CRWR

Thinking about practices is a way of focusing a conversation between art historians, creative writers, 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, writers who move back and forth with photographs like Teju Cole, Aisha Sabbatini Sloan and Geoff Dyer, interview-writers like Jordan Stein,  diarists like Hervé Guibert, and Chicago writers like Lee Bey and Rebecca Zorach.   

The course hopes to support students both in developing useful practices and experimenting boldly.  Class sessions will begin with student-led observation at the Smart Museum, and we will spend one session on close looking at works on paper 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.

In Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: Queering the Essay, we'll approach the essay as a vehicle for queer narratives, as a marker of both individual and collective memory, and as a necessary compliment to the journalism and scholarship that have shaped queer writing. Through readings and in-class exercises, we'll explore tenets of the personal essay, like narrative structure and pacing, alongside considerations of voice and vulnerability. After a brief historical survey, we'll look to contemporary essayists as our guides--writers like Billy-Ray Belcourt, Melissa Faliveno, Saeed Jones, Richard Rodriguez, and T. Fleischmann-- alongside more familiar writers like Alison Bechdel and Maggie Nelson. And through student-led workshops, we'll wrestle with concerns that often trouble narratives of otherness: What does it mean to write a personal narrative that has a potential social impact? How can we write trauma without playing into harmful stereotypes? How can our writing work as--or make demands toward--advocacy, rather than voyeurism?

Writing about work, jobs, and vocational experiences may seem contradictory— or even antithetical—to our goals in fiction. After all, if we aim to inspire, to invigorate, to otherwise wield a narrative “axe for the frozen sea within us” (as Kafka wrote), why write about the very day-to-day tasks so often charged with numbing and blurring our sensation of life? In this workshop, we will explore and answer this question with our own work-focused fictions, developing strategies for defamiliarizing the mundane, and using routines to build dramatic tension. Utilizing a combination of creative workshops and exercises—and drawing upon models from the job-focused fiction of Eugene Marten, Dorothy Allison, Lucia Berlin, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Edwidge Danticat, and other writers—we will also deepen and develop our characters through precise depictions of their work environments.

In this advanced fiction workshop, we will examine and write narratives set at college, the so-called campus and varsity novels (and short stories). We will try to capture the attendant promise and uncertainty of life on the cusp of adulthood, asking what it means to come of age, to age, to experiment, and possibly, to regress. We’ll attempt to veer away from cultural cliché and caricature to portray the truth of life on (and off) campus and come to grips with the way you live right now, as we consider what it means—to borrow the title of one such novel—to make our home among strangers. Students will read published works by Elif Batuman, Danielle Evans, and Alice Munro, and will submit up to two original stories or novel excerpts for workshop. Please expect a rigorous but constructive workshop environment where being a critic and an editor is essential.

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. 

Essay, derived from the French term essayer, means an attempt. To essay is to try, to experiment, to fail. In this class, we will explore a spectrum of these nonfiction experiments, moving from fractured, lyric, mosaic texts to linear, scene-driven, and found structures. In examining the relationship between content and form, we will parse the ways form itself has narrative agency. Students will analyze how language and image can drive a piece of nonfiction; we will consider the role of white space, silence, absence, and gaps. Our approach will recontextualize scene-driven narrative as an aesthetic choice, not a hallowed tradition. Students will develop a portfolio of reading responses and short creative pieces that explore this vibrant genre which is at once confiding and solitary; free and unfinished. “A good essay seems to question itself in a way that a novel or short story does not – or perhaps it is simply that an essay leaves the questions on the page, there for everyone to see; it is a forum for self-doubt, for an attempt whose outcome isn’t assured.” Students will leave this class with a strong grasp of the essay tradition and how to bring – and leave – their own questions around the form. Readings will include Terese Marie Mailhot, Carmen Maria Machado, Mark Spragg and others.

In her seminal essay “On Being Ill,” Virginia Woolf writes, “Literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear. [...] On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes.” This seminar will actively examine these bodily interventions in writing, and explore the merits of engaging deeply and precisely with the taboo subjects of sex, aging, illness, bodily change, and bodily difference. We will also discuss the concept of embodied writing—and the embodiment of physical experience through writing —using the body-centered prose of Bruno Schulz, Annie Ernaux, Rebecca Brown, Yasunari Kawabata, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, and other writers. Assignments will include short critical and creative responses, a final fiction assignment, and a final presentation.

Rightly dismissed, sometimes, as the home of costume dramas and simplistic crowd-pleasers, historical fiction was once the forge of European realism, honing priorities of detail, scene, and character development that could bring the bare historical record to life.  Today, some historical fiction remains a site of pressing experiment, and in this seminar we’ll read such work to unlock the arguments of craft that spur fiction to distinguish itself from non-fiction in ways that still feel fresh.  Analytical and creative responses will follow readings in historical magical realism (Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or Toni Morrison), counterfactual historical fiction (John Keene or Laurent Binet), imagined biography (Fleur Jaeggy, Marcel Schwob, or Virginia Woolf), and in scholarship that itself borrows the tools of fiction (John Demos or Saidiya Hartman).  Along the way we’ll discuss illuminating critical polemics, and at the quarter’s end students will prepare an essay or experiment that uses historiography to throw the techniques of fiction into a new light

Writing fiction is in large part a matter of convincing world-building, no matter what genre you write in. And convincing world-building is about creating a seamless reality within the elements of that world: from character dynamics, to setting, to social systems, and even the story or novel’s conceptual conceit. And whether it be within a genre of realism, historical fiction, or science fiction, building a convincing world takes a good deal of research. So while we look closely at the tools and methods of successful world-building, we will also dig into the process of research. From how and where to mine the right details, to what to look for. We will also focus on how research can make a fertile ground for harvesting ideas and even story. Students will read various works of long and short fiction with an eye to its world-building, as well as critical and craft texts. They will write short weekly reading responses and some creative exercises as well. Each student will also be expected to make a brief presentation and turn in a final paper for the class. The class will also be linked with the History Department’s ExoTerra Imagination Lab.

Characterization in any literary form seeks to bring a person, a story, and a world or worldview to life; but whether on the page or beyond it, what does it actually mean to be a character and to have character? In this course, we will approach this question not just as a matter of literary craft, but as an inquiry into how we see and construct our own humanity. Characterization, in that sense, involves more than design and imagination; it requires us to examine the various lenses we use to define ourselves collectively and personally as human beings—the lens of truth, of morality, of empathy, of self, etc. This can be a thorny but clarifying endeavor for a writer. Simply put: to create character, you have to interrogate who you are, even when your characters are nothing like you. To that end, we will discuss the fiction, essays, memoir, and poetry we read as exemplars of compelling and beautiful characterization, as well as a (speculative) reflection of who the authors think they are and how they see the world. We will also do reading responses, creative writing exercises, and presentations that will help us consider and apply what each of us means when we use the word character.