pages of polished prose—typically in the form of short stories or an excerpt from a longer work. Students are expected to have at least 50% of an initial draft of their project completed prior to the first day of class.  

Fiction Thesis Workshops are open to Creative Writing Intensive Majors, Creative Writing Legacy Majors and Minors completing an optional thesis, and MAPH Creative Writing Specialists. Students will build off a project already in-progress to complete 15-30 pages of polished prose—typically in the form of short stories or an excerpt from a longer work. Students are expected to have at least 50% of an initial draft of their project completed prior to the first day of class.  

Fiction Thesis Workshops are open to Creative Writing Intensive Majors, Creative Writing Legacy Majors and Minors completing an optional thesis, and MAPH Creative Writing Specialists. Students will build off a project already in-progress to complete 15-30 pages of polished prose—typically in the form of short stories or an excerpt from a longer work. Students are expected to have at least 50% of an initial draft of their project completed prior to the first day of class.  

According to Mel Brooks, “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.” It isn’t easy to argue with Brooks, yet there exist numerous wildly successful marriages between violence and comedy for which his maxim doesn’t fully account. In this class, we will explore such marriages—works by Helen Garner, Juan Pablo Villalobos, Laura Vasquez, Daniil Kharms, Franz Kafka, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Isaac Babel, Ralph Ellison, and more—and we’ll attempt to better understand their success. In the process, we’ll seek to develop a clearer sense of the twisting border that separates comedic from tragic violence. Students will read the assigned works closely, discuss them with rigor, and write violent and comic fiction of their own.

Jezebels, witches, femme fatales, nasty women, sirens, madwomen, and murderesses: the world over, these women of many names—whom we’ll collectively refer to as “the Bad Girls Club”—have alternately inspired the disdain and delight of multitudes. Whether jailed, expelled, excommunicated, or burned at the stake, their antiheroic antics have challenged, critiqued, or, some might say, corrupted the laws, mores, and sensibilities of societies. If it is true that polite, well-behaved women rarely make history, then what do impolite, badly-behaved women teach us about the construction of his story? In this course, we’ll examine literature from around the world featuring members of the “Bad Girls Club,” who, in opposing complimentary constructions of femininity, femaleness, and power invite introspection on the gendered nature of story and storytelling. In short critical papers, we’ll analyze the tropes, features, and conventions of literature featuring these bad characters, and in short exercises, you’ll write stories, poetry, and essays inspired by them.

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, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Hannah Arendt, and George Orwell. Assignments include critical essays, creative exercises, and a final creative piece. 

Since the commercialization of the internet in the 1990s, the online space has evolved and fractured and become more commodified than ever before. 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 being online, and what fiction is able to do in dialogue with another medium. We may read works by Tony Tulathimutte, Patricia Lockwood, 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. 

Rivers move--over land, through history, among peoples--and they make: landscapes and civilizations. They are the boundaries on our maps, the dividers of nations, of families, of the living and the dead, but they are also the arteries that connect us. They are meditative, meandering journeys and implacable, surging power. They are metaphors but also so plainly, corporeally themselves. In this course, we will encounter creative work about rivers, real and imaginary, from the Styx to the Amazon. Through poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and drama, we will consider what rivers are, what they mean to us, and how they are represented in art and literature. Rivers will be the topic and inspiration for our own creative writing, too. The goal for this course is to further your understanding of creative writing genres and the techniques that creative writers employ to produce meaningful work in each of those genres. You will also practice those techniques yourselves as write your own creative work in each genre.  Our weekly sessions will involve a mixture of discussions, brief lectures, student presentations, mini-workshops and in-class exercises. Most weeks, you will be responsible for a creative and/or critical response (300-500 words) to the reading, and the quarter will culminate in a final project (7-10 pages) in the genre of your choice, inspired by the Chicago River.

Ever since humans were drawing on cave walls, the ways in which we communicate meaning through stories has been evolving. This class will look at three forms of narrative—fiction, narrative poetry, and film—and explore their “grammars” (i.e. the modes, tools, elements of craft, etc. that a particular genre uses to convey meaning or achieve certain effects). How does film (a visual medium that offers a voyeuristic experience) tell a story differently than does fiction (which invites the reader to participate more in an act of shared imagination), differently than poetry (which condenses a story to its essences)? How is meaning or emotion conveyed differently through each? How do different grammars influence the effects they achieve? Students will look at and discuss various works of fiction, poetry, and film, read critical and craft-oriented texts, complete weekly reading responses, and write creative exercises. A hybrid creative/analytical paper will be due at the end of the course. 

Like the monsters it so often portrays, Gothic fiction is at once a transgressive, seductive, and mutable genre—blending horror, mystery, and romance and using supernatural elements to blur the line between realism and fantasy. It’s amid this ambiguity that the Gothic is at its most evocative and visceral, powerfully dramatizing our encounters with the irrational and inexplicable in nature, in others, and in ourselves. This Arts Core course will focus on these psychologically provocative aspects of the genre. As we read Gothic works from different eras and cultures, we’ll examine what these stories of extraordinary conflict might reveal about the horrors and mysteries of ordinary life—of our hidden desires, anxieties, and pathologies. Crucially, we’ll approach them from the writer’s perspective and consider what the Gothic enables a writer to explore and express that other genres may not. With this in mind, students will write their “Gothic Scenes” throughout the quarter, applying their own intimate Gothic lens to elusive encounters from their past. 

Humor is often treated as poetry's guilty pleasure — the thing serious poets do between serious poems. This seminar rejects that premise entirely. From the ribald fabliaux of medieval verse to the deadpan surrealism of Russell Edson, from Swift's savage ironies to Natalie Shapero’s sardonic restraint, comic poetry has always been doing the most sophisticated work: puncturing authority, negotiating pain, and telling the truth at an angle.

We will study humor not as decoration but as epistemology — a way of knowing and saying what other modes cannot reach. Topics include: the rhetoric of the joke; bathos and anticlimax as poetic structure; the long tradition of parody and mock-epic; nonsense verse and its philosophical undertow; the relationship between comedy and elegy; and the political uses of irony and satire.

Students will read widely, write critically, and compose original comic poems in a range of modes.

Across the several decades of her career, Joan Didion continually grappled with the myths, realities, facts and illusions of her home state in essays and memoirs. Though she lived in New York City for the last 35 years of her life, some of her most indelible work focuses our attention on images of the so-called “Golden West”: the hippie movement in San Franciso in "Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” the Manson Family murder trial in "The White Album,” the Donner Party in Where I Was From, as well as Patty Hearst, Alcatraz, the Reagans and wildfire season, to name a few of many. In this class, we’ll study several of her California-centered works and write our personal essays about place, history, our moment in time and where we are from. We'll also attempt to understand the hallmarks of her prose style, her enduring appeal, the issue of her celebrity, among other possibilities. 

From Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts to Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This, there has been a recent surge of popular fiction that not only employs online-based communication as a narrative device, but explores the Internet as a new field of literature: a field with its own rhetoric, network of referents, and unique poetics. In this Writing Studio, we will explore the evolution of Internet Literature from early Internet-focused works—such as Dennis Cooper’s Sluts and Jeanette Winterson’s The PowerBook—to contemporary works such as Olivia Laing’s Crudo, Esther Yi’s Y/N, and B.R. Yeager’s Amygdalatropolis. We will also hone our craft understanding of Internet Literature through writing exercises that engage with Internet forms, including social media, message boards, and various iterations of AI. The course will include reading discussions, short weekly written responses, and workshopping of original student work. 

Literary ecosystems that support underrepresented voices often require strategic interventions to create robustness. This Studio course will use the South Asian Literary Translation Project (SALT) as a case study for a hands-on examination of these kinds of interventions. Close reading of translations that have emerged from SALT will help equip us with the tools to read literature in translation from any language, while focusing on specific strategies used by translators to bring literature from this particular region into English. These readings will also serve as lenses to closely examine the interventions that helped bring these works into being: literary mentorships, subventions to publishers, reader’s reports, translation workshops, travel and publicity grants, community building, and awards. We will discuss with writers, translators, publishers, and literary nonprofits how these discrete features work in conversation to nourish a given literary ecosystem; what’s been working with SALT, and the challenges it faces; performance indicators that can be used to judge success. The final student portfolio will include two reader’s reports and a 1000-word blueprint for a project to address the needs of a particular literary ecosystem.

Many creative writers who are conversant in more than one language find that literary translation offers an affinity mode of writing. Employing skills that span language study, literary analysis, and creative writing, literary translation offers young writers a way of inhabiting other voices, sharpening their writing without the burden of invention, and reading far beyond the contemporary American canon. But how do you get started translating? This studio will offer students the space to explore their sensibilities as readers so that they may discover new international literature that speaks to them as writers. We’ll start with research activities that seek to survey current literary practices in the language or world area that each student is interested in. Then, we’ll read our way into a few potential projects by bringing in tools of critical reception, close reading, and literary analysis. Finally, we’ll embark on the first phases of translation praxis through language work and creative imagining in English. Students will leave the studio with an invested project that they may continue independently or within the structure of a translation workshop.

According to Philip Gerard, “Creative research is both a process and a habit of mind, an alertness to the human story as it lurks in unlikely places.” Creative writers may lean on research to sharpen the authenticity of their work; to liberate themselves from the confines of their personal experience; to mine existing stories and histories for details, plot, settings, characters; to generate new ideas and approaches to language, theme and story. The creative writer/researcher is on the hunt for the numinous particulars, the mysteries and human stories lurking in the finest grains of detail. In this course, we will explore the research methods used by creative writers and consider questions that range from the logistical (eg. How do I find what I need in an archive?) to the ethical (eg. How do I conscientiously write from a point of view outside my own experience?) to the aesthetic (eg. How do I incorporate all these researched details without waterlogging the poem/story/essay?). We will read poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction that relies heavily on research and hear from established writers about the challenges of conducting and writing from research. Assignments will include reading responses, creative writing and research exercises, short essays and presentations.

This creative writing course, focused on the art of writing and reading poetry, addresses the fundamentals of craft. Through creative writing exercises and assignments, students will explore precise imagery, unpredictable figuration, intentional musicality, the use of line and stanza, and the relationship between form and content. Students can expect to read deeply, respond creatively, and to engage with their peers in a workshop setting. This course is designed both for writers with a passion for the genre and those who are interested in gaining experience. Successful completion of Poetry Workshop I is a prerequisite for enrollment in Poetry Workshop II.

This creative writing course, focused on the art of writing and reading literary nonfiction, addresses the fundamentals of craft. Through creative writing exercises and assignments, students will explore narrative, voice, imagery, and the relationships between ethics and art, form and content, and the self and the subject matter. Students can expect to read deeply, respond creatively, and to engage with their peers in a workshop setting. This course is designed both for writers with a passion for the genre and those who are interested in gaining experience. Successful completion of Literary Nonfiction Workshop I is a prerequisite for enrollment in Literary Nonfiction Workshop II.

This creative writing course, focused on the art of writing and reading fiction, addresses the fundamentals of craft. Through creative writing exercises and assignments, students will explore characterization, point of view, plot, scene work, and worldbuilding. Students can expect to read deeply, respond creatively, and to engage with their peers in a workshop setting. This course is designed both for writers with a passion for the genre and those who are interested in gaining experience. Successful completion of a Fiction Workshop I is a prerequisite for enrollment in Fiction Workshop II.

This creative writing course, focused on the art of writing and reading fiction, addresses the fundamentals of craft. Through creative writing exercises and assignments, students will explore characterization, point of view, plot, scene work, and worldbuilding. Students can expect to read deeply, respond creatively, and to engage with their peers in a workshop setting. This course is designed both for writers with a passion for the genre and those who are interested in gaining experience. Successful completion of a Fiction Workshop I is a prerequisite for enrollment in Fiction Workshop II.

The sonnet form has a unique place in Western poetics--as a site for affective expression, formal exploration, and poetic narration. This advanced poetry workshop takes the historical tradition of the sonnet sequence--from the early modern period to contemporary avant-gardes across a range of languages and regions--as a model for serial lyric form. Authors will range from Petrarch, Dante, Sidney, and Shakespeare to Tonya Foster, Ed Roberson, and Wanda Coleman. (Please note students will *not* be required to write sonnet sequences!) Writing exercises will explore questions of lineation, recursion, seriality, and poetic narratology.

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 by turns imaginative, narrative, and documentary. 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 mixed media Chicago notebook, and write a longer piece in the genre or hybrid of their choice for workshop. Readings may include Eve Ewing, Lori Waxman, Frank London Brown, Gwendolyn Brooks, Rosalyn LaPier, Stuart Dybek, Sandra Cisneros, Aleksandar Hemon, Leonard Dubkin, Rebecca Zorach, Studs Terkel and more.

While aspiring writers usually grasp quickly how to write direct dialog—we hear it all around us, in public and private spaces—narration is a trickier enterprise. In this writing workshop, we will look at the narrator as personality, a voice that exists to tell the story, but not always to enter it. The narrator can be a constant, like an elbow in the side, or effaced, touching down to only give us the basics of time and place. They can be all knowing and judging, summarizing scenes, people and events from a distant, God-like vantage, or reportorial, speaking in present tense as events unfurl. Some narrators make us laugh but are conning us with their charm; others explain the psychology of events like a great therapist or moralize like a member of the clergy. We will look at a wide range of examples from writers such as Anton Chekhov, Louise Erdrich, Nicholai Gogol, Jhumpa Lahiri, Yiyun Li, ZZ Packer, and Edith Wharton. Students will be encouraged to experiment with narrative voice in both writing exercises and story revisions. By the end of the course, you will have generated significant raw material and workshopped one story, which you will revise for the final. 

This workshop approaches “the love story” as both a narrative genre and a foundational subject for all kinds of stories. As we read a selection of unique and provocative love stories, we’ll ask: What distinguishes a good from a bad one—and, for that matter, a great from a good one? As writers, how might we deepen the genre’s most potent tropes while avoiding its devitalizing clichés? How does exploring romantic love uniquely enable us to write not only about other kinds of love but about the most elusive subjects in life? Underlying all these questions is one that each student should ask for themself throughout the quarter: What am I truly writing about when I write about love? Through focused writing exercises and workshops of their own love stories, students will work toward answering these questions and writing as honestly and convincingly as possible about this most examined of human experiences. 

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.

It’s long been said that there are no new stories, only new ways of telling old ones, but how do writers reengage familiar genres, plots, and themes without being redundant? This course will confront the literary cliché at all levels, from the trappings of genre to predictable turns of plot to the subtly undermining forces of mundane language. We will consider not only how stories can fall victim to cliché but also how they may benefit from calling on recognizable content for the sake of efficiency, familiarity, or homage. Through an array of readings that represent unique concepts and styles as well as more conventional narratives we will examine how published writers embrace or subvert cliché through story craft. Meanwhile, student fiction will be discussed throughout the term in a supportive workshop atmosphere that will aim not to expose clichés in peer work, but to consider how an author can find balance—between the familiar and the unfamiliar, between the predictable and the unpredictable—in order to maximize a story’s effect. Students will submit two stories to workshop and will be asked to write critiques of all peer work.