CRWR

This Thesis/Major Projects Workshop is designed for students working on creative writing thesis projects in fiction. Together, we will use the workshop to create new material and to revise, exploring how fiction writers make readable structures out of the chaos of experience and imagination. Our guiding questions include: what stories can a work of fiction tell, and how? What is "true" in fiction, and what is the relationship between journalistic truth and artistic truth? You are already familiar with the fundamentals of plot and character; we will continue to hone the skills you've learned, toward writing characters who are multidimensional, plots that move, and contexts that matter. Narrative voice is an essential tool for creating coherence as well as raising (fictional) stakes. In every scene we read and write, we will consider the impact of the use of inside or outside perspective, declarative scenes and actions, and interiority. The perspectives and situations students write should be original, inimitable, and fresh; the prose should aim to keep lively even topics that are timeless: coming of age, culture, identity, death, and family. As students create and polish their capstone projects, their work will serve as an occasion on which to consider authorial perspective, structure, and craft. We will look carefully at the shapes of projects, exploring why some works organically belong to fiction and others to dramatic writing, poetry, or creative non-fiction. Sometimes students will adapt pages into other forms, in an effort to test their elasticity and allow them their fullest range of expression.

This thesis workshop is for students writing a creative BA or MA thesis in fiction, as well as creative writing minors completing the portfolio. It is primarily a workshop, so please come to our first class with your project in progress (a story collection, a novel, or a novella), ready for you to discuss and to submit some part of for critique. As in any writing workshop, we will stress the fundamentals of craft like language, voice, and plot and character development, with an eye also on how to shape your work for the longer form you have chosen. And as a supplement to our workshops, we will have brief student presentations on the writing life: our literary influences, potential avenues towards publication, etc.

In this course we will investigate the many forms poets have invented, remixed, and remade across time to sing their songs and express the news of the day. We will read poems ancient and contemporary, and also turn to song, video, dance, architecture, and other modes of expression to find inspiration to create our own new forms. We will study the components of a poem—syntax, music, imagery, sense, line—as we study larger structures a poem can take, and we will constantly be mindful of the historical dimension of our practice. We will become familiar with the campus arts calendar, as attendance at a minimum of two events (at least one literary) is required. Emphasis will be on writing exercises, student presentations on course readings, and student-led workshops of each other’s poems generated during the course. These writing efforts will be discussed by the class in workshops and revised for a final portfolio comprised of drafts of poems accompanied by a critical consideration and a clippings journal featuring other people’s poems, articles, and images gathered during the quarter.

This course studies how writers engage the senses to shape language into something actually felt and not just comprehended. We’ll track the sensual life of words—what they do to the mouth, to the ear, their musical kinships with one another—and learn how these qualities combine to generate mood and atmosphere. Alongside writing that renders embodiment and the physical world, we’ll read writing that makes abstraction feel concrete. Our weekly readings will guide our ongoing inquiry into questions such as: what constitutes an image? How does writing enact feeling? How do the sensory elements of a piece intensify or erode or expand its subject, and to what end? Texts will include poetry and prose by Sei Shōnagon, Francis Ponge, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Gwendolyn Brooks, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wanda Coleman, Vasko Popa, Lorine Niedecker, Ai, Durga Chew-Bose, Shane McCrae, Jenny Zhang, Justin Torres, James Baldwin, Deborah Eisenberg, and many others. Each member of the class will be asked to write weekly critical and creative responses, to give one presentation, and to produce a final project at the end of the quarter.

In this core course, students will investigate the complicated relationship between truth and art, by reading, watching, and writing works adapted from an historical record or “based on a true story.” Weekly reading assignments will include fiction, poetry, memoir, and film, and students will write both critical essays and creative exercises that explore the overlaps and divergences between journalistic and artistic truth. Readings: Aristotle, Baldwin, Bechdel, Carson, Northup, and Rankine.

The Gothic is arguably the most evocative of all storytelling genres. As haunting as it is seductive in its ambiguities and luridly symbolic tropes, no form more powerfully captures our encounters with the irrational and the inexplicable, whether in nature, in others, or in ourselves. In this Arts Core course, we will approach the genre through all its forbidding yet intimate qualities. As we read Gothic fiction from different eras and cultures, from both a reader’s perspective and a writer’s perspective (the why/how/who of the author’s decisions), we’ll cover concepts like the sublime, the uncanny, and abjection, examining the work’s sociopolitical layers but aiming our brightest light on its psychological underpinnings. We’ll ask ourselves: in what ways does the Gothic mirror the most vulnerable and obscure aspects of the self? What might these extraordinary stories of transgression, violence, or supernatural conflict reveal about the horrors of ordinary life, the vagaries of our hidden desires, anxieties, and pathologies? Our focus on the psychological and evocative nature of the genre, especially from a writer’s point of view, will also help us write our Gothic Scenes, where everyone will apply their own intimate “gothic lens” to memorable encounters from their recent past. 

According to Philip Gerard, “Creative research is both a process and a habit of mind, an alertness to the human story as it lurks in unlikely places.” Creative writers may lean on research to sharpen the authenticity of their work; to liberate themselves from the confines of their personal experience; to mine existing stories and histories for details, plot, settings, characters; to generate new ideas and approaches to language, theme and story. The creative writer/researcher is on the hunt for the numinous particulars, the mysteries and human stories lurking in the finest grains of detail. In this course, we will explore the research methods used by creative writers and consider questions that range from the logistical (eg. How do I find what I need in an archive?) to the ethical (eg. How do I conscientiously write from a point of view outside my own experience?) to the aesthetic (eg. How do I incorporate all these researched details without waterlogging the poem/story/essay?). We will read poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction that relies heavily on research and hear from established writers about the challenges of conducting and writing from research. Assignments will include reading responses, creative writing and research exercises, short essays and presentations.

Might there be a kind of poem that acts like a parasite latched on to a host body? A poem whose very life is the fusion of various sources, voices, discourses? This poetry workshop invites students to read and write poetry that, either overtly or subtly, engages with other texts. We’ll examine ways that poems create intertextual relationships (e.g. quoting, voicing, alluding, echoing, stealing, sampling, imitating, translating…) and test out these methods in our own writing. Students should expect to engage with the basic question of how their work relates to other poets and poems. Expect to read a substantial amount of work by modern and contemporary poets, submit new original poems for workshop, complete intertextual writing exercises, participate in discussion forums with both initial response papers and follow-up comments, critique peers’ work, and submit a final portfolio. A substantial amount of class time will be spent workshopping student work.

This course will be a deep dive into prosody. What is prosody? Merriam-Webster describes it as “the rhythmic and intonational aspect of language” — we might also describe it as the way poems move, and how they move their reader. Arguably one of the most important (and least visible) aspects of poetic composition, prosody can teach you to see and write differently. We’ll begin with an introduction to historical metrics (the boring but necessary part), and then move on to studying more contemporary models. Readings will include a bit of scholarly work on prosody by Rosemary Gates and Boris Maslov, but mostly we’ll read poems, from the 12th century to the 21st, that foreground prosody and rhythmic structure. This will be a practice-intensive class—you will be asked to produce several exercises a week, in addition to a final paper or project.

This workshop-centered course introduces writers to foundational concepts and tools in the craft of poetry, including form, diction, voice, line, and meter. Regular assignments include both prompts and imitations in poetry writing, and will culminate in a final portfolio developed in working consultation with the instructor. In particular, we will explore formal adaptations of “the line” as “measure” within American poets' work. A short unit within the course will also be dedicated to the translation of poets writing outside of English. Poets whose work will be discussed include Emily Dickinson, Nate Marshall, Bernadette Mayer, Frank O'Hara, Adrienne Rich, Sappho, César Vallejo, Walt Whitman, and poets visiting the UChicago campus.