Undergraduate

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.