Beginning Workshops

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.

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.

Instructor TBD

Course Description TBD

Instructor TBD

Course Description TBD

Instructor TBD

Course Description TBD

Nature writer Barry Lopez suggests that knowing a place intimately and writing about it — whether that place is an Arctic ice floe or an urban taco stand — creates an important “sense of belonging, a sense of not being isolated in the universe.” In this course, we will read fiction by writers who explore the impact of place on community, culture, and the individual. We will take Lopez’s advice to “become vulnerable to a place,” and to represent that place and its people with rich and complex detail. Writing exercises and the occasional field trip will help to generate material, while responses to assigned readings will give you a bit more direction as you address issues specific to writing about places, as well as other fundamentals of fiction writing.