Undergraduate

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.  

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 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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.