CRWR

This course invites readers to reconsider Chicago as collage constructed through literary, journeyed, and virtual navigation.  We’ll examine work by writers and artists including Claude Dangerfield, Thomas Dyja, Eve Ewing, Bradley Garrett, Aleksandar Hemon, Richard Nickel, Mike Shea, and Chris Ware.  At what points does Chicago’s necropolis “peek out?”  Versus Walt Whitman, how does the artist’s eye retain defining power in the twenty-first century?  Is there such a thing as a “Chicago flâneuse or flâneur?”  In exploration of these questions, participants will develop their own individual and collaborative creative responses to “the world’s second most closely observed city.” 

Day/Time: Tuesday, 2:00-4:50pm

Whether a memoir operates in the past or present tense, its narrator must reckon with some kind of unfinished business. While memory is the raw material of an autobiographical story, the drama exists inside the act of remembering, of reckoning with the “why” or “how” a narrator’s previous character or worldview has been transformed. In this class, we will study the structural, tonal, and representational possibilities of the "privileged perspective”: the vantage point from which a narrator writes across time and emotional distance from an experience, usually with the goal of resolution, revelation, or the conveyance of something that can only be approximated. We will close-read a number of contemporary memoirists that teach us how the privileged perspective works to drive forward a narrator’s agenda while upholding the reader’s stake in a story, exploring a multitude of interpretations through student-led presentations. Authors may include Jean-Dominique Bauby, Vladimir Nabokov, Vivian Gornick, Hisham Matar, Darin Strauss, and Joan Didion. In addition to one group presentation, students will be expected to track and analyze the functions of the privileged perspective via critical reading reports and technical writing prompts.

Day/Time: Wednesday, 12:30-3:20pm

In this writing workshop, students will go through all the stages 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 and re-write pitches, learning how to highlight the potential story in these ideas. 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 through drafts 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/reporters about their process. In the end, we should be able to put together a publication that contains all of these feature stories.

Day/Time: Friday, 1:30-4:20pm

Like so many essential and life-sustaining processes—relationship maintenance, money management, digestion—revision is something we often talk about without “really” talking about it (to use the words of writer Matthew Salesses). Yet by refusing (or failing) to “really” talk about revision, writers deny themselves the opportunity to actively engage with the potentialities of their work: the different shapes, forms, and shifts it might take. In this class, we will demystify the revision process by analyzing the works of writers—such as Anna Kavan, Edwidge Danticat, and Suzanne Scanlon—who have pursued radical revisions to their projects, including expansions (short stories developed into novels), compressions (longer works condensed into shorter pieces), point of view changes, and dramatic stylistic transformations. With a combination of creative exercises and workshops, we will also work toward our own radical revisions.

Day/Time: Friday, 1:30pm-4:20pm

In this workshop based course we'll investigate how strangeness and magic function in short fiction. We'll read stories by authors like Kelly Link, Carmen Maria Machado, and Alice Sola Kim, examining how these writers portray the fantastical and impossible. We'll explore concepts like defamiliarization, versimilitude, and the uncanny. We will contemplate how magical realism and surrealism differ from sci-fi and fantasy genre writing, and ask how we, as writers, can make the quotidian seem extraordinary and the improbable seem inevitable, and to what end? Students will complete several short creative exercises and workshop one story that utilizes magic or strange effects. Students will also be expected to write thoughtful, constructive critiques of peer work. Throughout the course, we'll consider how the expectations of literary fiction might constrain such narratives, and we can engage with and transcend these archetypes.  

Day/Time: Wednesday, 10:30am-1:20pm

Where do art and fact meet? Our seminar will explore how creative nonfiction responds to timely issues through vivid scene work, responsible fact-checking, and artistic expression. We will investigate the ways to communicate enormous subjects to a readership. Students will develop a clearer vision of how to approach current crises of climate change, social justice, public health, and more, through storytelling. Our readings will highlight the ways in which creative nonfiction is borne of traditions in reportage and literary writing. To wit, we will ask how “lyrical” reportage is driven not only by narrative and veracity, but language, tone, image, and form. Through close readings and brief writing assignments, students will engage with models of how to: use different kinds of media to recreate very specific spaces; make music of technical jargon; hone creative, humanist approaches to writing research. Readings will include texts by Eula Biss, Timothy Egan, Maggie Nelson, Elena Passarello, Claudia Rankine, Luis Alberto Urrea, and *visiting writers.*

Day/Time: Monday, 9:30am-12:20pm

Beginning with a notation of a “false Chicago” on Marquette’s map, this course works with texts as maps (and maps as texts) to explore the imagined, walked, and disappearing city. In particular, we’ll explore fictionalized versions of the city (i.e., Frank Baum’s Oz, the “White City” of the 1893 World’s Fair, the city as one stop along Sun Ra’s space of cosmic flight, etc.). Participants will examine area maps (i.e., Marquette's mapping of Lake Michigan, CTA maps, Richard J. Daley's proposed Aquaport, etc.), then build parallels within work by writers including Baum, Daniel Borzutzky, Alexai Galaviz-Budziszewski, Kenneth Rexroth, Salima Rivera, Mike Royko, Carl Sandburg, and William Sites. What serious geographic play echoes in Chicago’s architecture and urban blues? What points of transit mark the fictive Chicagos that emerge in the course’s maps and texts? How are poems, stories, and autobiography also markers of (dis)placement? In exploration of these questions, participants will develop their own individual and collaborative creative responses to “the Paris of the Midwest.”

Day/Time: Tuesday, 2:00-4:50pm

“All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey toward a lost land.” So wrote Janet Frame, a singularly talented author who was institutionalized at the age of 21, then saved from a lobotomy only because she won a literary prize. In keeping with Frame’s reflection, this craft-based course will focus on strategies for saving our lives through fiction writing: how to cultivate a convincing voice; how to extract strength from our writerly weaknesses; and, ultimately, how to forge a home for ourselves in our own words. Through a combination of creative exercises and workshops, we will explore and examine the craft components of strong, original fictions, including character development, descriptive detail, compelling dialogue, and rich sentences. We’ll also learn how to read the works of published writers for creative inspiration, mining texts by established masters such as Janet Frame, Alice Munro, and Julio Cortazar, as well as lesser-known contemporary voices. We will workshop our writings throughout the term, developing a portfolio of stories that reflect our individual interests, desires, and needs as writers.

Day/Time: Tuesdays, 2:00-4:50pm

What is the role of the self in our writing? Are we known or made things, even to ourselves, in our work? This workshop focuses on writing and revising poems that capture the nuances of our often-intersectional identities, centering the questions: How is my work representative of me, and Who is the person represented in my work? Throughout the quarter, we will read, write, and discuss contemporary poems dealing with issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, ethnicity and cultural background, etc., and develop strategies for addressing similar ideas in our own work. Throughout the quarter, you will learnthrough practice, writing drafts that engage with craft elements like imagery, form, rhythm, and voice. We will workshop these drafts as a class, building a supportive, process-oriented community that focuses on creative and critical feedback. By the end of the quarter, you will revise your work into a cumulative portfolio, and will be able to articulate your own work’s place in the landscape of contemporary poetry. While fellow students’ work will be the primary texts, other possible readings include work by Cortney Lamar Charleston, Su Cho, Tarfia Faizullah, Nikky Finney, Dorothy Chan, torrin a. greathouse, Jillian Weise, and others.

Day/Time: Wednesdays, 1:30-4:20pm

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 presentation, and a critical essay.

Day/Time: Mondays, 1:30-4:20pm