Beginning Workshops

You’ve heard this one before.  Fairy tales are some of our most durable stories, and they are durable in two ways: they can survive not only the passage of time but the distortions of creative retellings.  In the first third of this class we will study folk tales from varied traditions, learning to recognize basic elements of storytelling such as closure, plot twist, and economy.  In the middle third of class we will write and workshop our original retellings, using the old tales as a frame in which to practice modern techniques like scenic narration, incidental detail, and interiority.  Finally, in the last third of the class you’ll write and workshop an original fairy tale.  Students will be responsible for weekly response papers and detailed critique of classmates’ workshop submissions.  Tales will be drawn from around the world; our modern models may include Franz Kafka, D.O. Fagunwa, Angela Carter, Italo Calvino, Yoko Tawada, and Ludmilla Petrushevskaya.

Representing Ourselves: “We read to find ourselves” or so Harold Bloom told the mainstream media collective to which he belongs. But what about those who lack representation from canon to curriculum to publishing industry and literary criticism? How does our practice of reading and writing differ from the default standards of being which the American literary imagination has deemed “universal”? In this multicultural multi-genre workshop we will read and honor the works of people of color, Black, Indigenous, Muslim, immigrant, women, queer, gender-nonconforming, disabled, and incarcerated artists. Students will deconstruct and celebrate the unique ways in which they create and encounter ideas that may differ from their own, drawing connections between worldview and craft. Through collective leadership, mutual respect, and rigorous practice, students will boldly explore their identities with the goal of developing a nuanced literary aesthetics. Half the quarter will focus solely on original student work. Students will self-direct their goals, craft artist statements, and lead workshop discussions.

Shaping Poems: 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.

This course introduces fundamental ideas about poetic form and approaches to poetic writing through close reading and discussion of poetry (modern and contemporary but not exclusively). We will consider poetic elements from the ground-up—reading closely for sound, image, syntax, and meaning—in order to enliven those elements in student writing. Likewise, we will consider how poems appear at a cross-roads between history and experience (the past and present) in order to inspire students to write not only about themselves but about real and imagined social, cultural, historical, and intellectual locations and horizons. We will do so in conversation with our peers by way of regular workshops, in which students will give feedback to one another’s works, learning thus how to read critically while generously, and how to respond collegially while also constructively.  At the end of the quarter students will revise drafts based on the class writing exercises and workshop conversations, to produce a portfolio prefaced by a critical reflection. Students who are interested in the multidisciplinary and multimedial intersections of poetry are especially encouraged to apply.

Scenes are often considered the building blocks of narrative story-telling. In this course, we’ll examine short fiction through the lens of scene, starting from the basics: What are scenes, how do they work, and what should they accomplish in a story? We’ll consider the scene’s relationship with context, tension, subtext, narrative arc, and other story elements. Together we’ll examine how authors like Bret Anthony Johnston, Rebecca Lee, and Jhumpa Lahiri use scenes to great effect, with a particular focus on setting, dialogue, action, and detail. In addition to readings, students will complete several short writing exercises and one longer story, which you will workshop and substantially revise. You will also engage with the work of your peers, delivering thoughtful, encouraging, constructive critiques.

Understanding Narrative Points of View: 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, Edith Wharton, and Jhumpa Lahiri. Discussion will be lively—passionate opinions and enthusiasm are welcome—but most of our focus will be on the choices writers make, the nuts and bolts of craft, including: point of view, tone, direct and summary dialog, setting, 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.

Basics of Narrative Design:

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 like woodworking, or gardening. It’s like raising a half-formed, misbehaved child and then trying to reason with it. 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.

Exploration of traditional nonfiction genres including literary journalism, memoir, and genre-writing. In a workshop environment, writers will develop working familiarity with basic aspects of craft in reportage and narrative. An added focus to the course is the exploration of “American space” and memory, particularly through autobiographical writing by American women (including work by Joan Didion, Margo Jefferson, Vivian Gornick, and MFK Fisher).

Day/Time: Thursday, 9:30am-12:20pm

There’s really no such thing as the “voiceless.” There is only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.~~Arundhati Roy 

Invasion and occupation, waves of nomads and immigrants, the African slave trade, the Underground Railroad, the Great Migration, the Trail of Tears, the Dust Bowl, and the “southern border,” our American story contains multitudes, united in motion. Wanderers and drifters, exiles and refugees, we are on the run and in the mix, our collective experience one of forced migration as well as voluntary uprooting—we’re at once victims and agents, objects and subjects. 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 a relationship 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. We look for what happened, what people say happened, and the webs of significance people construct to make sense of what happened. 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 much wider range of Chicago communities. 

Day/Time: Monday, 1:30-4:20pm

“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 and workshops, 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 established masters such as Janet Frame, Alice Munro, and Julio Cortazar, as well as lesser-known contemporary voices. We will workshop our writings throughout the term, developing a portfolio of stories that reflect our individual interests, desires, and needs as writers.

Day/Time: Tuesdays, 2:00-4:50pm