Undergraduate

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 Chicago River and the Amazon. Through poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and film, we will consider what rivers are, what they mean to us, and how they are represented in art and literature. Rivers will also be the topic and inspiration for our own forays into creative writing. Students will be asked to keep a reading notebook as well as to produce weekly creative and critical responses for class discussion. 

Day/Time: Monday, 10:20-12:20 PM

"Do you like sentences?" Such is the litmus test posed to would-be writers in Annie Dillard's The Writing Life. In order to understand narrative, we often go abstract—we summarize, we speak of structure, we read between the lines—yet everything that happens in fiction still happens in sentences. Some writers therefore make the sentence the cynosure of all effort: they dazzle. Others forge a rough music out of odd locutions and interrupted sense. In this course we'll study (and appreciate) such limit cases, as well as sentences of quieter grace, while reserving the most of our effort for sentences of our own, testing them against the manifold requirements of narrative: pace, logic, voice, and flow. In exercises and communal editing sessions we'll trim, paste, lard, complicate, rewrite, recast, and sometimes simply delete sentences by ourselves and others. And the more we relish what might seem like tedium, the more we'll prove that we do like sentences.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 9:40-12:40 PM

This course studies how writers engage the senses to shape language into something actually felt and not just comprehended. We’ll track the sensual life of words—what they do to the mouth, to the ear, their musical kinships with one another—and learn how these qualities combine to generate mood and atmosphere. Alongside writing that renders embodiment and the physical world, we’ll read writing that makes abstraction feel concrete. Our reading will guide our ongoing inquiry into questions such as: what constitutes an image? How does writing enact feeling? How do the sensory elements of a piece intensify or erode or expand its subject, and to what end? Case studies may include poetry and prose by Bashō, Sei Shōnagon, Homer, John Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Jean Toomer, D. H. Lawrence, Lorine Niedecker, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Sylvia Plath, Ai, Elaine Scarry, Wanda Coleman, Toni Morrison, Hai-Dang Phan, Nathaniel Mackey, Durga Chew-Bose, Justin Torres, and Jenny Zhang. These writers will provide inspiration for your own creative experiments on the page. Students will be asked to lead one presentation during the quarter and to write short weekly pieces to extend the group discussion.

Day/Time: Thursday, 2:40–5:40 PM

All writing is revision, and this holds true for the practice of literary translation as well. We will critique each other’s longer manuscripts-in-progress of prose, poetry, or drama, and examine various revision techniques—from the line-by-line approach of Lydia Davis, to the “driving-in-the-dark” model of Peter Constantine, and several approaches in between. We will consider questions of different reading audiences while preparing manuscripts for submission for publication, along with the contextualization of the work with a translator’s preface or afterword. Our efforts will culminate in not only an advanced-stage manuscript, but also with various strategies in hand to use for future projects. Students who wish to take this workshop should have at least an intermediate proficiency in a foreign language and already be working on a longer translation project.

Day/Time: Monday, 1:50 - 5:00 PM

Place—and the writing of places—is a conundrum of the imagination. We live in the present moment, yet we are haunted by remnants of our history: repurposed buildings, lands containing layers of legacy. We live in a world that constantly pushes toward new development while much of our natural environment is disappearing. In this class, we will explore critical questions inherent to the writing of place in a world of disappearing landscapes: How can we write place in a way that embodies the fleeting sensation of being there? How can we use place to evoke—precisely—the most elusive parts of experience: the topography of emotions, the clouded shapes of memories? Through the place-driven writing of Italo Calvino, Cesar Aira, Anna Kavan, Lucia Berlin, Edwidge Danticat, Ottessa Moshfegh, and other contemporary authors, we will discover strategies for descriptive world-building and illustrating environmental change. With a combination of creative exercises and workshops, we will also write our own place-driven stories.

Day/Time: Thursday, 4:20 - 7:20 PM

There’s really no such thing as the “voiceless.” There is only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.~~Arundhati Roy 

Invasion and occupation, waves of nomads and immigrants, the African slave trade, the Underground Railroad, the Great Migration, the Trail of Tears, the Dust Bowl, and the “southern border,” our American story contains multitudes, united in motion. Wanderers and drifters, exiles and refugees, we are on the run and in the mix, our collective experience one of forced migration as well as voluntary uprooting—we’re at once victims and agents, objects and subjects. Oral History, “the poetry of the everyday,” the literature of the street, is perfectly poised to open a unique window onto our migration stories, offering a narrative space where an interviewer, listening with empathy and identification, and a story-teller, seizing an occasion to perform an account of events and experiences, co-create a relationship and reveal a universe of meaning-making. Seeking authenticity, oral historians become attuned to contradiction, tension, disagreements, silences, inconsistencies, ambiguities, paradoxes, uncertainties, and every other kind of human muddle; we dive head-first into the wide, wild world of human experience and human meaning-making, offering an important antidote to propaganda, dogma, imposition and stereotype. We look for what happened, what people say happened, and the webs of significance people construct to make sense of what happened. In this seminar we will study the theory and practice of Oral History, and we will create original oral accounts of migration from our own families as well as from a much wider range of Chicago communities. 

Day/Time: Thursday, 9:40 - 12:40 PM

When life unfolds in a series of random senseless events, humans seek narratives that make order of the chaos. The literary essay gives us a tool to ask: Who are we? How did we get here? What drives us? What holds us back? Where are we headed? Students in this workshop will tackle some of life’s biggest questions alongside their lived experiences, dreams, and fantasies in a “field notebook” with the goal of developing— and helping each other develop in workshop— true, bold, idea-driven narratives or meditations that render us a little more lucid, strategic, and in love with the act of wondering. Topics of interest will include rhetoric, self-characterization, associative logic, conflict-resolution, and the possibilities of voice and truth in nonfiction. Along the way, we will read essayists and essayistic narrators who have honored reverie and introspection, such as E.B. White, Henry David Thoreau, Fernando Pessoa, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Patricia Foster, and Sei Shonagon. Students will direct their own workshop discussions and attend one-on-one conferences with the instructor before revising two essays for a portfolio that demonstrates curiosity and discovery.

Day/Time: Wednesday, 9:10-11:10 AM

Writers at all levels learn through the careful reading of works they admire. We will spend more than a third of our time in this class reading stories worth learning from, both classic and contemporary, by writers like James Baldwin, Clarice Lispector, Sherman Alexie, Lorrie Moore, and Jhumpa Lahiri. Discussion will be lively --passionate opinions and enthusiasm are welcome --but most of our focus will be on the choices that writers make, the nuts and bolts of craft, including: point of view, tone, direct and summary dialog, setting, and use of time. In-class exercises will further hone your understanding of specific techniques, fire your creativity and get you writing. In writing workshop, each of you will each 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.

Day/Time: Wednesday, 1:50 - 3:50 PM

Style, it might be said, is a truce the writer makes between her material and what she can do with it. This course will focus on the latter—especially the things that beginning writers can do to take control of their writing.  Directed prose exercises will sharpen your technical self-mastery.  For larger issues of craft we'll examine stories by a succession of vivid stylists. You might be asked to experiment with the picaresque elaborations of Nikolai Gogol, the ruthless dreaming of Jamaica Kincaid, the limited point of view of a Katherine Mansfield character, or the supple empathy of David Foster Wallace's indirect discourse.  In the second part of the course, you will twice submit an original story for peer workshopping and will turn in polished revisions at the semester's end.

Day/Time: Friday, 12:40-3:50 PM

Where should a poem end and what should that ending feel like? We’ll acquaint ourselves with many possible answers to these questions as we read a range of poems from the past and present, seeking out new models to challenge and refine our ideas and habits around closure. To better understand closural strategies in our own and others’ poetry, we’ll examine narrative and lyric expectations, prosody, epiphany, seriality, anti-closure, and procedure, discussing the sociohistorical context and politics of poets’ formal choices. Course readings will be determined by the needs and interests of the group and will enrich the workshop dialogue around your own poetry. Students will be asked to write and share a new poem each week and to participate rigorously in discussion.

Day/Time: Friday, 1:50-3:50 PM