Undergraduate

This workshop focuses on writing and revising poems, and the related art of giving helpful feedback to other writers. One of the course’s goals is to help you reflect on your writing as a process. Most weeks you will write drafts that focus on the poetic concepts we are studying. At the end of the quarter, you’ll revise your drafts and collect them in a portfolio, accompanied by an artist’s statement you’ll write. As a class, we’ll form a community of readers and writers that will support you in this process. You’ll receive feedback on your drafts from your classmates and will respond constructively to theirs. At the same time, this course will introduce you to poetry from a variety of time periods, languages, and approaches to content and structure. You’ll learn to apply critical tools and terminology by drafting poems that experiment with elements such as form, voice, rhythm, imagery, translation, and creative response. We’ll discuss not only how and why poems are written, but also what relationship they have to the worlds in which they are written and read.

This workshop-centered course introduces writers to foundational concepts and tools in the craft of poetry, including form, diction, voice, line, and meter. In particular, we will explore the boundaries of "poetic language" and utterance through bordered genres like prose poem, concrete/visual poem, sound poetry, and lyric essay, including work by poets visiting the UChicago campus. Regular assignments include both prompts and imitations in poetry writing, and will culminate in a final portfolio developed in working consultation with the instructor.

Describing fiction writing as an “art” is perhaps a misnomer. Depending on who’s describing it, the process of creating a narrative is more like driving in the dark, or woodworking, or gardening. The metaphors abound, but the techniques for creating effective fictional prose are often quite consistent. This course will begin with a weeks-long consideration of selected works of fiction where discussion will aim to distinguish the basic 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 as 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.

This nuts-and-bolts of fiction writing class begins with the question: what drives a story? What are the different engines that a writer can use to craft momentum in a story, and how does one tune these engines for greatest effect? We will cover such engines as plot, conflict, suspense, narrative questions, worldbuilding, and narrative pacing through revelations about characters and their world. In addition to submitting two stories or excerpts for workshop (plus a revision of one), expect to read and discuss a selection of published work.

Character and setting are nearly inextricable forces in storytelling. In effective fiction, we often experience one through the other. We will explore this dynamic relationship and study how writers often put their characters at odds with their chosen setting to create and sustain tension in a story. We’ll also give attention to rendering our characters and settings with specificity—learning how to create the sense of “somebody somewhere” instead of “anybody anywhere.” Our reading list will focus on short fiction. Students will write many exercises at the beginning of the quarter and fully realize one complete story to submit for workshop discussion by the end.

This workshop-centered course introduces writers to foundational concepts and tools in the craft of fiction writing, including character development, point of view, and plotting.  Regular assignments include the submission and editing of shared short/extended fictions, as well as critical reflection on the artistic contexts of the short story itself.  A focus within this course reflects on the short story’s “exhaustion” as a form. How has short fiction been reinvented or found new shapes in contemporary writing?  How has the line between fiction and nonfiction been renegotiated there? Writers for discussion include Jeffery Renard Allen, Elif Batuman, Jorge Luis Borges, Lydia Davis, Lauren Groff, Yu Hua, and writers visiting the UChicago campus.

This course will be a close examination of the use of spectral imagery as a craft element in narratives across genre and time. From Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” to Emily Carrol’s A Guest in the House, to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Octavia Butler’s Fledgling, the supernatural metaphor presents a unique stage upon which to play out questions of gender autonomy, mental health, repressed sexuality, racism and more. Students in this course will be expected to put the fantastical metaphor under a microscope and explore its potential through both creative and critical work of their own.

Since Homer’s narratives of war and exile, and Hesiod’s accounts of cyclical degeneration and the uncertain future of humankind, poetry has dealt with crisis and liminality. Our own present moment is defined by a convergence of climate and ecological crises, refugee crisis, food crisis, war, and epidemic. In this workshop, we will examine poetic writing arising out of crises, whether political, artistic, or existential, and craft poems that attempt to deal with crisis – both in the form of a concrete Event, and as a literary trope – through critical creative engagement, experimentation, and intertextual dialogue. Readings may include work by Peter Balakian, Jericho Brown, Don Mee Choi, Jorie Graham, Ilya Kaminsky, Valzhyna Mort, Claudia Rankine, Ocean Vuong, as well as classical sources. Students can expect to workshop their poems in class; to engage, critically and supportively, with peers’ work; and to develop a final portfolio.

Beginning Translation Workshop: It’s been said that in an ideal world, all writers would be translators, and all translators would be writers. In addition to the joy of enlarging the conversation of literature by bringing new voices into another language, the practice of literary translation forces us as writers to examine the materials and tools of our craft. In this workshop, we will critique each other’s translations of prose, poetry, or drama into English, as well as explore various creative strategies and approaches to translation by a variety of practitioners that touch on various aspects of the "radical recontextualization" that constitute the decision-making work of literary translation. Through these processes, you will formulate your own strategies to both literary translation and creative writing. We will also have the opportunity to have conversations via Zoom with some of the translators we’ll be reading. Students should have at least an intermediate proficiency in a foreign language to take this workshop.

The past few years have seen a proliferation of major awards for works of contemporary world literature that have been translated into English (among them the International Booker Prize, the National Book Award for Translated Literature, and the National Book Critics Circle Book in Translation Prize). While such awards certainly elevate translation as a mode of writing comparable to that of other literary arts, they also raise important questions about the production, circulation, and reception of translated literature in the Anglosphere. In this course, we will read a number of recent award-winning books in English translation (both poetry and prose), considering how these books traveled from origin to translation, and how we as readers engage with them – as translations and as literary texts. How are translations made? How do we evaluate books that have two writers: author and translator? What larger forces (social, aesthetic, commercial, political) are at work when deciding which translated books will hold value for Anglophone readers? We’ll explore these questions through weekly readings and discussions, student presentations, critical analyses and creative responses. As a final project, students will develop their own evaluative rubrics from which to award a prize to one of the translations we’ve read.