Spring

From the short stories of George Saunders to the TV show Atlanta, speculative fiction often introduces the fantastical into narratives seemingly set in everyday reality. This workshop will focus on the fantastical in contemporary literature, 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 modes? 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. Readings may include works by Rachel Ingalls, Ted Chiang, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah.

Day/Time: Thursday, 12:30-3:20pm

“If you want a compelling story, put your protagonist among the damned.” --Charles Baxter

While crisis is to be avoided in life, when it comes to narrative, trouble is your friend. In this advanced workshop we'll explore the complex ways writers create conflict in their stories, be it internal or external, spiritual or physical, romantic, financial or familial. We'll read masters of the form like Edward P. Jones, George Saunders, ZZ Packer, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Yiyun Li, and discuss how they generate conflict that feels organic, character-driven, and inevitable. Weekly writing exercises will encourage you to take creative risks and hone new skills. Each student will workshop two stories, with strong emphasis on focused and productive peer critique and in-class commentary.

Day/Time: Monday, 1:30-4:20pm

"The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment and responsibility of the novelist," writes Henry James, "is that there is no limit to what he may attempt." Writers interested in these torments and responsibilities can begin to experiment with long form in this workshop. Each student will compose a single long story of about forty pages. We'll attend to the freshness of beginnings, the satisfactions (and compromises) of endings and, most acutely, to the crises of middles. A scaffolding of workshops, outlines, and conferences will support and structure your efforts. Along the way we'll catalog the classic problems of long-form composition with examples from the likes of Alice Munro, Katherine Anne Porter, Franz Kafka, or John Keene.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 2:00-4:50pm

In this advanced fiction workshop, students will read and research “dangerous” and/or banned literature, and work to write short stories or chapters from longer works of fiction that address complex social, personal, and/or historical moments. What makes art dangerous? Banned books from Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain to Chopin’s The Awakening and Morrison’s Beloved will guide our conversation as we consider the crucial relationship between literature and context, writer and interlocutor, research and imagination. We will attend UChicago’s American premiere of the banned, never-before produced opera, Korngold’s opera Die Kathrin in April 2022.*

Day/Time: Wednesday, 2:30-5:20pm

All writing is revision, and this holds true for the practice of literary translation as well. We will critique each other’s longer manuscripts-in-progress of prose, poetry, or drama, and examine various revision techniques—from the line-by-line approach of Lydia Davis, to the “driving-in-the-dark” model of Peter Constantine, and several approaches in between. We will consider questions of different reading audiences while preparing manuscripts for submission for publication, along with the contextualization of the work with a translator’s preface or afterword. Our efforts will culminate in not only an advanced-stage manuscript, but also with various strategies in hand to use for future projects. Students who wish to take this workshop should have at least an intermediate proficiency in a foreign language and already be working on a longer translation project.

Day/Time: Friday, 10:30am-1:20pm

To revise a piece of writing isn’t merely to polish it. Revision is transformation and yields an alternate reality. A new view, a re-vision. This course will examine the radical potential of revision, drawing case studies from a range of writers such as Marguerite Duras, Jorge Luis Borges, Elizabeth Bishop, Dionne Brand, Li-Young Lee, Janet Malcolm, Lydia Davis, Terrance Hayes, Yiyun Li, francine j. harris, Bhanu Kapil, Shane McCrae, and Chase Berggrun. We’ll start by tracking compositional process, looking at brilliant and disastrous drafts to compare the aesthetic and political consequences of different choices on the page. We’ll then study poems, essays, and stories that refute themselves and self-revise as they unfold, dramatizing mixed feelings and changing minds. We’ll end by considering erasure poetry as a form of critical revision. Our conversations will inspire weekly writing exercises and invite you to experiment with various creative revision strategies. Students will be asked to lead one presentation and to share their writing for group discussion.

Day/Time: Thursday, 2:00-4:50pm

This course studies how writers engage the senses to shape language into something actually felt and not just comprehended. We’ll track the sensual life of words—what they do to the mouth, to the ear, their musical kinships with one another—and learn how these qualities combine to generate mood and atmosphere. Alongside writing that renders embodiment and the physical world, we’ll read writing that makes abstraction feel concrete. Our reading will guide our ongoing inquiry into questions such as: what constitutes an image? How does writing enact feeling? How do the sensory elements of a piece intensify or erode or expand its subject, and to what end? Case studies may include poetry and prose by Bashō, Sei Shōnagon, Homer, John Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Jean Toomer, D. H. Lawrence, Lorine Niedecker, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Sylvia Plath, Ai, Elaine Scarry, Wanda Coleman, Toni Morrison, Hai-Dang Phan, Nathaniel Mackey, Durga Chew-Bose, Justin Torres, and Jenny Zhang. These writers will provide inspiration for your own creative experiments on the page. Students will be asked to lead one presentation during the quarter and to write short weekly pieces to extend the group discussion.

Day/Time: Wednesday, 2:30-5:20pm

In this class we'll study how writers define and make use of truth--whatever that is. In some cases it's the truth, singular; in others a truth, only one among many. Some writers tell it straight, others slant. Some, like Tim O'Brien, advocate story-truth, the idea that fiction tells deeper truths than facts. To get at the heart of these and other unanswerable questions we'll read writers who've written about one event in two or more modes. Nick Flynn's poems about his father, for example, which he's also set down as comic strips as well as in prose. Jeanette Winterson's first novel as well as her memoir, sixteen years later, about what she'd been too afraid to say in it. Karl Marlantes' novel about the Vietnam war, then his essays about the events he'd fictionalized. Through weekly responses, creative exercises, and longer analytic essays you'll begin to figure out your own writerly truths, as well as the differences-and intersections-between them.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 9:30am-12:20pm

Consider your story of water. The drip at your faucet connecting you through a map of pipelines to the lake. Your neighborhood river that was also a highway. The familiar shoreline that now only appears in family pictures and old maps. An endless blue horizon that someone you loved crossed. Our relationship to water shapes our everyday lives and connects us to environmental change and social realities. When we tell the story of a body of water, we also tell the story of the people whose memories, livelihoods, and futures depend on it. It is a story both personal and global. In your workshop, you will write two essays. The first will contextualize a personal story within a broader story of water. In this process, you will further develop your understanding of structure, refine your ability to weave research into narrative, and practice yielding surprise from juxtaposing the social and ecological. Your second essay will be piece of environmental journalism. Through conducting interviews, document research, and field work, this essay will embody an encounter with our current changing water geography and consequent social upheaval. During this unit, our class will speak with two environmental journalists about their career paths and current work. Essay topics will be wide-ranging and should be driven by student experiences and interests. Readings will include texts from Robin Wall Kimmerer, Naomi Klein, Angela Palm, Elizabeth Rush*texts/visiting writers*

Day/Time: Monday, 3:00-5:00 PM

Rivers move -- over land, through history, among peoples -- and they make:  landscapes and civilizations. They are the boundaries on our maps, the dividers of nations, of families, of the living and the dead, but they are also the arteries that connect us. They are meditative, meandering journeys and implacable, surging power. They are metaphors but also so plainly, corporeally themselves. In this course, we will encounter creative work about rivers, real and imaginary, from the Styx to the Chicago River and the Amazon. Through poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and film, we will consider what rivers are, what they mean to us, and how they are represented in art and literature. Rivers will also be the topic and inspiration for our own forays into creative writing. Students will be asked to keep a reading notebook as well as to produce weekly creative and critical responses for class discussion. 

Day/Time: Monday, 10:20-12:20 PM