CRWR

“It’s very boring to talk about winners,” Umberto Ecco once said. “The real literature always talks about losers.” In this class, we shall embrace all manner of failures, no-accounts, and deadbeats, those unlikely central characters around which good fiction often rotates, considering how they intrigue us with their flaws and failings, but also how they can present pitfalls at the levels of plot (lack of agency), tone (reward vs. punishment), and reader sympathy. Through an array of short fiction, as well as selected poems, films, and an illustrated novel, this course aims to uncover the ways narrative craft can infuse stories driven by shiftless and inept protagonists with a sense of curation, poignancy, and meaning. Students will also attempt their own short story versions of “loser lit,” to be workshopped by the class. All are welcome. Expectations will be very low.

According to Albus Dumbledore, "To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure." And to the well-organized fiction writer, it can be the same. In this class, we’ll explore mortality as a literary device, considering how it not only brings a measure of incident to our stories, but also how it infuses the pages with darkness, sentiment, and consequence. The downside, of course, comes when too much darkness swamps a story with pessimism; when sentiment tilts into sentimentality; or when the consequences of such high stakes test a reader’s ability to suspend disbelief. Through readings of mostly short fiction, we’ll uncover how death can trigger stories of aftermath, how it can operate as a climax to build toward, or how it makes space for unexpected outcomes. Students will also write their own stories—about death, containing death, starring the character Death, or perhaps something more death-adjacent—which we’ll workshop as a group, focusing on the ways in which mortality sets tone, drives plot, and influences style.  

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.

“The novel is exhaustive by nature,” Steven Millhauser once wrote. “The short story by contrast is inherently selective. By excluding almost everything, it can give perfect shape to what remains.” The short story label, however, often feels imperfect, since it covers such a broad swath of literary forms. While micro- and flash-fiction renditions can resemble poems, longer prose narratives often press into murkier territories such as that of the novella or the connected collection. Through readings and workshops of students’ own fiction, this course will explore the parameters of the short story, its scope and ambitions, its limitations as well. We’ll read established masters alongside newer literary voices, breaking down their work not simply as examples of meaningful fiction, but as road maps toward a greater awareness of what makes a short story operate. Discussion will revolve around basic elements of narrative craft—point of view, pacing, language, etc.—in an effort to define the ways in which any story can be conveyed with economy, precision, and power.

“Write what you know,” as a literary motto, doesn’t mean writers focus narrowly on their own experiences. Thankfully, we can get to know other people as well—through conversations, careful observation and research. Writing a profile is an act of empathy. Students in this profile writing workshop will learn how to conduct interviews and do basic reporting, and they will hone their skills as nonfiction storytellers. Some of the reading, reporting and writing will look at Chicago and Chicagoans—getting to know and make sense of people around us. Other subjects will visit during class time. In considering the extent to which we can’t fully know the people we portray, students will also explore how writers (along with documentary filmmakers, historians, journalists, obituary writers) address these limitations creatively in their work. Students will complete a short profile each week, and they will write one longer and revised profile as a final.

Beginning Workshops are intended for students who may or may not have previous writing experience, but are interested in gaining experience in a particular genre. These workshops focus on the fundamentals of craft and feature workshops of student writing. 

Beginning Fiction Workshop: Larger Than Life explores the concept of the indelible—that hard-to-define quality that makes an element of fiction “jump off the page” and become instantly memorable. We’ll explore hyperbole, duality, idiosyncrasy, narrative voice, the sublime, and many other techniques, then put them into practice to make our own fiction “larger than life.” 

How do we hear the voice of a text when we’re reading in another language? What makes a voice intrinsically itself? And where can we locate those qualities in the language that the voice speaks in? This workshop explores what translators read for when constructing a narrative or poetic voice in English. Students will select a long-form literary text to translate, and we will work through the drafting process by breaking the text down into short extracts that we will close-read together each week in class. In doing so, we’ll listen through the translation for evidence of how the source wants to sound, in order to discern its voice, its tendencies, and how it behaves in language. Our own translation work will be accompanied by assigned readings that represent a range of contemporary world literature in translation, paying attention to what the translator does with English to sketch a cohesive voice. We’ll build toward the polished translation of a short prose text or a selection of poems, which students will submit as part of a final portfolio, along with a translator’s note that provides critical commentary on their reading of the source text and their treatment of it in translation. To participate in this course, students should have reading proficiency in a language other than English.

Since the commercialization of the internet in the 1990s, the online space has evolved and fractured into different commodifications. In this course, we will look at depictions in contemporary literature of the experience of being online, of engaging with various platforms, and the mindsets that it creates. At heart in this course, we are looking at the ways in which fiction attempts to mimic, critique, mock, or even take pleasure in another medium, and what fiction is able to do by co-opting another medium. We may read works by Jaron Lanier, Tony Tulathimutte, Patricia Lockwood, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, and Ben Lerner. As an antidote to all of this thinking about onlineness, we will also engage in creative writing exercises, some inspired by or made possible by being online.

This course will introduce students to recent debates in the environmental humanities while exposing them to a range of works spanning fiction, documentary prose, poetry, and film that engage what has come to be called the Anthropocene era (despite substantive challenges to the term that we will address). We will read foundational texts in environmental perception and activism (John Ruskin’s “Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century” and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring) in dialogue with modernist work surrounding urban landscapes (William Carlos Williams’s Paterson). We will then open onto a wide range of contemporary texts that engage the natural and constructed environment in crisis. Students will be asked to conduct fieldwork on an environmental theme of their choosing (climate change, petrol economies, watershed issues, air quality, pandemics and the management of wild animals, species extinction, etc.) and to produce a portfolio of short creative pieces in response to an issue or debate that interests them. Students are asked to ponder possible topics of interest prior to the first class meeting.