CRWR

This technical seminar focuses on poems’ development of image through the work of urban writers. We will explore the lineage of urban lyric within the nineteenth century, then reflect on its development in the contemporary city. What impulse defines an “urban poetics?” What is urban lyric’s relationship with painting and photography? Do all city poems reflect one “city” in the end or is a more local impulse at work in cities as foci for writing? This course seeks to establish a solid, working basis in examining “image” and its lyric development through critical reflection and field work. To this end, we will work with a range of urban writers, including Paul Blackburn, Andrew Colarusso, Wanda Coleman, Kevin Killian, Frank O’Hara, Salima Rivera, Ed Roberson, and David Ulin. 

These days, the words inoculation and vaccination are used interchangeably, despite the fact that the English word inoculation predates Western vaccination practices by nearly a century. In this class, students will explore the concept of inoculation as a kind of alchemy, a melding of science and zeitgeist. We will study the perspectives of writers across various cultures, genres, and academic specialties as we examine the ideological roots and ever-shifting cultural significance of inoculation. We’ll look closely at selections from Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Satius’s The Achilleid, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria, Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, Richard Rodriguez’s Darling, Jamaica Kinkaid’s My Brother, and Eula Biss’s On Immunity, among others. Through class discussion, reading responses, academic papers, and creative writing assignments, we will discuss the relationship between concepts of protection and concepts of vulnerability, alongside the ways inoculation—of various sorts—has served as a hallmark of self-governance, a shoring up of community, and, of course, a medical mandate.

In this seminar we will study the theory and practice of Oral History, and we will create original oral accounts of migration from our own families as well as from a wider range of Chicago communities. We will work to understand the method and politics of Oral History, and to gain facility in practice and written presentation. Oral History, the poetry of the everyday, the literature of the street, is perfectly poised to open a unique window onto our migration stories, offering a narrative space where an interviewer, listening with empathy and identification, and a story-teller, seizing an occasion to perform an account of events and experiences, co-create and reveal a universe of meaning-making. Seeking authenticity, oral historians become attuned to contradiction, tension, disagreements, silences, inconsistencies, ambiguities, paradoxes, uncertainties, and every other kind of human muddle; we dive head-first into the wide, wild world of human experience and human meaning-making, offering an important antidote to propaganda, dogma, imposition and stereotype. Learning to question, to interrogate, to experiment, to wonder and wander, to pay full attention, to construct and create—this is the foundation upon which to build an Oral History project of purpose and importance. We look for what happened, and the webs of significance people construct to make sense of what happened.

Wallace Stevens suggests that “The essential thing in form is to be free in whatever form is used.” How does form provide a kind of freedom for a poet? How does it manifest itself in a poem? Does it mean we have to follow prescribed rules, or is there a more intuitive approach? This course will give students a chance to try out a range of traditional and experimental forms, both as an attempt to improve as writers and in order to interrogate form and its other, what Bataille called the formless, or “unformed” (l’informe). We’ll explore traditional and contemporary takes on a variety of forms, such as sonnets, odes, aphorisms, serial poems, and poetic collage. Students should expect to write exercises, submit new poems, contribute feedback on peer work, write short response papers, and submit a final portfolio.

Friday 12:30pm-3:20pm

“Which one of us, in his moments of ambition, has not dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose," wrote Charles Baudelaire in Paris Spleen,"... supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the jibes of conscience?” This genre-blurring workshop will explore elements of the history and practice of the prose poem, and other poems and texts that combine strategies, forms and gestures of prose (fiction, nonfiction, etc.) with those of poetry. We will also read texts that are difficult to classify in terms of genre. “Flash Fiction,” “Short Shorts,” the fable, the letter, the mini-essay, and the lyric essay will be examined, among others. We will discuss the literary usefulness (or lack of it) of genre and form labels. The class will be taught as a workshop: students will try their hand at writing in their choices of hybrid forms, and will be encouraged to experiment. Writers from all genres are welcome, as what we will be studying, discussing, and writing will involve the fruitful collision of literary genres.

Thursday 12:30pm-3:20pm 

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.

Monday 2:30pm-5:20pm

There are many creative ways to write of, about, from, and because of reading. In this class, serious readers will have the chance to practice forms they love and may not often get chances to write: the incisive review, the long-form reading memoir, the biographical sketch of a writer in history, the interview, the essay about translation, diaristic fragments. In this course, we’ll develop individual approaches, styles and regular practices. We’ll make use of both creative (and traditional) research, analysis, and criticism, and explore the wide terrain available to creative writers. We’ll go back to foundational essayists including Toni Morrison and Virginia Woolf, study contemporary writers of reading such as Jazmina Berrera, Claire Messud, Niela Orr, Ruth Franklin, Emily Bernard, Hanif Abdurraqib, and Parul Sehgal. Students will keep a reading/writing notebook, conduct an interview, and write and revise a longer essay for workshop.

Tuesday 9:30am-12:20pm

Where does childhood end and adulthood begin? For Wordsworth growth happens in reverse. “The Child is the father of the Man,” he wrote in 1802, yearning to recall the fundamental joy of a rainbow. Proust was eager to forget his schooldays: “We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us.” In this class, students will search their lives for events and lessons which they may consider formative, together evaluating the standards they use to qualify rites of passage, in order to isolate unique patterns of growth that students can call their own. Half the quarter will be dedicated to discussing original student work. A multitude of possibilities will be offered by readings of contemporary memoirists from all walks of life. By the quarter's end, each student will have laid down the groundwork for a dexterous memoir about surviving the challenges of their youth, and in doing so perhaps even imagine a future that is less prescribed and more personally fulfilling.   

Friday 12:30pm-3:20pm

As writers, your "voice" is you imposing who you are on the truthfulness of your sentences. Finding your voice, then, is the process—whether you’re describing a character, an image, or an idea—of constantly asking yourself, Do I absolutely believe this?, of rewriting and rewriting your sentences until you absolutely do believe it, and finally of refining all the technical aspects you brought to bear to assure that level of individual truth. Out of that, naturally and inevitably, comes your voice—at least for the time being. In this workshop, we’ll examine this crucial stage in the development of your own aesthetic, which is not merely a writing style, but more importantly a personal perspective on the world that informs and is informed by that style. We will read a selection of writers with distinctive worldviews and thus distinctive literary voices (Paul Bowles, Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Lorrie Moore, Ottessa Moshfegh, Ocean Vuong, Garth Greenwell, etc.), and we’ll complement those readings with writing exercises and workshops of your own fiction, where you will actively interrogate, cultivate, and refine your emerging voice. 

Tuesday 2:00pm-4:50pm

The unshackled narrators that dominate many of our most exciting novels—from Dostoevsky’s underground man to the uber-relatable mother of 2019’s Ducks, Newburyport—take their bearings not from the scenic method of theater or the omniscient narration of history but from the essay form and from oral storytelling.  This workshop plumbs those resources to better understand this alternative tradition, studying the craft that can make unruly narrative both highly entertaining and intellectually satisfying, exploring rhetoric, repetition, leitwortstil, logical nesting, suspense, digression, irony, and humor.  While executing creative exercises in voice, we’ll read books of furious energy by Thomas Bernhard and Jamaica Kincaid alongside cooler, essayistic meanders by W. G. Sebald and Claire-Louise Bennett.  Students will compose and workshop a substantial work that takes its cues from these examples.

Tuesday 9:30am-12:20pm