Beginning Workshops

“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.

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. 

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? Where do we locate what makes a text intrinsically itself? This workshop explores what translators read for when constructing a narrative or poetic voice in English. By emphasizing the drafting process, we’ll break down week-by-week a long-form literary text into short extracts that we can close-read together during the workshop. 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 literary text (approx. 1500-2000 words in length or a selection of 6-8 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.

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 personal essay is arguably the most protean form in literature. Highly elastic in shape and size, it can also take on any subject. From the inward-looking and intimate to the outward-facing and encompassing, the essay appeals to many writers because it is so multi-faceted and universally useful. Like a good pocketknife, essays can do just about anything. In this course, we will explore the personal essay through all it can do: meditate, argue, confess, study a person, go to a place and tell a story, to name some of the seemingly endless possibilities. We will consider classic and contemporary examples of the personal essay and write many, many of our own. 

This course seeks to develop your abilities in the writing of literary nonfiction as well as in the editing of your own and others’ prose in a workshop environment.  Through short assignments and shared readings, you will be introduced to basic considerations of craft in nonfiction, including style and narrative. Formally this quarter, we will explore the review—reconsidering reviews of movies, food, products, and even oneself. To these ends, we will examine work by contemporary writers including M.F.K. Fisher, Pauline Kael, Margo Jefferson, and Kevin Killian (including his collected Amazon reviews).

Writers at all levels learn through the careful reading of works they admire. While this is a workshop class, we will spend about a third of our time reading stories worth learning from, both classic and contemporary,  with a focus on the choices that writers make, the nuts and bolts of craft, with special emphasis on point of view (who speaks and why?) while also covering tone, direct and summary dialog, setting, conflict, causality, and use of time. In-class exercises will further hone your understanding of specific techniques, fire your creativity and get you writing. We will then move to writing workshop, where you will have the opportunity to present your work to the group. Critique will be respectful and productive, with emphasis on clarity and precision. By the end of the course, you will have generated significant raw material and completed at least one story, which will be revised and handed in as a final portfolio.

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.

In "Beginning Nonfiction Workshop: Travelogues," we'll explore how travel writing uses place as a lens for understanding self, culture, and the world. Through readings from authors like Rebecca Solnit, Annie Dillard, and Sabrina Imbler, students will analyze how travelogues blend personal experience with exploration, considering the ethics and complexities of writing about travel and tourism, as well as challenging their own definitions of what place can mean. Students will read deeply, write craft analysis papers, and apply these ideas to their own travelogues, focusing on their experiences as travelers here in Chicago.