2017-2018

This workshop-based nonfiction course is suitable for any student who wants to work on long-form (1500 words and up) journalistic projects. To supplement our workshop submissions, we'll look at a variety of texts touching on (and often combining) reporting on political, cultural, and environmental subjects. We'll consider interviewing techniques and profile writing, as well works concerned with travel (of the non-touristic kind), sports, and the arts. We'll read pieces by the likes of Katherine Boo, Eula Biss, George Orwell, Ryzard Kapuchinski, George Saunders, Geoff Dyer, Ted Conover, Maggie Nelson, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. The emphasis of the course will be on narrative journalism, but other approaches will be considered and welcomed. Ideally, students will come into the course with projects already in mind, but we will also work on developing stories and pitches.

This is a course for students interested in developing their ability to write about the visual arts, as critics, appreciators, theorists, or memoirists, and, practically, for work in galleries, museums, journals, and magazines. A theme of the course will be to explore ways that art and life may interact, both in the work made by a visual artist, and in the nonfiction that arises in response to a visual artist or their work. Some students may be interested to write biographically about artists and their work, and we'll talk about how to make biography illuminating and not reductive; other students may be interested to draw on their own life experiences as they try to shed light on works of art; still others may be curious to see how certain artists themselves have viewed the questions and practices of drawing from life. We'll use ideas about drawing, and especially drawing repeatedly, as a model and a metaphor for thinking about writing. We'll have some occasions to look at works on paper held at the Smart Museum, and we'll visit some exhibitions and galleries, together and independently. Readings will include works such as James Lord's book A Giacometti Portrait, on being drawn by Giacometti, Maggie Nelson on the color blue in life and art from Bluets, John Berger on drawing, Rebecca Solnit on photographer Edweard Muybridge, Geoff Dyer on street photography from The Ongoing Moment, John Yau on Jasper Johns's practice and on those of contemporary artists, Zbigniew Herbert on the way 17th century Dutch artists used the material of their own life, and Lori Waxman, art critic of the Chicago Tribune, on walking as a radical art form, from Keep Walking Intently. Students will write a number of exercises in different forms (wall text, lyric meditation, portrait, interview) and will also write a more extended essay to be workshopped in class.

This workshop is for students who want to leave the ivory tower with a realistic view of their strengths and limitations. A forewarning: I can't get you an editor or an agent. The only way to do that is to have a forceful, beautiful manuscript. This class is about how to begin that manuscript._It's a workshop, meaning that you're responsible for generating the majority of our text and our discussions._You can write a personal essay, argument, memoir, character study or travelogue, as well as reportorial, researched, and investigative pieces. No matter what rubric your piece falls under, we'll help you to distinguish between what Vivian Gornick has called The Situation-the plot or facts at hand-and The Story, which is the larger, more universal meaning that arises naturally from these facts. By developing these two strands and tying them more artfully together you'll make your piece as appealing as it can be to editors and a discerning audience._We'll also read and discuss successful published work every week that I've chosen to illustrate specific solutions to the problems we found in last week's student work. That's because the best way to become a better writer is to become a better reader. If you learn nothing else in this class, you'll learn that._

Is there a place for poetry in a society in which reading has been declared dead-where at the very least, reading threatens to be eclipsed by scanning? In this workshop/laboratory, we will explore material whose response is a delirious yes-poetry that revels in charging the confines of the page and book. Exposure to an archive of modernist and contemporary visual and sound poetry, artists' books, contemporary installation and performance works, and relevant theories of media dislodgment will help us compose our own answers to the (old) question: what forms are poems obliged or inspired to take as language goes viral, in the face of total information, digitization, and post-literary culture? Readings and viewings in 20th- and 21st-century poetry and poetics, visits to local writing-arts collections, and class visits by local artists will help us generate our own works. Students will complete weekly assignments across media, and engage with the writing of their peers formally, while working toward a culminating piece in a medium of their choice: this final piece can take the form of a chapbook, performance, installation, or other pertinent channel. Works studied may include the envelope poems of Emily Dickinson, a range of mid-century concrete poems, DICTEE (by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha), Spit Temple: The Selected Performances of Cecilia Vicu-a, the "total translations" of Jerome Rothenberg, Drift (by Caroline Bergvall), the art of Etel Adnan and Barbara Kruger, performances, texts, and graphic work by Edwin Torres, The Jew's Daughter (by Judd Morrissey), the instagram feeds of Shelley Jackson, and more.

"It is difficult / to get the news from poems," Williams wrote in 1955, yet American poetry has demonstrated since its inception a fascination with public events and how poetry itself might respond to, even intervene in, those events. This course will explore the genre of the "public" poem, a poem shaped by-registering, responding to, remonstrating against-public phenomena, and one which locates the poetic "self" within a wider social newsscape. On the premise that creative work is socially produced, and that the best training for a writer, therefore, is to read extensively, we will examine an eclectic range of contemporary "public" poetry-Peter Balakian, Quan Barry, Joshua Clover, Martha Collins, Tyehimba Jess, Jill McDonaugh, Gregory Pardlo, Anne Winters-and engage pressing questions in historical and contemporary poetics. We will also, of course, produce, share, and workshop a significant body of our own "public" poetry. What, we will ask, makes a poem of its moment but not momentary? How is "public" poetry different from "political" poetry? Incorporating basic and advanced issues in poetic craft-open form, braided narratives, the ethics of witness-as well as attendance at poetry readings and some critical writing, the course will ultimately help us find and sharpen those techniques necessary to write our keenest, most urgent poetry. We will write, then, not only about public history, but into it.

In this advanced writing workshop students will write two short stories and revise one. The workshop will focus on traditional aspects of craft while the short writing and reading assignments will focus on various writing processes. We will learn through practice how different writing approaches utilize or ameliorate the vital power of the ego. "Ego" is self: ourselves and our own experiences are vital for writing fiction with authenticity. But ego can also get in the way of creation and foment fear and pretension. Reading modern short stories by Alice Walker, Alice Munro, Haruki Murakami and Lan Samantha Chang among others, we will look at "ego" as a function of characterization and the self in fiction. We'll read essays by Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung on "Active Imagination," theories of automatic writing by Beat poets, and ideas of writing pedagogy by Peter Elbow and will question how and why calibrating ego is essential for authors and characters, and when ego can detract from the power of the imaginary world and "first thoughts."

This course is for students with works-in-progress, whether a story collection or a novel, who feel stuck in their manuscripts. In weekly workshop sessions, we'll re-examine what's actually at stake in the narrative draft. We'll help each other dive deeper in our writing, to rediscover submerged aspects of the narrative that can be further explored - and what to do once we've uncovered them. With accompanying readings of novel excerpts and stories, we'll also examine how to incorporate next-level techniques such as re-sequencing the plot, imposing metaphorical value, and thematic layering of storylines.

In this advanced fiction workshop, students will work on novel-length projects, completing 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. Work by James Baldwin, Edith Wharton, Ha Jin, Vladimir Nabokov, and Akhil Sharma will help us consider the crucial relationship between characters and their contexts.

Purple, lean, evocative, muscular, literary, exuberant, lucid, stilted, economical. These are all labels that critics and reviewers have used to characterize prose styles that call attention to themselves in distinct ways. Of course, what constitutes style not only changes over time, but also means different things in different literary traditions. How, then, do translators carry style over from one language and cultural milieu to another? And to what extent does style structure storytelling? We will explore these questions by reading a variety of modern and contemporary stylists who either write in English or translate into English, paying special attention to what stylistic devices are at work and what their implications are for narration, characterization, and world building. Further, we'll examine the range of choices that each writer and translator makes when constituting and reconstituting style, on a lexical, tonal, and syntactic scale. By pairing readings with generative exercises in stylistics and constrained writing, we will build toward the translation of a short work of contemporary fiction into English. To participate in this workshop, students should be able to comfortably read a literary text in a foreign language.

Every writer of personal nonfiction knows that ultimately the story isn't about them: it's about something larger, perhaps universal, and their personal story is merely a means to that end. The key to this paradox is the synecdoche, or the part that stands for the whole. The universe in a grain of sand, the one story that tells many people's story. Anne Fadiman did it in_The Spirit Catches You and Then You Fall Down, her book about a Hmong immigrant in the United States. So did Joan Didion, in_Where I Was From; by telling the story of her family, she told the story of California, and by telling the story of California she told the story of the West and thus of America. Rian Malan did the same for South Africa in _My Traitor's Heart: by telling the story of his family he told the story of Apartheid, and thus of our segregated world. We'll look at how these and other writers locate the universal in their particulars, and discuss how to apply their example to your own writing._