Spring

In this advanced fiction workshop, students will work on novel-length projects, completing one to two polished chapters and an outline of a full novel. We will explore how to structure a book that is both propulsive and character-driven, and how to create a compelling, unique narrative voice. Works by James Baldwin, Edith Wharton, Ha Jin, Vladimir Nabokov, and Akhil Sharma will help us consider the crucial relationship between characters and their contexts.

Day/Time: Thursday, 9:40-12:40 PM

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: Thursday, 2:40–5:40 PM

This workshop will support students in developing useful practices and experimenting boldly. Working with recent technological transformations in the visual arts world, we’ll be keeping art notebooks in different forms (by hand, photographs, blog, instagram, collage). We’ll begin with Walter Benjamin’s classic essay about art and mechanical reproduction, and then work with some examples: 1. Virtually seen. Jennie C. Jones’s show Constant Structure, hung at the Arts Club of Chicago via face time, with pamphlet-catalogue by poet and critic Fred Moten; 2. Unseen. Lori Waxman, long the art critic of the Chicago Tribune, and her pandemic 60 word / min art critic project in Newcity of art reviews for artists with canceled shows; 3. Explained / packaged. The instagram feeds of museums; 4. Technological diary / memory methods. Looking back to T.J. Clarke’s book of 2006 The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing, and to Teju Cole’s Blind Spot, which uses his own photographs, and looking now at instagram feeds of Cole and other art writers; 5. Collaborations. Artists working as collaborator-curators and self-interpreters, with reference to a recent Dawoud Bey show at the Art Institute and a Venice installation by iris Kensmil and Remy Jungerman.  Each class will begin with student-led observation. Students will visit, in-person or on-line, five installations / exhibitions / events, and be workshopped twice. Final work, revised essay and looking notebook portfolio. 

Day/Time: Tuesday, 9:40-12:40 PM

In this advanced poetry workshop we will turn from the Romantic notion of poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling…recollected in tranquility” towards a postmodern practice of radical recycling in response to global crisis. We will resurrect, excavate, interrogate, pilfer from, and otherwise raid a variety of archives, as a means of artistic engagement with the circulating materials of civic life. We will study examples of literary works whose principal technique is one of scavenging among such nonliterary sources as court transcripts, weather reports, grammar lessons, a war criminal’s memoirs, and the dictionary itself, to create fresh encounters with language. Texts to be studied will include Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, Robin Coste Lewis’ Voyage of the Sable Venus, Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony, Lisa Robertson’s The Weather, C.D. Wright’s One Big Self,and M. Nourbese Philips’ Zong!, among others. Students will spend the quarter seeking out and assembling their own archives, and experimenting on the page with acts of salvage. Because this is a workshop, a large part of every class will be devoted to discussions of students’ original work.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 1:00-4:00 PM

Students will write and turn in two full-length stories or novel chapters for this workshop-based class. The class will pay special attention to plot: what it is, what the specific engines are that drive it, how it's connected to other elements such as character, setting, and dialogue. In addition to submitting and reading for workshop, expect to read and discuss at least one novel and a selection of short stories.

Day/Time: Thursday 1:00 - 4:00 PM

Whenever we write stories, we are in conversation with other writers, living or dead. Sometimes that conversation is quiet and intimate—a matter of subtle influence, much as we take on unconsciously the diction and cadences of admired mentors and beloved friends. Other times, the conversation is boisterous, a meeting of minds, a deepening of our collective discourse. Still other times, the conversation gets heated. We feel the need to set the record straight, give voice to a neglected or misrepresented character, vindicate a monster, or indict a hero. In this technical seminar, we will read writers responding to other writers—Victor Lavalle & H.P. Lovecraft, Haruki Murakami & Franz Kafka, Doris Lessing & Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Joyce Carol Oates & James Joyce, among others—and examine how these writers retell, modernize, and comment upon influential stories, making the stories their own while incorporating familiar elements. The emphasis of this course will be on critical writing, but students will also have opportunities to write creative responses to the readings and experiment with the craft techniques we discuss.

Day/Time: Wednesday, 10:20-12:20 PM

Who (or what) tells a story might be the most important decision a writer makes.  The narrator of a work of fiction will tell the story from a particular point in time, will have particular biases, agendas, frames of reference, lexicon, insights, and history. And all of those factors contribute to their perspective—in fact, a story’s narrative could be understood as the delivery of the narrator’s perspective to the reader. In this seminar, we will examine perspective in works of fiction, with an eye towards discovering the elements that comprise a given perspective and also what we might learn as writers from the work. Along with the reading material, assignments will include reading responses, creative writing exercises, and presentations. 

Day/Time: Tuesday, 1:00-4:00 PM

What is character? And what is a character? How we answer these two questions depends not only on the genre we're writing in, but also on the kind of writer and person we are. Which is also to say that tackling these questions requires a look within ourselves, a confrontation with who we think we are and how we think we see the world around us, even when our characters are nothing like us. In this Fundamentals course, we'll look at the range of ways that "character" can be seen and constructed—the different technical, aesthetic, and even philosophical approaches to characterization. How does characterization in a poem differ from characterization in a story, or in an essay, play, or memoir? What ultimately makes for a compelling and memorable character? Beyond actual human beings, what does it mean for an idea to be a character, or a city to be one, or the very work itself? Our reading material will include poetry, fiction, and essays, and our assignments will include reading responses, creative writing exercises, short essays, and presentations.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 2:40 - 5:40 PM

When we think of groups that are othered, who and what do we mean? Is the other always defined against hegemonic ideas of race, gender, sexuality, and class? Can we understand American othering outside of post-colonialism? In this seminar, we will read work that investigates othering—which is to say, who and what constitutes an othered literary voice, the ways writers contend with that othering in their work, and the cultural and political forces that push an othered voice to “the edge” of the mainstream. To give a sense of the breadth of othering in literature, we will take a multi-ethnic/cultural/gender and multi-genre approach to our study, examining texts of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from Black, Asian, Native American, Latinx, and queer writers. That list will include Natalie Diaz, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Ocean Vuong, and Audre Lorde. We will work to deepen our facility with the skills needed to critique the ideas in the texts and also situate them in their cultural context. In addition, we will discuss how othering has produced eloquent literary voices and the particular aspects of a given writer’s eloquence. During the semester, you will engage in rigorous inquiry, prompted informal writing, and formal writing in the form of response-papers and short creative assignments accompanied by a critical reflection.

Day/Time: Monday, 1:50-3:50 PM

A monolith manifests in orbit around Jupiter, emitting a signal. A beacon? A man spontaneously discovers the ability to teleport. An evolutionary accident? The origin of human life proves to be malicious. Divine fate? Space travel is enabled by the ingestion of enormous quantities of a geriatric spice a messianic figure auspiciously learns to manipulate. A drug trip?! Among popular genres, science fiction is the riskiest conceptually and among the trickiest to master. The difference between an amazing idea and a rotten story is often slim. What makes good sci-fi work? And how best to write it? Let's put on our gravity boots and solar visors and see what we can discover. In this course, you'll read some novels (by Frank Herbert, Alfred Bester, and Ursula K. LeGuin), poetry (by Andrew Joron), a graphic novel (by Chris Ware), and screenplays (by Damon Lindelof, and Stanley Kubrick & Arthur C. Clarke). And all the while, you'll try your hand at bending each other's minds with your own science fiction.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 1:00-4:00 PM