Spring

What topics, ideas, or narratives merit a book-length exploration? In this advanced nonfiction workshop, we will explore the capacity of the book-length essay, the subjects that can sustain and justify such lengthy works, and the structures professional writers have employed to maintain the project’s integrity even as it expands across one hundred or more pages. Each week, we will read short, book-length essays, on topics ranging from the nature of beauty to the Salvadoran Civil War, analyzing the conventions of these manuscripts, the commonalities in their subject matter, and the tactics each writer uses to maintain and organize their project. Students will propose and write weekly on a topic of their choosing, and workshops will consist of collating and arranging sections of a potential book-length project using this written material. A final paper will lay out both a plan for completing a longer project as well as an analysis of the structures and conventions the writer has used or plans to use in their piece. 

Apart from not being fiction, a nonfiction feature is a lot like a short story: in terms of length, scenes, characters, world building and all the potential innovations of storytelling. In this writing workshop, students will go through each stage of composing a narrative nonfiction feature story. After generating a few ideas that seem original, surprising in their approach, and appropriate in scope, we will write pitches. After the class agrees to "assign" one of these features, each student will report, research and write a draft. The features will be workshopped in class, and students will go through an editorial process, polishing their stories and experimenting with style and form for a final assignment. Along the way, we will consider the mechanics, ethics and craft of this work as we read published nonfiction and talk to writers and reporters about their process. There will be an emphasis in the class on Chicago writers and their beats; in weekly writing assignments, students will also report on local stories.

In "Technical Seminar in Nonfiction: Breaking the Frame," students will explore the creative possibilities of narrative structure in nonfiction, from traditional forms like the pyramid and the circle to experimental and unconventional shapes. Through close readings of works by authors like John McPhee, Maggie Nelson, and Lauren Russell, students will analyze how structure shapes meaning and craft their own uniquely structured pieces. Weekly exercises will culminate in a final project that challenges the boundaries of traditional narrative forms.

The personal essay is arguably the most protean form in literature. Highly elastic in shape and size, it can also take on any subject. From the inward-looking and intimate to the outward-facing and encompassing, the essay appeals to many writers because it is so multi-faceted and universally useful. Like a good pocketknife, essays can do just about anything. In this course, we will explore the personal essay through all it can do: meditate, argue, confess, study a person, go to a place and tell a story, to name some of the seemingly endless possibilities. We will consider classic and contemporary examples of the personal essay and write many, many of our own. 

This course seeks to develop your abilities in the writing of literary nonfiction as well as in the editing of your own and others’ prose in a workshop environment.  Through short assignments and shared readings, you will be introduced to basic considerations of craft in nonfiction, including style and narrative. Formally this quarter, we will explore the review—reconsidering reviews of movies, food, products, and even oneself. To these ends, we will examine work by contemporary writers including M.F.K. Fisher, Pauline Kael, Margo Jefferson, and Kevin Killian (including his collected Amazon reviews).

Increasingly, the fantastical creeps into popular narratives, a rupture in the fabric of otherwise ordinary reality. This workshop will focus on the fantastical in contemporary literature and culture, and the logistical issues and questions that commonly arise around it. We will look at the role of fantastical in puncturing the veil of "realism." What is the fantastical doing that can't be done through other narrative techniques? How does the narrative metabolize this disruption? How should the fantastical be tempered by the mundane? Students for this course should not only have an interest in speculative fiction, but should have already made some efforts within this mode. Note that this course does not focus exclusively on fantasy or science fiction, though there may be some genre overlap. Come prepared to engage with free-associative creative exercises. Readings may include works by Rachel Ingalls, George Saunders, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. 

A story's end point determines its meaning. The history of a life can be covered in a sentence, a few pages or seven volumes. How do writers decide? In this advanced workshop, we'll look at different ways to handle narrative time, paying special attention to building blocks like direct and summary scene, flashback, compression, slowed time and fabulist time. We'll examine work by writers whose long stories feel like novels, like Alice Munro and Edward P. Jones, alongside those who say everything in a short single scene of a page or two, like Grace Paley and Kate Chopin. Students will be encouraged to experiment with time in both writing exercises and story revisions.By the end of the course, you will have generated significant raw material and workshopped one story. Two stories, one polished and one in draft, will be prepared for the final.

Sigmund Freud defines "the uncanny" ("unheimlich") as something that unnerves us because it is both familiar and alien at the same time, the result of hidden anxieties and desires coming to the surface. In this advanced fiction workshop, we will explore how fiction writers use the uncanny to create suspense, lend their characters psychological depth, thrill and terrify their readers, and lay bare the darkest and most difficult human impulses. We will read and discuss fiction by writers like Shirley Jackson, Jamaica Kincaid, Octavia Butler, Kelly Link, Ben Okri, Haruki Murakami, and Victor Lavalle, drawing craft lessons from these writers to guide our own attempts at writing the uncanny. 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 and "mini-workshops" throughout the quarter, every student will complete a full-length "uncanny" short story for workshop and compose critique letters for each of their peers. Students will be required to significantly revise their full-length short story by the end of the quarter.

This technical seminar will investigate the purposes and possibilities of beginnings in fiction. Students will read opening lines, paragraphs, pages, and occasionally chapters, from Aimee Bender, Miranda July, Dorthe Nors, Kobe Abe, and others, asking: what work do these beginnings do—and why, to what end? Of course, this means we will also read the stories that follow, to analyze these introductions in the framework of their narratives. How do openings guide—or mislead—the reader? How should they balance introduction and momentum? How do they orient us, not only to character, setting, and conflict, but also to elements like tone and sensibility, to a story’s own sense of itself? What archetypes or common “moves” can we identify and use? What are the implications and meanings of beginnings—of starting in a particular place and way, when a story might very well start in any number of places? And how do such authorial decisions ripple through the story? Students will be responsible for reading responses, short craft analyses, vigorous class participation, and several creative exercises putting what they learn into practice.

Among the foundational elements of a writer’s craft, dialogue is perhaps the most anxiety-inducing. After all, the very nature of writing dialogue requires that we defamiliarize—and fictionalize—something that we do almost every day. In this course, we will learn how to use dialogue as a strategy for developing character, hinting at subtext, and nourishing narrative ambiguity (“showing” scenes with different interpretive possibilities versus “telling” the reader what to think). We will also explore dialogue as a means of controlling the pace and flow of fiction (when and where we learn which bits of information). Finally, we will explore the ways fiction uses dialogue as a kind of sculptural blueprint, from variations between dense paragraphs and sparse lines, to stories made up solely of dialogue. Using the dialogue-driven models of writers such as Eileen Chang, Edwidge Danticat, Edward P. Jones, Nino Cipri, and Ottessa Moshfegh, writers will develop the use of dialogue in their own short fiction. The course will feature craft talks, reading discussions, week-to-week generative writing assignments, and a final presentation (on a dialogue-focused work of the student’s choice).