Beginning Workshops

It’s where it all began. Often, the questions that drive narrative and underpin a lifetime’s inquiry originate in childhood’s rich ore. It remains the subject of many great works of literature and is one terrain that each writer, student or master, can claim sovereignty over.

In this beginning workshop, we will look closely at a number of texts that deal with childhood with an eye towards generating work of our own. We will study the basic craft elements of point-of-view, setting, character, and voice. In addition to studying literary fiction, we will consider one or two children’s fiction and YA texts as well. Through in-class exercises, and imitative and generative writing, we will bring a quality of care and attention to writing about the lifestage known as ‘childhood.’ In the second half of the quarter, the emphasis will be on workshopping student’s original work.

We will study writers such as Sayaka Murata, Roald Dahl, Roddy Doyle, Edmund De Waal.

Flannery O’Connor writes, “the fiction writer has to realize that he can’t create compassion with compassion, or emotion with emotion, or thought with thought. He has to provide all these things with a body; he has to create a world with weight and extension.”

In this class, we will focus on how prose creates worlds of weight and extension. How do we weave, through the fabric of words, flesh and blood characters whose actions carry heft. We will consider how embodied action amalgamates with voice, setting, dramatic tension, and other story elements. And, through in-class exercises and imitative and generative writing, we will look to hone our control over embodied action. 

Together, we’ll study writers such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, and Patricia Highsmith, with a focus on how they give words warp and weft. In the second half of the quarter, the emphasis will be on workshopping student’s original work.

This beginning workshop takes up the tradition of the modern short story. Always attentive to ancient story values like plot and closure, we will take as our model the specifically twentieth and twenty-first century form that uses scenic-method and open-ended construction to tell a distinctly modern kind of story. Reading authors like James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, Mavis Gallant, and Joy Williams for lessons in technique, as well as several short critical texts, students will compose their own stories to be workshopped in class. A spirit of discovery and experiment will be encouraged.

This beginning fiction workshop approaches long-standing issues of craft through engagement with stories that have been published by BOTH EMERGING AND CELEBRATED writers within the last two years. We will find classic narrative techniques (like scenic method, plot reversal, and closure) operating in newly published work, but we’ll also look for promising experiments, novelties of form, and blurred boundaries. Authors read in this class have included Bruna Dantas Lobato, Annie Ernaux, Sterling HolyWhiteMountain, and ’Pemi Aguda. After several weeks devoted to reading and the trial of basic techniques, students will compose stories to beSPACEworkshopped in class. A spirit of discovery and experiment will be encouraged.

According to Albus Dumbledore, "To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure." And to the well-organized fiction writer, it can be the same. In this class, we’ll explore mortality as a literary device, considering how it not only brings a measure of incident to our stories, but also how it infuses the pages with darkness, sentiment, and consequence. The downside, of course, comes when too much darkness swamps a story with pessimism; when sentiment tilts into sentimentality; or when the consequences of such high stakes test a reader’s ability to suspend disbelief. Through readings of mostly short fiction, we’ll uncover how death can trigger stories of aftermath, how it can operate as a climax to build toward, or how it makes space for unexpected outcomes. Students will also write their own stories—about death, containing death, starring the character Death, or perhaps something more death-adjacent—which we’ll workshop as a group, focusing on the ways in which mortality sets tone, drives plot, and influences style.  

Describing fiction writing as an “art” is perhaps a misnomer. Depending on who’s describing it, the process of creating a narrative is more like driving in the dark, or woodworking, or gardening. The metaphors abound, but the techniques for creating effective fictional prose are often quite consistent. This course will begin with a weeks-long consideration of selected works of fiction where discussion will aim to distinguish the basic devices of effective storytelling. Weekly topics will range from subjects as broad as point of view and plot arrangement to more highly focused lessons on scene design, dialog, and word choice. Throughout the term, the writing process will be broken down into stages where written work will focus on discrete story parts such as first pages, character introductions, and dialog-driven scenes before students are asked to compose full-length narratives. Along the way, students will chart their processes of conceptualizing, drafting, and revising their narratives. Finally, in the latter weeks of the quarter, emphasis will shift to the workshopping of students’ full stories.

“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. 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 reading, 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 explore 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.

In this beginning workshop, we will study the various forms of creative nonfiction, of what makes a piece of writing ‘creative’ and what makes it ‘nonfiction' (and the tension between those two categories, which is where the art comes to life). Students will submit original works-in-progress, and offer peer feedback. Together, as a group, we will discuss and critique this writing as well as the work of published writers. We will explore some of the major and minor forms, and the old and newer genres: the personal letter, memoir and magazine profile, travelogue and pilgrimage narrative, the many species of essay. While the emphasis is on the art and craft of writing, class discussion will also touch on the practice of writing as a form of social communication in the real world. In thinking about how we want to shape our own writing, we must be savvy to what forces – e.g. which audiences, what cultural expectations, what economies – shape us as writers. 

Beginning Fiction Workshop: Larger Than Life explores the concept of the indelible—that hard-to-define quality that makes an element of fiction “jump off the page” and become instantly memorable. We’ll explore hyperbole, duality, idiosyncrasy, narrative voice, the sublime, and many other techniques, then put them into practice to make our own fiction “larger than life.” 

How do we hear the voice of a text when we’re reading in another language? What makes a voice intrinsically itself? And where can we locate those qualities in the language that the voice speaks in? This workshop explores what translators read for when constructing a narrative or poetic voice in English. Students will select a long-form literary text to translate, and we will work through the drafting process by breaking the text down into short extracts that we will close-read together each week in class. In doing so, we’ll listen through the translation for evidence of how the source wants to sound, in order to discern its voice, its tendencies, and how it behaves in language. Our own translation work will be accompanied by assigned readings that represent a range of contemporary world literature in translation, paying attention to what the translator does with English to sketch a cohesive voice. We’ll build toward the polished translation of a short prose text or a selection of poems, which students will submit as part of a final portfolio, along with a translator’s note that provides critical commentary on their reading of the source text and their treatment of it in translation. To participate in this course, students should have reading proficiency in a language other than English.