CRWR

In Disproving the Pastoral, we’ll explore our own ties to rural landscapes as a means of interrogating and updating the pastoral tradition, just as we’ll investigate and write toward a more holistic landscape—one that integrates the literal and the political, the critical, and the sociocultural. Throughout the quarter, we will read, write, and discuss contemporary poems that are dedicated to the careful observation of—and commentary on—rural spaces. As we study works by Billy-Ray Belcourt, Nikky Finney, Joy Priest, Nikki Wallschlaeger, Matthew Wimberly, C.D. Wright and others, we will develop a keen eye for the multi- faceted utility of the landscape in our own work. We 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 collective vocabulary for creative and critical feedback. And, in the end, we will craft work that seeks to subvert the expected narratives of these far-off, rural places we take up as subjects.

The personal is political – that slogan of Women’s Liberation – has long been understood, among other things, as a call for new forms of storytelling. One of those forms, feminist biography, has flourished in publishing since the 1970s, and it continues to evolve today, even as the terms of feminism and of biography are continually re-negotiated by writers and critics. 

In this workshop, we read some of those writers and critics. And we read illustrative examples of contemporary feminist biography (and anti-biography) in various nonfiction genres, including magazine profile, trade book, Wiki article, audio performance, personal essay, cult pamphlet, avant-garde art piece. Mostly, we try out the form for ourselves, in our own writing. Each workshop writer will choose a biographical subject (single, collective, or otherwise), and work up a series of sketches around that subject. By the end of the quarter, workshop writers will build these sketches into a single piece of longform life-writing. The workshop will focus equally on story-craft and method (e.g. interview and research techniques, cultivating sources); indeed we consider the ways that method and story are inevitably connected. This workshop might also include a week with an invited guest, a practicing critic or biographer. 

Thinking about practices is a way of focusing a conversation between creative writers, art historians, curators, and working visual artists, all of whom are encouraged to join this workshop. We ourselves will be practicing and studying a wide variety of approaches to visual art. We’ll read critics like John Yau and Lori Waxman, memoirists like Aisha Sabbatini Sloan, inventive historians like Zbigniew Herbert, and poets like Gwendolyn Brooks and Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, as well as curatorial and museum writings, catalogue essays, artists' statements, and other experimental and practical forms.

The course hopes to support students both in developing useful practices and experimenting boldly. Classes will be shaped around current exhibitions and installations. Sessions will generally begin with student-led observation at the Smart Museum, and we will spend one session on close looking in the study room at the Smart. Students will also visit five collections, exhibitions and/or galleries and, importantly, keep a looking notebook. Students will write a number of exercises in different forms (immersive meditation, researched portrait, mosaic fragment), and will also write and revise a longer essay (on any subject and in any mode) to be workshopped in class.

Apart from it being nonfiction, a nonfiction feature is like a short story—in terms of length and scenes and characters and all the potential innovations of storytelling. In this writing workshop, students will go through each stage of composing a narrative nonfiction feature story. After generating a few ideas that seem original, surprising in their approach, and appropriate in scope, we will write pitches. After the class agrees to “assign” one of these features, each student will report, research and write a draft. The features will be workshopped in class, and students will go through an editorial process, polishing their stories and experimenting with style and form for a final assignment. Along the way, we will consider the mechanics, ethics and craft of this work as we read published nonfiction and talk to writers and reporters about their process. There will be an emphasis in the class on Chicago writers and their beats; in weekly writing assignments, students will also report on local stories.

The essay, derived from the French term essayer meaning "to try" or "to attempt," is not only a beloved sub-genre of creative nonfiction, but a form that yields many kinds of stories, thus many kinds of structures. Araceli Arroyo writes that the essay can “reach its height in the form of a lyric, expand in digression, coil into a list, delve into memoir, or spring into the spire of the question itself all with grace and unexhausted energy.” In this course, we will analyze the essay’s continuum, marked by traditional, linear narratives on one end, and at the other, everything else. In our class, we will investigate the relationship between content and form. What does it mean to be scene-driven? What happens when a narrative abandons chronology and event, propelled instead by language and image? What is gained through gaps and white space? You will leave this class with a strong grasp of content’s relationship to form, prepared to participate effectively in creative writing workshops. You will also create a portfolio of short writings that can be expanded into longer pieces. 

Readings will include: Nox by Anne Carson; A Bestiary by Lily Hoang; Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions by Valeria Luiselli; Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine; Essayists on the Essay edited by Ned Stuckey-French

If you’ve ever been sucked inside a rabbit-hole of threaded replies to your own objectively perfect Tweet or winced under the pressure of a scribble in So-and-So’s yearbook, you’ll know the art of extreme brevity is not for everyone. The kaleidoscopic nature of the human mind resists compression. Like a reflex away from an odor, your sentences want to run. I’ll try to keep this brief: some stories can only carry so much, and well, our breath is short. Containment is a source of drama, so let’s study the art of concision together. Students in this workshop will churn out 750-word essays each week, exchanging feedback on what sticks, and revising toward distillation. We’ll spend most of class honing what Bernard Cooper has called “an alertness to detail, a quickening of the senses, a focusing of the literary lens... until one has magnified some small aspect of what it means to be human.”

This course explores creative nonfiction that responds to the places where boundaries blur, culture encounters nature, the self meets the collective. Scottish writer Ali Smith once said, “The place where the natural world meets the arts is a fruitful, fertile place for both.” Robert Macfarlane suggests that we consider such places as an “ecotone” – a biological term for the liminal space between biomes “where two communities met and integrate.” Our exploration of writing about ecotones will take us outside of the classroom on tours, urban hikes, and neighborhood explorations that engage with Chicago's history, ecology, and architecture*. Writing creative nonfiction, we shall see, requires all of the sense; as we explore the city, students will the learn fundamentals of recording their observations and shaping them into story. Students will develop foundational creative nonfiction tenets, including scene-building, character development, point of view, voice, artful word choice, and structure. Inside the classroom, our workshop will foment a supportive, knowledgeable, and critical community in which to exchange and discuss original work. Course readings will include the work of Robin Wall Kimmerer, Elizabeth Kolbert, Brian Macfarlane and Lauret Savoy.

In this advanced workshop, we will explore the range of strategies and techniques that fiction writers employ to make readers suspend their disbelief. We will consider how imagined worlds are made to feel real and how invented characters can seem so human. We will contemplate how themes, motifs, and symbols are deployed in such a way that a story can feel curated without seeming inorganic. We will consider how hints are dropped with subtlety, how the ‘rules’ for what is possible in a story are developed, and how writers can sometimes defy their own established expectations in ways that delight rather than frustrate. From character consistency to twist endings, we’ll investigate how published authors lend a sense of realism and plausibility to even the most far-fetched concepts. Through regular workshops, we will also interrogate all student fiction through this lens, discussing the ways in which your narratives-in-progress create their own inner logic. Students will submit two stories to workshop and will be asked to write critiques of all peer work.

If, as the opening lines of Anna Karenina suggests, it is true that “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” then the unique character of family is largely determined by its distinct manner and type of conflict. In this advanced fiction workshop, we’ll examine fiction about family friction with an eye for observing the strategies that authors have used to construct dramas that revolve around how families love, cope, or crumple in the midst of crisis. As we identify tropes of family dysfunction, we’ll also consider the ways authors use narrative devices like point-of-view, setting, plot, and scene to investigate how we define family (and how those definitions have evolved); its bonds and intergenerational inheritances; how families—like institutions— are bonded by their distinctive habits, manners, mores, and laws; and how kinship might magnify, subvert, or critique larger society. Above all, we’ll debate what family life and family strife teach us about storytelling. Over the course of the term, we will write and workshop your own fiction inspired by model texts.

In a craft talk, writer Stephen Dobyns once described an exercise he used for generating stories inspired by Raymond Carver, who said about his process, "I write the first sentence, and then I write the next sentence and then the next." Apparently, Dobyns was frustrated by that answer, but later challenged himself to write 50 first sentences of potential stories. Then, he picked half of them and wrote 25 first paragraphs. From those, he eventually completed about a half dozen stories. (I learned this from an article by the great short story writer Kelly Link.) In this generative workshop, we will proceed in this fashion. During the first week, we’ll study the first sentences of stories and each write our own 50 first sentences. During the second week, we’ll study the first paragraphs of stories and each write 25 first paragraphs, and so on until all students have a few complete drafts of stories, one of which will be submitted to our in-class workshop. Along the way, we’ll read and discuss well-made stories by writers such as Kelly Link, Denis Johnson, Joy Williams, Edward P. Jones, Justin Torres, Mary Gaitskill, and many others. To be successful, students will read and write actively and share their well-informed opinions with enthusiasm, especially in our workshop discussions.