Autumn

This studio course introduces students to essential graphic design skills and concepts. Through a series of hands-on assignments, we’ll explore how graphic information—type, image, composition, and layout—shapes the way we communicate and understand the world. Students will experiment with accessible tools like photocopiers and laser printers, and work through the phases of the design process: from research, conception and ideation, to sketching, evaluation and the development of form, to final execution and production.

“The novel is exhaustive by nature,” Steven Millhauser once wrote. “The short story by contrast is inherently selective. By excluding almost everything, it can give perfect shape to what remains.” The short story label, however, often feels imperfect, since it covers such a broad swath of literary forms. While micro- and flash-fiction renditions can resemble poems, longer prose narratives often press into murkier territories such as that of the novella or the connected collection. Through readings and workshops of students’ own fiction, this course will explore the parameters of the short story, its scope and ambitions, its limitations as well. We’ll read established masters alongside newer literary voices, breaking down their work not simply as examples of meaningful fiction, but as road maps toward a greater awareness of what makes a short story operate. Discussion will revolve around basic elements of narrative craft—point of view, pacing, language, etc.—in an effort to define the ways in which any story can be conveyed with economy, precision, and power.

“Write what you know,” as a literary motto, doesn’t mean writers focus narrowly on their own experiences. Thankfully, we can get to know other people as well—through conversations, careful observation and research. Writing a profile is an act of empathy. Students in this profile writing workshop will learn how to conduct interviews and do basic reporting, and they will hone their skills as nonfiction storytellers. Some of the reading, reporting and writing will look at Chicago and Chicagoans—getting to know and make sense of people around us. Other subjects will visit during class time. In considering the extent to which we can’t fully know the people we portray, students will also explore how writers (along with documentary filmmakers, historians, journalists, obituary writers) address these limitations creatively in their work. Students will complete a short profile each week, and they will write one longer and revised profile as a final.

In this beginning workshop, we will study the various forms of creative nonfiction, of what makes a piece of writing ‘creative’ and what makes it ‘nonfiction' (and the tension between those two categories, which is where the art comes to life). Students will submit original works-in-progress, and offer peer feedback. Together, as a group, we will discuss and critique this writing as well as the work of published writers. We will explore some of the major and minor forms, and the old and newer genres: the personal letter, memoir and magazine profile, travelogue and pilgrimage narrative, the many species of essay. While the emphasis is on the art and craft of writing, class discussion will also touch on the practice of writing as a form of social communication in the real world. In thinking about how we want to shape our own writing, we must be savvy to what forces – e.g. which audiences, what cultural expectations, what economies – shape us as writers. 

Beginning Fiction Workshop: Larger Than Life explores the concept of the indelible—that hard-to-define quality that makes an element of fiction “jump off the page” and become instantly memorable. We’ll explore hyperbole, duality, idiosyncrasy, narrative voice, the sublime, and many other techniques, then put them into practice to make our own fiction “larger than life.” 

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 both fictional and nonfictional. 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 Chicago notebook, and write a longer piece for workshop. Readings may include Eve Ewing, Lori Waxman, Frank London Brown, Gwendolyn Brooks, Rosalyn LaPier, Stuart Dybek, Saul Bellow, Sandra Cisneros, Aleksandar Hemon, Jeanne Gang, Rebecca Zorach, Studs Terkel and more.

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, Aleksander 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.

In this generative advanced poetry workshop we will find inspiration for our own poetry by engaging with the visual arts. We will read poems that respond to, reflect, and refract the arts, and exercises will be based on our own encounters in museums, at the movies, in the realms of fashion, architecture, landscape, and elsewhere. We will ask ourselves about artifice and making, the materiality of the written word, the relationship between observation and expression, the emotive qualities of the image, and the sonic qualities of words. Most of our course reading will be contemporary poetry, but we will also explore a range of exciting earlier examples. Each class meeting will include workshops of student poems, discussions of assigned literature, and conversations about art practice and art community. In addition to reading deeply, looking closely, and writing wildly, students are expected to be lively participants in the arts community on campus, and will attend exhibitions, concerts, readings, screenings, and other events and experiences that bring us into contact with various modes of expression. Texts may include poems by, Harryette Mullen, James Schuyler, Brenda Shaughnessy, David Trinidad, and Virgil.

This genre-blurring workshop will explore elements of the history and practice of the prose poem. We will also read texts that are difficult to classify in terms of genre. “Flash Fiction,” “Short Shorts,” the fable, the letter, the mini-essay, and the lyric essay will be examined, among others. We will discuss the literary usefulness (or lack of it) of genre and form labels. The class will be taught as a workshop: students will try their hand at writing in their choices of hybrid forms, and will be encouraged to experiment. Writers from all genres are welcome, as what we will be studying, discussing, and writing will involve the fruitful collision of literary genres.

In some ways, writing a first-person narrator seems like the most straightforward and natural kind of storytelling in the world. But as any writer who has made the attempt knows, that simple little “I” comes with an array of pitfalls – and possibilities. In this advanced fiction workshop, we will look at the many styles and approaches to first-person point of view: central narrators who are at the heart of the plot, peripheral narrators who witness and stand a little apart, the singular “I” vs. the plural “We,” direct address (often mislabeled as second-person narration), and the spectrum of unreliability. We will read and discuss fiction by writers like Jamaica Kincaid, Haruki Murakami, Kazuo Ishiguro, Charles Portis, Alice Munro, Raven Leilani, Russell Banks, Evan S. Connell and others, drawing craft lessons from these writers to guide our own attempts at writing in first person. Much of our class time will be dedicated to evaluating student work and honing our skills of composition and critique. In addition to shorter writing exercises throughout the quarter, every student will complete a full-length first-person short story for workshop and compose critique letters for each of their peers. Students will be required to significantly revise their full-length story by the end of the quarter.