Beginning Workshops

Beginning Poetry Workshop: Imaginary Music

The poet Aimé Césaire suggests that “The only acceptable music comes from somewhere deeper than sound. The search for music is a crime against the music of poetry which can only be the beating of the mind’s wave against the rock of the world.” What is this music “deeper than sound”? How is it related to the more obvious “audible” sounds of poetry? This course guides students in exercises that work with both the actual sounds of poetry, like alliteration and rhythm, and the inaudible, “imagined” music of the mind, to write and workshop poems. We read diverse contemporary and classic poets, write several poems, and workshop peer work weekly, culminating in a portfolio of new poems as a final project.

The concept of “voice” comes up often in writing. How does a narrator’s personality, their way of seeing the world, imbue the writing in an unforgettable way? How we are drawn in, charmed, confounded, and driven to epiphany? In this course, we will consider this nebulous yet essential aspect of writing by examining our own original stories in workshop and by reading published works from Grace Paley, Bette Howland, Lucia Berlin, Kathleen Collins, and others. Ideally, you will develop and embrace your own authorial voice over the course of the quarter.

Choices about form and shape are not unique to nonfiction writing, but nonfiction presents unique challenges. Unlike fiction we cannot simply invent information or insert details in order to maintain traditional narrative forms. Instead, we are tasked with finding or creating forms that meets the needs of our content. In this beginning workshop we will explore a range of possible forms that fit the needs of various genres of nonfiction. From traditional narrative nonfiction and memoir that follow the kinds of story arcs or hero's journeys familiar to fiction and theatre on the one hand, to more associative and fractured structures that make space for uncertainty and missing information on the other, we will explore the role form plays in shaping the content of nonfiction. We will read more traditional essays from classic and contemporary writers like James Baldwin, Joan Didion, John Jeremiah Sullivan and Hanif Abdduraquib and compare these works to formally experimental work from writers such as Renee Gladman, Aisha Sbatini Sloan, Eula Biss, and Maggie Nelson. Students will be asked to produce their own work that explores the potentials and limitations of both traditional and experimental forms, engage in respectful and constructive workshop, and reflect on the role of form as it relates to the works we have read in one critical essay.

What makes a portrait come to life? Whether through a camera’s lens or the written word, portraits expose truths, reveal choices, and capture the complexity of a person or moment. In this course, we’ll explore how the creative process of nonfiction writing parallels photography, using the tools of framing, perspective, and composition to capture the essence of a subject. We’ll dive into this intersection between writing and visual art through activities like ekphrastic writing prompts and a field trip to the Smart Museum of Art, discovering along the way how these experiences can inform our writing and deepen our understanding of truth and representation. We’ll study photographs by Ansel Adams and Lewis Hine, read Maggie Nelson, and analyze films like I, Tonya to explore how to tell stories with multiple truths. The first half of the term will focus on testing and broadening your skills with photography-inspired assignments. By midterm, you’ll pitch your own written portrait of a local Chicago resident using the techniques we’ve studied. The second half will be dedicated to workshopping these portraits, allowing for collaboration and feedback to refine your work. By the end of the course, you’ll submit a final portfolio that includes a fully realized written portrait and that reflects the evolution of your creative voice, showcasing your ability to authentically capture the complexity and humanity of real individuals.

What do a diagnosis and a narrative essay have in common? How can research be made accessible and jargon lyrical? And what can the structure of the circulatory system teach us about the structure of an essay? In this beginning workshop, we will practice writing from medicine, illness, and the body, focusing on ways we can turn knowledge and information into compelling and deeply felt essays. We will consider medical writing from the perspectives of doctors, nurses, interpreters, researchers, and patients, and examine ways of approaching medical topics and stories that may not fit neatly into linear narratives. Our course will look at contemporary texts in the field of medical writing like Eula Biss' "The Pain Scale," Andrea Long Chu’s, “China Brain” and Leslie Jamison’s “Devil’s Bait” for models of how to make the scientific personal and the personal impactful in a broader political or cultural conversation. Participants will either share or discuss obstacles, successes and questions stemming from their work in supportive, process-oriented small group workshops that focus on the goals of the writer. This course is an opportunity to think about medicine from a new perspective, to create messy first and second drafts, and to explore what might be familiar subjects from a place of uncertainty and exploration.

Beginning Workshops are intended for students who may or may not have previous writing experience, but are interested in gaining experience in a particular genre. These workshops focus on the fundamentals of craft and feature workshops of student writing. See the course description for this particular workshop section in the notes below.

Many physicists posit that time is not linear—and in fiction, it doesn’t have to be either. Within a single story, we can be pulled to the to the past, the future, and a liminal space existing outside of time. In this course, we will investigate how authors manipulate our perception of time, in both conventional and unconventional ways, to deliver information and drive tension, to both orient and disorient us within the narrative. How do these moves impact our perception of meaning, the indelible, and the sublime? In addition to submitting two stories or excerpts for workshop, expect to read and discuss published works from Clarice Lispector, Stuart Dybek, Joy Williams, Denis Johnson, Tobias Wolff, and others.

Beginning Workshops are intended for students who may or may not have previous writing experience, but are interested in gaining experience in a particular genre. These workshops focus on the fundamentals of craft and feature workshops of student writing. See the course description for this particular workshop section in the notes below.

The first person voice has the capacity to create rich characters, ironic and surprising conflict, and worlds filtered through a tantalizingly subjective lens. But it also poses technical and ethical challenges for writers, particularly in the genre of nonfiction. In this beginning workshop, students will explore both the potential and limitations of the first person voice in their nonfiction writing. To understand the full scope of this mode, we will examine the basic techniques and the limit cases of first-person narration— the unreliable narrators, the intentional deceptions, and the altered states that can make the first person both troubling and compelling. Over the course of the semester, students will apply what they have discovered to three creative writing exercises and participate in a respectful, constructive workshop of one of their pieces. Students will also be asked to write critically about weekly readings. The course will culminate in a final revision of one creative piece and a reflective essay that explores a major problem or possibility within the first person. Representative authors will include Hanif Abdurraquib, James Baldwin, Andrea Long Chu, Carolyne Forche, Leslie Jamison, Ottessa Moshfegh, Claudia Rankine, and Lauren Slater.

“Write what you know,” as a literary motto, doesn’t mean writers focus narrowly on their own experiences. Thankfully, we can get to know other people as well—through conversations, careful observation and research. Writing a profile is an act of empathy. Though weekly reading assignments and writing exercises, students in this profile writing workshop will learn how to conduct interviews and do basic reporting, and they will hone their skills as nonfiction storytellers. Some of the reporting and writing will look at Chicago and Chicagoans—getting to know and make sense of people around us. Other subjects will visit during class time. In considering the extent to which we can’t fully know the people we portray, students will also consider how writers (along with documentary filmmakers, historians, journalists, obituary writers) address these limitations creatively in their work. Students will complete a short profile each week, and they will write one longer and revised profile as a final. If you wish to add this course during add/drop please email the instructor to be added to the waitlist. 

This workshop will explore literary translation as a mode of embodied reading and creative writing. Through comparative and iterative readings across multiple translations of both poetry and fiction, we will examine the interpretive decisions that translators routinely encounter when assigning an English to a work of literature first written in another language, as well as the range of creative strategies available to translators when devising a treatment for a literary text in English. Students will complete weekly writing exercises in retranslation and English-to-English translation, building to the retranslation of either a short piece of fiction or selection of poems.

"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, rooting their art in the material world as a strategy, albeit a counterintuitive one, to access the emotional and abstract.