Undergraduate

In this class you can write about anything you want, as long as you adhere to the truth. What that truth is, only you can say; our job is to help you find it, as well as the best form for conveying it. Nonfiction is inherently interdisciplinary and this class reflects that: I welcome essays, lyric essays, criticism, memoir, travelogues, oral histories, and profiles, as well as reported and journalistic features. Also rants, radio stories, and graphic nonfiction, i.e., comics. Whatever the form or format, the process is the same: you submit your work in progress and your classmates edit and critique it. These critiques aren't for the faint of heart; they require meticulous line editing, rigorous reflection, and total honesty. They require you to put as much effort into your classmates' work as you do into your own. We'll start by reading foundational theoretical texts, including Vivian Gornick's The Situation and The Story and Phillip Lopate's To Show and To Tell. After that I'll choose published examples that demonstrate solutions to the specific narrative problems we've found in last week's student work. You'll leave this class with the writing sample and skills you'll need for admission to advanced workshops.

Poems are meeting places, Robert Creeley said. They offer locations but they also locate us, as writers and readers, in literal and figurative ways. And sometimes they dislocate us too. This beginning workshop will explore poetry writing through the lens of location, from considering place-based writing to thinking about textual and performative strategies that capture or engender movement, stasis, flux. We'll look to artists, writers, poets, dancers for inspiration and orientation: William Cowper, On Kawara, Gertrude Stein, Marguerite Young, C.S. Giscombe, Charles Olson, Alice Notley, Tonya Foster, Virgil, Gaston Bachelard, Adrienne Rich, Robert Venturi, Sally Gross. Reading, writing, and workshopping assignments will consider "location" (and locomotion) as theme, technique, and opportunity to investigate and play with our own senses of locality as individuals and as a writing community. In addition to writing poems, weekly assignments might find you taking walks, making maps, conjuring imaginary geographies, crafting spatial histories, and discovering embodied movement practices.

This course will begin with a weeks-long consideration of selected works of short fiction where discussion will aim to isolate the basic techniques and devices of effective storytelling. Weekly topics will range from subjects as broad as plot arrangement and character development 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 students will be asked to chart their processes of conceptualizing, writing, and revising a narrative. Finally, in the latter weeks of the quarter, emphasis will shift to the workshopping of students' own fiction.

How to Read Like a Writer: When someone says that a piece of writing is "beautiful" what does that mean? Why do you sometimes sigh with pleasure after reading a short story? In this discussion class, we'll be analyzing short stories (including your own) to discover the many different ways writers are able to create beautiful, moving works of art. We will be using craft analysis, the historical basis for learning to be a writer and in the process, we'll read some playful writers such as Chekhov, Joyce Carol Oates, Flannery O'Connor, George Saunders and Kelly Link. We will also be reading about the philosophy of writing, as described by Cixous, Barthes, Bachelard and Wood. And best of all, you'll be presenting your own manuscripts for critique in this workshop-based class. By the end of the quarter, we will have honed our skills as attentive readers, developed as writers of clear, sophisticated prose, and read some fiction that will linger in our imaginations, hopefully for life.

What is the temporality of the sea? Its consciousness? Where does it begin? Or end? In this course, we will consider the sea both as a figure in our literary, critical, visual, political, historical, and ecological imaginations, as well as a body in itself, iridescent and gleaming at the end of the world. We will look at practices of burial at sea, the infamous "wine dark sea" of Homer, the Middle Passage, the hold and wake of the ship, necropolitics, the concept of sovereignty and bare life, stowaway and asylum seekers, piracy and floating armories, eco-materialism, the post-human and alien worlds of our oceanic origins, the moon . . . and so on. Students will be asked to keep a reading notebook as well as to produce weekly creative responses for class discussion. "And as you read /the sea is turning /its dark pages /turning /its dark pages" (Denise Levertov, from The Reader).

This course invites writers to reconsider the influence of Chicago's public spaces on artistic form. 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 devastation 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 Michael Anania, Daniel Borzutzky, Ava Tomasula y Garcia, Philip Roth, and Erik Larson, as well as the city's rich legacies in documentary and the visual arts.

A monolith manifests in orbit around Jupiter, emitting a signal. A beacon? A man spontaneously discovers the ability to teleport. An evolutionary accident? The origin of human life proves to be malicious. Divine fate? Space travel is enabled by the ingestion of enormous quantities of a geriatric spice a messianic figure auspiciously learns to manipulate. A drug trip?! Among popular genres, science fiction is the riskiest conceptually and among the trickiest to master. The difference between an amazing idea and a rotten story is often slim. What makes good sci-fi work? And how best to write it? Let's put on our gravity boots and solar visors and see what we can discover. In this course, you'll read some novels (by Frank Herbert, Alfred Bester, and Ursula K. LeGuin), poetry (by Andrew Joron), a graphic novel (by Chris Ware), and screenplays (by Damon Lindelof, and Stanley Kubrick & Arthur C. Clarke). And all the while, you'll try your hand at bending each other's minds with your own science fiction.

In this course, we'll work to write about people and communities who are in crisis, on the verge of crisis, or looking back at crisis. We'll discuss reporting, interviewing, oral history, historical research, working from photography and video, and the ethical situation of the writer. We'll read works by writers such as Liu Xiaobo, Elena Poniatowska, Claudia Rankine, Rebecca Solnit, Edwidge Danticat, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Philip Gourevitch, Arundathi Roy, Leslie Marmon Silko, Rachel Carson, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, on subjects including migration, exile, prison, totalitarian regimes, dissidence, questions of reparation and reconciliation after systematic violence, and environmental activism. Students will undertake significant research and produce a substantial essay to be workshopped in class.

If, as claims the Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago, "the novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers," then how vast must be the space of poetry, which contains, after all, among its many streams, the verse novel? In this course we will explore some of the major and minor lyric tributaries that feed the sea of poetry, following such currents as the elegy, the ekphrastic poem, the dramatic monologue, and the eclogue, while considering the many branchings where they meet and overlap. We will read lists, letters, essays, and travelogues, and examine the endless ways generic conventions, in addition to formal ones, play a generative role in poetic innovation. Primary texts for this course will include weekly writing assignments alongside readings from a wide range of literary precursors.

Students will write and turn in two full-length stories or novel chapters for this workshop-based class. While we won't ignore such fundamental elements of fiction writing as POV and narrative distance, characterization, setting, and dialogue, the class will pay special attention to the relationship between character arc and narrative structure, as well as the various kinds of conflict that act as engines for a story or novel. In addition to submitting and reading for workshop, expect to read and discuss at least one novel and a selection of short stories.