Beginning Workshops

This nuts-and-bolts of fiction writing class begins with the question: what drives a story? What are the different engines that a writer can use to craft momentum in a story, and how does one tune these engines for greatest effect? We will cover such engines as plot, conflict, suspense, narrative questions, worldbuilding, and narrative pacing through revelations about characters and their world. In addition to submitting two stories or excerpts for workshop (plus a revision of one), expect to read and discuss a selection of published work.

Character and setting are nearly inextricable forces in storytelling. In effective fiction, we often experience one through the other. We will explore this dynamic relationship and study how writers often put their characters at odds with their chosen setting to create and sustain tension in a story. We’ll also give attention to rendering our characters and settings with specificity—learning how to create the sense of “somebody somewhere” instead of “anybody anywhere.” Our reading list will focus on short fiction. Students will write many exercises at the beginning of the quarter and fully realize one complete story to submit for workshop discussion by the end.

This workshop-centered course introduces writers to foundational concepts and tools in the craft of fiction writing, including character development, point of view, and plotting.  Regular assignments include the submission and editing of shared short/extended fictions, as well as critical reflection on the artistic contexts of the short story itself.  A focus within this course reflects on the short story’s “exhaustion” as a form. How has short fiction been reinvented or found new shapes in contemporary writing?  How has the line between fiction and nonfiction been renegotiated there? Writers for discussion include Jeffery Renard Allen, Elif Batuman, Jorge Luis Borges, Lydia Davis, Lauren Groff, Yu Hua, and writers visiting the UChicago campus.

Beginning Translation Workshop: It’s been said that in an ideal world, all writers would be translators, and all translators would be writers. In addition to the joy of enlarging the conversation of literature by bringing new voices into another language, the practice of literary translation forces us as writers to examine the materials and tools of our craft. In this workshop, we will critique each other’s translations of prose, poetry, or drama into English, as well as explore various creative strategies and approaches to translation by a variety of practitioners that touch on various aspects of the "radical recontextualization" that constitute the decision-making work of literary translation. Through these processes, you will formulate your own strategies to both literary translation and creative writing. We will also have the opportunity to have conversations via Zoom with some of the translators we’ll be reading. Students should have at least an intermediate proficiency in a foreign language to take this workshop.

The poet Aimé Césaire once wrote 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 invites students to experiment with both the audible and inaudible elements of poetry. We’ll practice traditional music-making devices, such as rhythm and rhyme, at the same time that we explore the musical movements of mind and the moods that lyricism makes available. The class will practice literary community building by discussing peers’ poems in workshops, by responding to poems and essays by contemporary and modern poets and critics, and by attending literary events on campus. For the first few sessions, our discussions will focus primarily on readings. As we move forward, we will spend the majority of time workshopping student work.

In Disproving the Pastoral, we’ll explore our own ties to rural landscapes as a means of interrogating and updating the pastoral tradition, just as we’ll investigate and write toward a more holistic landscape—one that integrates the literal and the political, the critical, and the sociocultural. Throughout the quarter, we will read, write, and discuss contemporary poems that are dedicated to the careful observation of—and commentary on—rural spaces. As we study works by Billy-Ray Belcourt, Nikky Finney, Joy Priest, Nikki Wallschlaeger, Matthew Wimberly, C.D. Wright and others, we will develop a keen eye for the multi- faceted utility of the landscape in our own work. We will learn through practice, writing drafts that engage with craft elements like imagery, form, rhythm, and voice. We will workshop these drafts as a class, building a collective vocabulary for creative and critical feedback. And, in the end, we will craft work that seeks to subvert the expected narratives of these far-off, rural places we take up as subjects.

If you’ve ever been sucked inside a rabbit-hole of threaded replies to your own objectively perfect Tweet or winced under the pressure of a scribble in So-and-So’s yearbook, you’ll know the art of extreme brevity is not for everyone. The kaleidoscopic nature of the human mind resists compression. Like a reflex away from an odor, your sentences want to run. I’ll try to keep this brief: some stories can only carry so much, and well, our breath is short. Containment is a source of drama, so let’s study the art of concision together. Students in this workshop will churn out 750-word essays each week, exchanging feedback on what sticks, and revising toward distillation. We’ll spend most of class honing what Bernard Cooper has called “an alertness to detail, a quickening of the senses, a focusing of the literary lens... until one has magnified some small aspect of what it means to be human.”

This course explores creative nonfiction that responds to the places where boundaries blur, culture encounters nature, the self meets the collective. Scottish writer Ali Smith once said, “The place where the natural world meets the arts is a fruitful, fertile place for both.” Robert Macfarlane suggests that we consider such places as an “ecotone” – a biological term for the liminal space between biomes “where two communities met and integrate.” Our exploration of writing about ecotones will take us outside of the classroom on tours, urban hikes, and neighborhood explorations that engage with Chicago's history, ecology, and architecture*. Writing creative nonfiction, we shall see, requires all of the sense; as we explore the city, students will the learn fundamentals of recording their observations and shaping them into story. Students will develop foundational creative nonfiction tenets, including scene-building, character development, point of view, voice, artful word choice, and structure. Inside the classroom, our workshop will foment a supportive, knowledgeable, and critical community in which to exchange and discuss original work. Course readings will include the work of Robin Wall Kimmerer, Elizabeth Kolbert, Brian Macfarlane and Lauret Savoy.

This beginning fiction workshop approaches long-standing issues of craft through engagement with stories that have been published by emerging writers in the last several 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 may include Vanessa Onwuemezi, Bora Chung, or Isabel Waidner. After several weeks devoted to reading and the trial of basic techniques, students will compose stories to be workshopped in class. A spirit of discovery and experiment will be encouraged.

Writers at all levels learn through the careful reading of works they admire. We will spend more than a third of our time in this class reading stories worth learning from, both classic and contemporary, by writers like James Baldwin, Sherman Alexie, and Jhumpa Lahiri. Discussion will be lively—passionate opinions and enthusiasm are welcome—but most of our focus will be 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. In writing workshop, which will occupy a significant part of class most weeks, each of 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.