Advanced Workshops

This workshop will support students in developing useful practices and experimenting boldly. Working with recent technological transformations in the visual arts world, we’ll be keeping art notebooks in different forms (by hand, photographs, blog, instagram, collage). We’ll begin with Walter Benjamin’s classic essay about art and mechanical reproduction, and then work with some examples: 1. Virtually seen. Jennie C. Jones’s show Constant Structure, hung at the Arts Club of Chicago via face time, with pamphlet-catalogue by poet and critic Fred Moten; 2. Unseen. Lori Waxman, long the art critic of the Chicago Tribune, and her pandemic 60 word / min art critic project in Newcity of art reviews for artists with canceled shows; 3. Explained / packaged. The instagram feeds of museums; 4. Technological diary / memory methods. Looking back to T.J. Clarke’s book of 2006 The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing, and to Teju Cole’s Blind Spot, which uses his own photographs, and looking now at instagram feeds of Cole and other art writers; 5. Collaborations. Artists working as collaborator-curators and self-interpreters, with reference to a recent Dawoud Bey show at the Art Institute and a Venice installation by iris Kensmil and Remy Jungerman.  Each class will begin with student-led observation. Students will visit, in-person or on-line, five installations / exhibitions / events, and be workshopped twice. Final work, revised essay and looking notebook portfolio. 

Day/Time: Tuesday, 9:40-12:40 PM

In this advanced poetry workshop we will turn from the Romantic notion of poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling…recollected in tranquility” towards a postmodern practice of radical recycling in response to global crisis. We will resurrect, excavate, interrogate, pilfer from, and otherwise raid a variety of archives, as a means of artistic engagement with the circulating materials of civic life. We will study examples of literary works whose principal technique is one of scavenging among such nonliterary sources as court transcripts, weather reports, grammar lessons, a war criminal’s memoirs, and the dictionary itself, to create fresh encounters with language. Texts to be studied will include Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, Robin Coste Lewis’ Voyage of the Sable Venus, Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony, Lisa Robertson’s The Weather, C.D. Wright’s One Big Self,and M. Nourbese Philips’ Zong!, among others. Students will spend the quarter seeking out and assembling their own archives, and experimenting on the page with acts of salvage. Because this is a workshop, a large part of every class will be devoted to discussions of students’ original work.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 1:00-4:00 PM

Students will write and turn in two full-length stories or novel chapters for this workshop-based class. The class will pay special attention to plot: what it is, what the specific engines are that drive it, how it's connected to other elements such as character, setting, and dialogue. In addition to submitting and reading for workshop, expect to read and discuss at least one novel and a selection of short stories.

Day/Time: Thursday 1:00 - 4:00 PM

It’s clear, increasingly, that we live in a time of imperiling crisis—political, ecological, even religious. Apocalypse is one of the genres poets use to make moral claims on the present, as well as to envision the nature of reality to come. Apocalypse also refers to vision, to a way of seeing that is both allegorical and incendiary. How, within the realms and forms of the contemporary poetic imagination, can you persuasively engage apocalypse? In this workshop, students will approach your own apocalyptic claims with those of some visionary masters in hand, including Emily Dickinson, Robert Lax, Fanny Howe, Pam Rehm, Adonis, Lawrence Joseph, Brian Teare, Autumn Richardson, Tim Lilburn, and Richard Skelton. Forms, language, and vision will absorb our study with a focus on visualizing and sharing your own apocalyptic poetry.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 9:40-12:40

It’s long been said that there are no new stories, only new ways of telling old ones, but how do writers reengage familiar genres, plots, and themes without being redundant? This course will confront the literary cliché at all levels, from the trappings of genre to predictable turns of plot to the subtly undermining forces of mundane language. We will consider not only how stories can fall victim to cliché but also how they may benefit from calling on recognizable content for the sake of efficiency, familiarity, or homage. Through an array of readings that represent unique concepts and styles as well as more conventional narratives we will examine how published writers embrace or subvert cliché through story craft. Meanwhile, student fiction will be discussed throughout the term in a supportive workshop atmosphere that will aim not to expose clichés in peer work, but to consider how an author can find balance—between the familiar and the unfamiliar, between the predictable and the unpredictable—in order to maximize a story’s effect. Students will submit two stories to workshop and will be asked to write critiques of all peer work.

Day/Time: Wednesday, 10:20-12:20

Where’s your home? Why is that home? The great Toni Morrison writes, “Home is memory and companions and/or friends who share the same memory.“ In this advanced fiction workshop, we will write and read work that explores aspects of home: landscape, people, language, history, customs, memories, etc. The first few weeks we will read and discuss exemplary short stories and novel excerpts from writers including Edward P. Jones, Flannery O’Connor, Junot Diaz, and Jesmyn Ward. In later weeks, each workshop member will write and submit one full-length story or stand-alone chapter for workshop and either a second story or stand-alone chapter or significant revision of the first story. While each submission will receive holistic feedback, we will also pay particular attention to the aspects of home explored in each submission. Furthermore, will also work to deepen the skills necessary to revise your work and to critique the work of others. The course will include writing exercises to assist in exploring a range of strategies, impulses, and ideas.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 2:40-5:40

Between the autopsical facts of science writing and the adaptations, novelizations and base-on-true-story stories, lies a very specific type of writing. The creative nonfiction exploration of the recounted lives of others. From Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago,” to Brian Doyle’s “Thirsty for the Joy,” from John Hershey’s “Hiroshima” and Art Spiegelman’s “Mouse” to Rebecca Skloot’s “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” the world of nonfiction writing is rife with second, third, and fourth hand stories in which the essayist must learn to negotiate the researched history of people and places, with the imagined mind of these people moving across equally imaginary spaces. How do we believably and respectfully tell others’ stories? How do we learn to find them? How do we draw these stories out, jot them down? How do we know when to make them our own and when to leave them in the liminal space of another’s inaccessible and inimitable experience? Where is the line between imaginative nonfiction and imaginary tales? This course is designed to tackled these specific questions through workshops of student work, writing prompts and guided discussions of assigned texts that attempt to unravel this very matter through numerous and varied approaches.

Day/Time: Friday, 10:20-12:20

In the radically different environment we anticipate for this fall, this course will work creatively to build individual writing projects and collaborative ones. Students will keep observation notebooks and we’ll develop an ongoing class publication online with reports from all the locations students are residing in (this might be a room, a neighborhood, a landscape, a city, or other kinds of places). The course will consider creative research methods in constrained times, with special attention to walking and other local kinds of investigation. We'll discuss observation, interviewing, historical research, keeping a notebook, supportive editorial relationships, and working from photography, video, and the internet. Some thematic clusters and possible reading: walking, local, and photographic investigation (Rebecca Solnit, Francisco Cantú, Teju Cole, Hervé Guibert); reckoning with history, ideas of reparations (Claudia Rankine, Layli Long Soldier, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Tommy Orange, Nikole Hannah-Jones) migration, testimony, interview, and borders (Valeria Luiselli, Liu Xiaobo, Edwidge Danticat), climate crisis and slow emergency (Winona LaDuke, Elizabeth Rush), notebook practices (H.D. Thoreau, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Walter Benjamin). Students will write in an ongoing way for our shared publication, produce essays to be workshopped in class, and develop writing, researching, and editorial skills.

Day/Time: Wednesday, 10:20 AM-12:20 PM

In this course, we will not only explore how stories function individually, but also how they can come together in a collection to form a coherent and unified story or experience. Please come prepared to read and discuss published story collections, focusing in particular on the formal and thematic ties of discrete narratives. With this in mind, we will also workshop two to three of your own short stories. By the end of the course, you will have written the first three stories of your collection and developed a plan for how to proceed with the project.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 9:40-12:40

Fiction writers say “If there’s no trouble, there’s no story”—an easier adage without the presumption of truth. This class will consider techniques for rendering “trouble” in narrative nonfiction. How can we write about the wrongs of others—and the wrongs we ourselves have committed—in a way that makes for a compelling story and an ultimately likable narrator? What makes a rendering of hate, abuse, indifference, ingratitude, or jealously compelling or empathetic in the end? What techniques—of persona, characterization, humor, pacing, or form—might help us write honestly and generously at the same time? And when generosity is not our aim, what other vehicles of connection are available to us? Readings may include essays by Jo Ann Beard, Richard Rodriguez, Shalom Auslander, Jesmyn Ward, Bret Lott, Albert Goldbarth, and Ocean Vuong.

Day/Time: Tuesday/Thursday: 11:20-12:40