Beginning Workshops

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

This workshop will focus on the artistic possibilities of uncertainty in creative nonfiction. Writers have to tell our stories with authority. Yet many of our experiences of displacement, illness, trauma, and the slipperiness of memory remain unknown, unresolved, unhealed. While the need to render meaning from our narratives remains constant, when does certainty actually detract from that meaning? Can wisdom do more to obscure richer truths derived from form, tone, and voice? Readings and assignments will explore the ways that gaps invite creative opportunities and paradox. Workshop will explore the need for less knowing and more wondering in creative nonfiction. Course texts will include the work of Anne Carson, Carmen Maria Machado, Peter Orner, and Nathasha Tretheway. Through submitting your own original work and responding to the writing of others, our workshop will to illuminate how generative doubt can be.

Friday 9:30am-12:20pm

What does it mean to study another person’s life—a real person—and craft the collected pieces into a work of nonfiction? How do we gain insight into other people? How can we write about them with authority? As students report and write profiles in this nonfiction workshop, we will explore the practice and limits of this popular genre. Through weekly writing exercises and reading assignments, we will study techniques of interviewing and observing subjects, of using secondary sources and social and historical context. We will develop the abilities to depict people through physical detail, dialogue and action. In considering the extent to which we can and can’t know the real people we portray, we will also explore how writers (along with documentary filmmakers, historians, sociologists, writers of case studies) address these limitations in their work. Students will complete a short profile each week, and they will write one longer, workshopped and revised profile.

Thursday 9:30am-12:20pm

If one account of a story is that it is, at heart, a transformation, then what is—or could be—transformed? In this beginning fiction workshop, we will consider change as an engine of fiction and explore metamorphoses that take place at the level of plot, character, narrative voice, planes of reality, place, memory, identity, language, and form, as well as transformations that perhaps fail to take place. Readings may include the work of authors such as Ovid, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, Gabriel García Márquez, Jamaica Kincaid, Haruki Murakami, Steven Millhauser, Lesley Nneka Arimah, Jamil Jan Kochai, Alice Munro, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, and Jamel Brinkley, among others. In creative exercises, we will experiment with transformations in our own fiction. Over the course of the quarter, students will collect and revise these experiments into a portfolio and transform one experiment into a complete short story, which we will workshop in class.

If one account of a story is that it is, at heart, a transformation, then what is—or could be—transformed? In this beginning fiction workshop, we will consider change as an engine of fiction and explore metamorphoses that take place at the level of plot, character, narrative voice, planes of reality, place, memory, identity, language, and form, as well as transformations that perhaps fail to take place. Readings may include the work of authors such as Ovid, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, Gabriel García Márquez, Jamaica Kincaid, Haruki Murakami, Steven Millhauser, Lesley Nneka Arimah, Jamil Jan Kochai, Alice Munro, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, and Jamel Brinkley, among others. In creative exercises, we will experiment with transformations in our own fiction. Over the course of the quarter, students will collect and revise these experiments into a portfolio and transform one experiment into a complete short story, which we will workshop in class.

Friday 12:30pm-3:20pm

The question of which point of view to use is central to any fiction writer beginning a story or a novel, but what does it mean to choose one point of view over another? Who is narrating the story and how does she present herself? Is the narrator speaking directly to the reader, as a character in the story itself? Is she hiding in the shadows, trying to be as invisible as possible? Does she have a god-like omniscience, narrating from on high? Or does she exist in a liminal state, narrating through both a character and herself simultaneously? How does a writer's choice of POV and narrative distance affect such things as voice, rate of revelation, and even worldbuilding? How does it affect the reader's experience? And how can a writer maximize their choice of POV to best serve the story they want to tell? 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.

Thursday 9:30am-12:20pm

"Every story is perfect until you write the first sentence - then it's ruined forever." So said prolific fiction writer J. Robert Lennon. This craft-focused course is geared towards those who don't quite know how to begin, who might be afraid of writing, and who feel burdened by their own inhibitions and expectations. With creative exercises, readings, and workshops, we'll find ways to warm up our writerly voices and use them as a guiding force in creating short fiction. We'll learn how to mine the readings - by an eclectic mix of authors including Miranda July, Noviolet Bulawayo, John Cheever - for specific techniques and skills to apply to our own work. We will workshop our writings throughout the term. By the end, we will have built up a modest but powerful portfolio.

Thursday 12:30pm-3:20pm

Instructor: Jake Fournier

Through readings in a wide variety of formal, free verse, and prose poetry, and attentive workshops of student writing, this class will offer a compendium of great English sentences, new strategies for composition, as well as refreshers in advanced and basic English grammar. Students will weigh the interaction of the sentence against fundamental metrical patterns in both verse and lyrical prose, and they will interrogate how a variety of grammatical and syntactical features evolve within dynamic poetic forms. Mostly short, exemplary readings in poetic genres will move from classical to contemporary voices and feature a diverse range of styles and sensibilities—from Phillis Wheatley to Tommy Pico, Emily Dickinson to Jos Charles, Gwendolyn Brooks to Diane Seuss (and more). The class is not just about writing better sentences and becoming better communicators; it is about playing with the underlying fabric of our creative expressions and of our thoughts themselves. Course work will vary, but students will be expected to workshop their own poetry, to write weekly reading responses, and to experiment with different meters and sentence forms.