Autumn

This workshop-centered course introduces writers to foundational concepts and tools in the craft of poetry, including form, diction, voice, line, and meter.  Regular assignments include both prompts and imitations in poetry writing, and will culminate in a final portfolio developed in working consultation with the instructor. In particular, we will explore the construction and sounding of image within poems, including the Imagists’ legacies, concrete poems, and ekphrastic impulses in writing. Poets and writers whose work will be discussed include H.D., Jamaal May, William Carlos Williams, C.D. Wright, James Wright, Pedro Xisto, and poets visiting the UChicago campus.

This course introduces students to poetry writing by guiding students through generative exercises focused on imagery and diction, then revising the material with an eye toward formal shaping choices. We read diverse contemporary and classic poets, write several poems, and workshop peer work weekly, culminating in a portfolio of new poems as a final project. 

Popular notions of “the fairytale” are often synonymous with childhood: bedtime stories, adventuring children, and cautionary tales warning young people away from wayward behaviors (“Never go into the woods at night”; “You must be wary of strangers”). In many ways, however, fairytales serve as a vital link between historic and contemporary storytelling traditions: In the words of Angela Carter, “[…] the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labour created our world.” In this course, we will explore how authors such as Sabrina Orah Mark, Helen Oyeyemi, Lily Hoang, Kiik Araki Kawaguchi, Benjamin Niespodziany, and Sarah Shun-lien Bynum have used fairytales as foundations for their own stories, gleaning inspiration from—and finding creative freedom within—pre-existing narratives, tropes, and characters. Each student will also write their own fairytale revision and receive critical oral and written workshop feedback. 
 

Beginning Workshops are intended for students who may or may not have previous writing experience, but are interested in gaining experience in a particular genre. These workshops focus on the fundamentals of craft and feature workshops of student writing. See the course description for this particular workshop section in the notes below.

Many physicists posit that time is not linear—and in fiction, it doesn’t have to be either. Within a single story, we can be pulled to the to the past, the future, and a liminal space existing outside of time. In this course, we will investigate how authors manipulate our perception of time, in both conventional and unconventional ways, to deliver information and drive tension, to both orient and disorient us within the narrative. How do these moves impact our perception of meaning, the indelible, and the sublime? In addition to submitting two stories or excerpts for workshop, expect to read and discuss published works from Clarice Lispector, Stuart Dybek, Joy Williams, Denis Johnson, Tobias Wolff, and others.

This technical seminar will investigate how we can use speculation as a tool in our creative nonfiction narratives. How can we bring imagination and fantasy into our discussion of "fact" and "reality," and do those ideas, in fact, change what "fact" and "reality" mean to us? We'll read Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House and Alan Weisman's The World Without Us to deepen our thinking. Students will then practice using speculation in their own nonfiction narratives through short creative exercises. They will also write analytical papers on our chosen works to investigate how each author uses speculation to support and inspire their nonfiction narratives.

Beginning Workshops are intended for students who may or may not have previous writing experience, but are interested in gaining experience in a particular genre. These workshops focus on the fundamentals of craft and feature workshops of student writing. See the course description for this particular workshop section in the notes below.

The first person voice has the capacity to create rich characters, ironic and surprising conflict, and worlds filtered through a tantalizingly subjective lens. But it also poses technical and ethical challenges for writers, particularly in the genre of nonfiction. In this beginning workshop, students will explore both the potential and limitations of the first person voice in their nonfiction writing. To understand the full scope of this mode, we will examine the basic techniques and the limit cases of first-person narration— the unreliable narrators, the intentional deceptions, and the altered states that can make the first person both troubling and compelling. Over the course of the semester, students will apply what they have discovered to three creative writing exercises and participate in a respectful, constructive workshop of one of their pieces. Students will also be asked to write critically about weekly readings. The course will culminate in a final revision of one creative piece and a reflective essay that explores a major problem or possibility within the first person. Representative authors will include Hanif Abdurraquib, James Baldwin, Andrea Long Chu, Carolyne Forche, Leslie Jamison, Ottessa Moshfegh, Claudia Rankine, and Lauren Slater.

In this course, we will investigate narratives of investigation. Detective stories without answers, in which characters piece together clues, trying to understand, yet something always remains elusive. Mysteries that defy conclusion and pull us deeper into the sublime, embracing what Robert Boswell calls "the half- known world." How do writers combine elements of the detective and literary genres to create and frustrate a reader's appetite for knowledge? How do writers elevate these stories to offer the spiritual alongside the factual? In addition to reading published texts from Patrick Modiano, Keith Ridgway, W.G. Sebald, Scott Blackwood, and others, students will produce craft analyses and creative work that puts course learnings into practice.

This course invites writers to reconsider the influence of Chicago’s public spaces on artistic impulse. 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 Jeffrey Renard Allen, Daniel Borzutzky, Bette Howland, Erik Larson, Bayo Ojikutu, and Ava Tomasula y Garcia, as well as the city's rich legacies in documentary and the visual arts.

“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. Though weekly reading assignments and writing exercises, 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 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 consider 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. If you wish to add this course during add/drop please email the instructor to be added to the waitlist. 

This workshop will explore literary translation as a mode of embodied reading and creative writing. Through comparative and iterative readings across multiple translations of both poetry and fiction, we will examine the interpretive decisions that translators routinely encounter when assigning an English to a work of literature first written in another language, as well as the range of creative strategies available to translators when devising a treatment for a literary text in English. Students will complete weekly writing exercises in retranslation and English-to-English translation, building to the retranslation of either a short piece of fiction or selection of poems.