Beginning Workshops

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

What is the role of the self in our writing? Are we known or made things, even to ourselves, in our work? This workshop 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. Throughout the quarter, you will learnthrough 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. By the end of the quarter, you will revise your work into a cumulative portfolio, and will be able to articulate your own work’s place in the landscape of contemporary poetry. While fellow students’ work will be the primary texts, other possible readings include work by Cortney Lamar Charleston, Su Cho, Tarfia Faizullah, Nikky Finney, Dorothy Chan, torrin a. greathouse, Jillian Weise, and others.

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

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. No foreign language proficiency is required to participate in this course. 

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

In the same way that water is composed of two elements—hydrogen and oxygen—the personal essay essentially consists of anecdotes and reflections, i.e., facts and thoughts, or the objective and the subjective. What happened, and what what happened means. The artistry of the essay consists of not only balancing these two elements but combining them so that they complement but also contradict one another. In this workshop you’ll write multiple drafts of your own attempt at the form while line editing and critiquing your classmates’ attempts. At the same time we’ll read (and write about) foundational essays that are in overt dialogue with one another, starting with “Why I Write,” by George Orwell, and “Why I Write,” by Joan Didion. We’ll read James Baldwin in conjunction with the seminal essay he inspired Adrienne Rich to write, then look at infusions of poetry into the form via Natalia Ginzburg and Margaret Atwood. We'll end by reading Didion’s essay, “Goodbye to All That,” paired with Eula Biss' cover version, also titled "Goodbye to All That." You'll leave knowing the recent history, basic theory, and practice of nonfiction's most fundamental form.

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

A long tradition of scientific and environmental writing animates the genre of creative nonfiction. In this introductory workshop, you will develop a writing practice and deepened understanding of nonfiction through readings and prompts focused on expressing ecological realities and scientific facts through literary art. Writing prompts will offer techniques in translating jargon into lyricism, data into story. Bring your love of memoir and personal essay, and we will also trouble notions of nature and reconsider how language shapes our relationship to the environment. In exciting the boundaries of the essay, we might, as David Quamman puts it, write wild thoughts from wild places. Throughout the course of the quarter, we will examine our own work and others' from a critical perspective, looking carefully at tenets of voice, language, and form. We will finish the course with a more nuanced understanding of creative nonfiction as a whole, as well as our position within the field and the changing world more generally. Readings will include texts by Linda Hogan, Lacy Johnson, Helen MacDonald, Arundhati Roy, Esmé Weijun Wang, and *visiting writers.*

Day/Time: Friday, 9:30-12:20pm

Given the recent shift to remote learning and its challenging effects on mental health, this course is designed to get us out of our heads and back into our bodies, minimizing the time we spend looking at the screen through activities and prompts that stimulate physical awareness, support wellness, and enhance creativity. An active writing life demands a refined ability to stay present and receptive to ideas that not only inspire possibility but animate our hands into action. If we view the relationship between sensory experience, memory, and imagination as a triangle of interdependence, then by exercising the gifts of perception writers can gain access to a wealth of "raw material" that sparks discovery of unconscious themes and associations while forging a path for reader accessibility and immersion within the world of a story. Many issues of craft— setting, scene, imagery, characterization— boil down to a writer's intuitive understanding of how corporeality informs emotion and spirituality. From scavenger hunts to yoga, photography, cooking, and dancing, students will exercise the integration of the nervous system and the business of creation, developing original drafts that can be felt in the spine and enriched with a robust workshop experience. Given the multidimensional nature of our practice, students will have the option to pursue multimedia and cross-genre projects. Students with disabilities are strongly encouraged to join in this exploration of the senses.

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

Creative nonfiction is an often difficult to define genre. Frequently caught up in ontological and political controversies, and perpetually torn between allegiances to journalism, science, philosophy and art. This course will serve as a brief introduction into the genre by focusing on its history, primary influences and some of the major subgenres which compose it today. From the lyrical, narrative and hybrid, to science writing, reportage, the memoire and even illustrated journalism straight from warzones. This will be accomplished through reading, lectures, discussions and guided writing prompts.

Day/Time: Mondays, 10:30am-1:20pm

This workshop is an introduction to writing and revising poems, and the related art of giving helpful feedback to other writers. One of the course’s goals is to help you reflect on your writing as a process. Most weeks you will write drafts that focus on the poetic concepts we are studying. You’ll receive feedback on your drafts from your classmates during workshop and will respond both critically and creatively to theirs. At the end of the quarter, you’ll revise your drafts and collect them in a portfolio, accompanied by a critical introduction. At the same time, this course will also introduce you to poetry from a variety of time periods, languages, and approaches to content and structure. You’ll learn to apply critical tools and terminology by drafting poems that experiment with elements such as form, voice, rhythm, imagery, translation, and creative response. We’ll discuss not only how poems are written, but also why they are written and what relationship they have to the contexts in which they are written and read.

Day/Time: Fridays, 10:30am-1:20pm