Spring

It’s where it all began. Often, the questions that drive narrative and underpin a lifetime’s inquiry originate in childhood’s rich ore. It remains the subject of many great works of literature and is one terrain that each writer, student or master, can claim sovereignty over.

In this beginning workshop, we will look closely at a number of texts that deal with childhood with an eye towards generating work of our own. We will study the basic craft elements of point-of-view, setting, character, and voice. In addition to studying literary fiction, we will consider one or two children’s fiction and YA texts as well. Through in-class exercises, and imitative and generative writing, we will bring a quality of care and attention to writing about the lifestage known as ‘childhood.’ In the second half of the quarter, the emphasis will be on workshopping student’s original work.

We will study writers such as Sayaka Murata, Roald Dahl, Roddy Doyle, Edmund De Waal.

This beginning fiction workshop approaches long-standing issues of craft through engagement with stories that have been published by both emerging and celebrated writers within the last two years. We will find classic narrative techniques (like scenic method, plot reversal, and closure) operating in newly published work, but we’ll also look for promising experiments, novelties of form, and blurred boundaries. Authors read in this class have included Bruna Dantas Lobato, Annie Ernaux, Sterling HolyWhiteMountain, and ’Pemi Aguda. After several weeks devoted to reading and the trial of basic techniques, students will compose stories to be workshopped in class. A spirit of discovery and experiment will be encouraged.

“It’s very boring to talk about winners,” Umberto Ecco once said. “The real literature always talks about losers.” In this class, we shall embrace all manner of failures, no-accounts, and deadbeats, those unlikely central characters around which good fiction often rotates, considering how they intrigue us with their flaws and failings, but also how they can present pitfalls at the levels of plot (lack of agency), tone (reward vs. punishment), and reader sympathy. Through an array of short fiction, as well as selected poems, films, and an illustrated novel, this course aims to uncover the ways narrative craft can infuse stories driven by shiftless and inept protagonists with a sense of curation, poignancy, and meaning. Students will also attempt their own short story versions of “loser lit,” to be workshopped by the class. All are welcome. Expectations will be very low.

According to Albus Dumbledore, "To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure." And to the well-organized fiction writer, it can be the same. In this class, we’ll explore mortality as a literary device, considering how it not only brings a measure of incident to our stories, but also how it infuses the pages with darkness, sentiment, and consequence. The downside, of course, comes when too much darkness swamps a story with pessimism; when sentiment tilts into sentimentality; or when the consequences of such high stakes test a reader’s ability to suspend disbelief. Through readings of mostly short fiction, we’ll uncover how death can trigger stories of aftermath, how it can operate as a climax to build toward, or how it makes space for unexpected outcomes. Students will also write their own stories—about death, containing death, starring the character Death, or perhaps something more death-adjacent—which we’ll workshop as a group, focusing on the ways in which mortality sets tone, drives plot, and influences style.  

How do we hear the voice of a text when we’re reading in another language? What makes a voice intrinsically itself? And where can we locate those qualities in the language that the voice speaks in? This workshop explores what translators read for when constructing a narrative or poetic voice in English. Students will select a long-form literary text to translate, and we will work through the drafting process by breaking the text down into short extracts that we will close-read together each week in class. In doing so, we’ll listen through the translation for evidence of how the source wants to sound, in order to discern its voice, its tendencies, and how it behaves in language. Our own translation work will be accompanied by assigned readings that represent a range of contemporary world literature in translation, paying attention to what the translator does with English to sketch a cohesive voice. We’ll build toward the polished translation of a short prose text or a selection of poems, which students will submit as part of a final portfolio, along with a translator’s note that provides critical commentary on their reading of the source text and their treatment of it in translation. To participate in this course, students should have reading proficiency in a language other than English.

Since the commercialization of the internet in the 1990s, the online space has evolved and fractured into different commodifications. In this course, we will look at depictions in contemporary literature of the experience of being online, of engaging with various platforms, and the mindsets that it creates. At heart in this course, we are looking at the ways in which fiction attempts to mimic, critique, mock, or even take pleasure in another medium, and what fiction is able to do by co-opting another medium. We may read works by Jaron Lanier, Tony Tulathimutte, Patricia Lockwood, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, and Ben Lerner. As an antidote to all of this thinking about onlineness, we will also engage in creative writing exercises, some inspired by or made possible by being online.

This course will introduce students to recent debates in the environmental humanities while exposing them to a range of creative works spanning fiction, documentary prose, poetry, and film that engage what has come to be called the Anthropocene era of unprecedented human intervention into ecosystems (despite challenges to that terminology that we will address). We will read foundational texts in environmental perception and activism in dialogue with writing surrounding urban landscapes. We will then open onto a wide range of contemporary texts that engage the natural and constructed environment in crisis. Students will be asked to conduct fieldwork on an environmental theme of their choosing (climate change, energy economies, watershed issues, air quality, pandemics and the management of wild animals, species extinction, etc.) that can contribute to experimentation with short creative pieces in several genres, and to produce one polished entry to a collective atlas of the natural world in Chicago. Students are encouraged to ponder possible topics of interest prior to the first class. We will do at least one field trip together to explore Chicago waterways, and will participate in a Chicago-wide exposition devoted to water in conjunction with the Environmental Arts + Humanities Lab. Artists studied may include John Ruskin, Henry David Thoreau, Rachel Carson, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ed Roberson, Lisa Robertson, Allison Cobb, Juliana Spahr, Rita Wong, Fred Wah, Brandon Som.

"I love the thingness of things," Sylvia Plath wrote in her journal. By concentrating on poems that are rooted deeply in the material world, this workshop will focus beginning poets on the art of description and the importance of image-making. Poets will to attend to the intensity of the sensorium, grounding their art in the material world as a strategy, albeit a counterintuitive one, to access the emotional and abstract.

In this course, we'll design and develop a world and characters determined by a series of what if? questions or propositions based on the implications of real world events and climate crises. Students will independently compose stories and then we'll workshop them for our shared-world anthology.

Characterization in any literary form seeks to bring a person, their world, and their worldview to life. Doing that effectively requires more than imagination and knowledge of our genre and craft. It begins with cultivating a personal understanding of human beings and asking ourselves what it means, on the page as in life, to be a character and to have character. And more deeply, even when our characters are nothing like us, it involves looking inward at who we think we are as an individual and how we see the world and our place within it. In this course, we’ll examine the various lenses all of us use, for better or for worse, to define ourselves and others: like the lens of truth, of morality, of empathy, of desire. And in our readings in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry (as well as creative writing exercises and presentations), we’ll learn how to approach characterization not only as a vehicle for storytelling and self-expression, but as an inquiry into our own humanity and the kinds of people we’re most interested in bringing to life in our work.