Undergraduate

Fiction author James Joyce believed that by writing toward the heart of Dublin, he could get to the heart of every city. His idea set a difficult literary standard for writers of contemporary creative nonfiction: no longer could they write about a particular subject without the expectation that it should resonate on a universal level. In this course, we will cross-examine the values behind the countless mantras that circulate creative writing communities in order to trace how they influence the creative process of nonfiction writing, a genre that has only begun to gain independence on bookshelves. As we read authors who specialize in exploring particularities such as childhood and identity, we will focus on crafting and discussing stories which are uniquely ours. Students will workshop and revise one personal essay and several micro-essays for a final portfolio that demonstrates originality and versatility. Potential guides for our reading include: Mary Karr, Frank McCourt, Kiese Laymon, Yiyun Li, and Lucy Grealy.  

Day/Time: Mondays, 1:30-4:20

This course addresses a range of techniques for writing poetry, making use of various compelling models drawn primarily from international modernisms on which to base our own writing. (Our textbook is Poems for the Millennium, edited by Rothenberg & Joris.) In this sense, the course will constitute an apprenticeship to modern poetry. We will consider the breadth of approaches currently available to poets, as well as the value of reading as a means of developing an understanding of how to write poetry. Each week students will bring poems for discussion, developing a portfolio of revised work by the quarter’s end. Additionally, students will keep detailed notebooks, as well as developing critical skills for understanding poetry in the form of two short essays.

Day/Time: Tuesdays, 2-4:50 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, edited by the instructor and returned for revision, will sharpen your technical self‐mastery. For larger issues of craft we'll examine two or three stories each by a succession of vivid stylists. In written assignments, you will be asked to experiment with the picaresque elaborations of Nikolai Gogol, the ruthless dreams of Jamaica Kincaid, the limited point of view of a Katherine Mansfield character, and the supple empathy of David Foster Wallace's indirect discourse. In the second half 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: Fridays, 12:30-3:20

In this beginning-level fiction workshop, we will focus on the relationship between writer, reader, and story -- in other words, point of view. Who is telling a story?  To whom?  For what purpose and at what distance?  As we read fiction by writers like Lorrie Moore, Jose Saramago, Breece D’J Pancake, George Saunders, Kazuo Ishiguro, and others, we'll consider how point-of-view choices affect storytelling at all levels: character, voice, plot, structure, and significant detail. Most important, through weekly writing exercises and peer critique, we’ll experiment with a wide range of storytelling personae and points of view, from the intimate unreliability of the first-person narrator to the judicial distance of the magisterial voice. You will also be required to produce a full-length story for workshop, letters of critique for each of your peers, and a substantial revision of your short story.

Mondays, 9:30-12:20

Basics of Narrative Design | This course will begin with a weeks-long consideration of selected works of fiction where discussion will aim to distinguish the basic techniques and devices of effective storytelling. Weekly topics will range from subjects as broad as point of view and plot arrangement 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 written work will focus on discrete story parts such first pages, character introductions, and dialog-driven scenes before students are asked to compose full-length narratives. Along the way, students will chart their processes of conceptualizing, drafting, and revising their narratives. Finally, in the latter weeks of the quarter, emphasis will shift to the workshopping of students’ full stories.

Thursdays, 9:30-12:20 

We often say of film adaptations: it’s not as good as the book. But what can we, as readers and writers, learn from that unsuccessful transition to the screen? And more intriguingly, what can we learn from the successful ones, the films that are just as good if not better than the original written work—or so vastly different that they become their own entity? In this class, we will be reading works of short fiction and also “reading” their film adaptations, focusing on this relationship between storytelling on the page and storytelling on the screen and what is both lost and gained in that transition. If filmmaking requires a different language than fiction writing, a different approach to things like character, plot, atmosphere, even thematic development, what can we learn from that approach that we can apply to our own fiction, even if we have no interest in making films? We’ll investigate this question in the work of writers like James Joyce, Andre Dubus, and Stephen King, and filmmakers like Hitchcock, Huston, and Wilder.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 2:00-4:50 

To write in any genre is a gesture that puts one in a relationship with predecessors and precursors. While this relationship if often constructed as a dialogue, it can also be a conflict, full of clatter, disagreement and intentional offensiveness. In this sense, the writer’s mark crosses out the predecessors’ work, and functions as an act of desecration. Writing becomes an intertextual act of rebellion that calls into question the conventional, the canonical, and the sacred. Readings may include avant garde manifestos, erasure poetry, and poetry and fiction by Shakespeare, William Blake, Joyce Mansour, Sylvia Plath, Bernadette Mayer, Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, Federico García Lorca, Haruki Murakami and Georges Bataille. Students will be expected to write creative works in response to prompts, and write an academic essay. The prompts will form the basis of a final portfolio, which will be accompanied by an original essay.

Day/Time: Wednesday, 1:30-4:20 PM

This course explores literary responses to Chicago's boundaries and sites of contention through fiction, drama, poetry, and literary journalism. We'll examine work by writers and artists including Saul Bellow, Lorraine Hansberry, Nate Marshall, Bruce Norris, and Studs Terkel. How does one map the city's conflicts along zoning ordinances, street corners, playgrounds, and rumors? What histories undergird the city's racelines? In exploring these aspects of the city, where does a writer draw the boundary between fiction and nonfiction, between verse and prose? Engaging these larger questions, participants will develop their own individual and collaborative creative responses to "the city in a garden."

Day/Time: Tuesday, 2:00-4:50

Form as Content

This course is primarily intended for students working on either a Creative BA, MA thesis, or Creative Writing Minors completing the portfolio. During the course of the semester we will examine various narrative forms, styles, frameworks and traditions and how they best accommodate, extend, challenge and complicate their corresponding content, as well as how --subsequently --they can be best applied to the writer's intended goals in their chosen projects.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 12:30-3:20 PM

This class is for nonfiction majors, minors, MAPH students, and anyone working on a substantial nonfiction project. It's a workshop, so you and your classmates will provide (almost) all the writing we'll analyze as a group. You’ll spend as much time editing and critiquing your classmates' writing as you will working on your own. I emphasize editing and critique because writing is essentially rewriting, and revising other people's work is the best way to gain the objectivity and skills you'll need to revise your own. By teaching others you'll teach yourself, preparing you for real life of the writer outside the academy. Writers are self-taught, ultimately, and this class is a step in that direction. That’s why your first assignment is to create your own syllabus: your own, self-directed program of outside reading, giving smart, succinct reasons why these books might teach you how to write your own.

Day/Time: Friday, 9:30 AM-12:20 PM