Beginning Workshops

This course introduces students to poetry writing first by exploring various ways of generating material, then by shaping that material into poems. We’ll refine devices such as image, rhythm, and metaphor while we also explore the musical movements of mind 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, we will focus primarily on readings and in class writing. As we move forward, we will spend most of class time workshopping student poems. Students can expect to turn in several drafts of poems, serve as discussion leaders, provide written comments to their peers, and assemble a final portfolio.

We will study the theory and practice of Oral History, and we will create original oral accounts from a wide range of Chicago communities. We will work to understand the method and politics of Oral History, and to gain facility in practice and written presentation. Oral History, the poetry of the everyday, the literature of the street, is perfectly poised to open a narrative space where an interviewer, listening with empathy and identification, and a story-teller, seizing an occasion to perform an account of events and experiences, co-create and reveal a universe of meaning-making. Each student will create an original oral account, and each will have the opportunity to introduce a narrator (or a group of narrators) while making a presentation to the Class/Workshop, employing any of the many approaches that we will have studied—theater, poetry, narrative, documentary, comix, film, podcasting. Our goal is to understand the method and politics of Oral History, and to gain facility in practice and presentation.

It has been said that good questions outrank easy answers. The meditative essay gives us a tool to refine our curiosities again and again: Who are we? How did we get here? What keeps us going? What holds us back? Where are we headed, really? Students in this class will tackle some of life’s biggest questions in a “field notebook” with the goal of developing— and helping each other develop— true, bold, idea-driven essays that render us a little more lucid and in love with the act of wondering. We’ll read essayists and narrators who specialize in the art of reverie, such as Fernando Pessoa, Sei Shōnagon, and Lia Purpura. Half of class-time will be dedicated to student-led discussions of original works in progress with the goal of exchanging constructive feedback and practicing revision as a form of inquiry. Students will direct their own learning with self-evaluations and a conference with the instructor about their developing goals, culminating in a final portfolio that is something to write home about.

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” is common and clichéd creative writing advice, but also happens to be quite helpful to those of us new to fiction. In this Beginning Fiction workshop, we’ll use memories as the raw material for our fiction, concerning ourselves with telling stories effectively rather than telling the truth and leveraging our deep impressions of real people, places and time to create convincing imagined worlds. Along the way, we’ll read the work of writers who have used their own experiences and impressions in fiction, such as Jayne Anne Phillips, Edward P. Jones, Annie Ernaux, and James Baldwin, among others, and discuss the benefits, limitations and ethical questions of writing fiction from lived experience. Many of our in-class activities and exercises will focus on training ourselves to remember more effectively in an effort to understand more deeply the relationship between memory and imagination. To be successful, students will read and write actively and share their well-informed opinions with enthusiasm, especially in our workshop discussions.

In life and in fiction writing, character development is often synonymous with major challenges: obstacles that demand deep investigation, adaptation, and change. Using the character-driven models of Tove Ditlevsen, Ottessa Moshfegh, Lucia Berlin, Edwidge Danticat, Eileen Chang, and other writers, this Beginning Fiction Workshop will explore strategies for crafting complex characters: illustrating their motives, perspectives, and arcs of evolution. Through a combination of generative writing exercises and writing workshops (wherein students will share original work and receive critical feedback from the class), each student will produce at least one complete short story.

All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey toward a lost land.” So wrote Janet Frame, a singularly talented author who was institutionalized at the age of 21, then saved from a lobotomy only because she won a literary prize. In keeping with Frame’s reflection, this craft-based course will focus on strategies for saving our lives through fiction writing: how to cultivate a convincing voice; how to extract strength from our writerly weaknesses; and, ultimately, how to forge a home for ourselves in our own words. Through a combination of creative exercises, we will explore and examine the craft components of strong, original fictions, including character development, descriptive detail, compelling dialogue, and rich sentences. We’ll also learn how to read the works of published writers for creative inspiration, mining texts by masters such as Janet Frame, Alice Munro, Julio Cortazar, Sofia Samatar, and Yasunari Kawabata. Primarily, we will workshop original student writing throughout the term, developing a portfolio of stories that reflect our individual interests, desires, and needs as writers.

In this seminar we will study the theory and practice of Oral History, and we will create original oral accounts of migration from our own families as well as from a wider range of Chicago communities. We will work to understand the method and politics of Oral History, and to gain facility in practice and written presentation. Oral History, the poetry of the everyday, the literature of the street, is perfectly poised to open a unique window onto our migration stories, offering a narrative space where an interviewer, listening with empathy and identification, and a story-teller, seizing an occasion to perform an account of events and experiences, co-create and reveal a universe of meaning-making. Seeking authenticity, oral historians become attuned to contradiction, tension, disagreements, silences, inconsistencies, ambiguities, paradoxes, uncertainties, and every other kind of human muddle; we dive head-first into the wide, wild world of human experience and human meaning-making, offering an important antidote to propaganda, dogma, imposition and stereotype. Learning to question, to interrogate, to experiment, to wonder and wander, to pay full attention, to construct and create—this is the foundation upon which to build an Oral History project of purpose and importance. We look for what happened, and the webs of significance people construct to make sense of what happened.

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. Our readings of translations will largely come from South Asian Languages, and we'll 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.

This course is cross-listed with SALC 10706, SALC 30706, GRMN 10606, and GRMN 30606.

Friday 12:30pm-3:20pm

What is the role of the self in our writing? Are we known or made things, even to ourselves, in our work? Beginning Poetry: Writing Identity focuses on writing and revising poems that capture the nuances of our often-intersectional identities, centering the questions: How is my work representative of me, and Who is the person represented in my work? Throughout the quarter, we will read, write, and discuss contemporary poems dealing with issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, ethnicity and cultural background, etc., and develop strategies for addressing similar ideas in our own work. You 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 supportive, process-oriented community that focuses on creative and critical feedback. While fellow students’ work will be the primary texts, other possible readings include work by Joy Priest, Adrian Matejka, Su Cho, Tarfia Faizullah, Nikky Finney, Dorothy Chan, torrin a. greathouse, and others.

Thursday 2:00pm-4:50pm