CRWR

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

The Long and the Short of it: Narrative Time

A story's end point determines its meaning. The history of a life can be covered in a sentence, a few pages or seven volumes. How do writers decide? In this advanced workshop, we'll look at different ways to handle narrative time, paying special attention to building blocks like direct and summary scene, flashback, compression, slowed time and fabulist time. We'll examine work by writers whose long stories feel like novels, like Alice Munro and Edward P. Jones, alongside those who say everything in a short single scene of a page or two, like Grace Paley and Kate Chopin. Students will be encouraged to experiment with time in both writing exercises and story revisions.By the end of the course, you will have generated significant raw material and workshopped one story. Two stories, one polished and one in draft, will be prepared for the final.

Monday 12:30pm-3:20pm   

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.

Wednesday 12:30pm-3:20pm

Poets often turn to the constraints and conventions of lyric forms (sonnets, sestinas, pantoums, etc.) as a way to engage with poetic tradition. The history of poetry, however, is as rich in genres as it is in forms. How is genre different from form? How do the two overlap? What are the oldest poetic genres and how have they evolved across cultures and time? How do new ones arise? In this course we’ll study both ancient and modern variations on traditional poetic sub-genres from across a range of cultures (the Japanese death poem; the English ode; the African-American ballad, etc) and consider how these poems complicate and deepen the tradition. We’ll read lists, letters, parables, and travelogues, and examine how considerations of genre, in addition to form, play a generative role in poetic innovation. Students will give a brief presentation, complete weekly creative exercises, and write a preface for and assemble a mini-anthology of a genre of their choosing.

What happens after you’ve completed an early draft of a nonfiction essay? With the genre’s commitment to lived experience and fact, what possibilities are yet available for revising nonfiction? This seminar will focus on approaches to revision that specifically address the challenges of rewriting and polishing literary essays. We will explore what possibilities yet remain even after “what happened” has been accounted for. Students will have the opportunity to bring in work from other nonfiction workshops and work towards its fruition. A slate of prompts will invite students to approach their written pieces anew, to explore aspects they’ve been waiting to address, and to implement feedback yet to be integrated. Revision is an important element of the writing craft; our readings will focus on elements of rewriting that unearth truer truths and consider how revising might become part of the story itself. Course readings will include works by Peter Ho Davies, Mary Karr, Ursula Le Guinn, and Brenda Miller. We will also draw on archives that show multiple drafts of published work, including that of Elizabeth Bishop and Barry Lopez.

Tuesday 9:30am-12:20pm

From "unreliable" to "unlikeable," certain characters--and character qualities--are often measured against popular understandings of who is "good," who is "relatable," and who gets to decide. As Ottessa Moshfegh quips in a Guardian interview, "We live in a world in which mass murderers are re-elected, yet it’s an unlikeable female character that is found to be offensive." In this technical seminar, we will critically investigate cultural dialogues around "unlikeability," and discuss the shared qualities and compelling narrative capabilities of "unlikeable" characters. Assignments will include reading responses, short craft analyses, and a presentation.

Thursday 2:00pm-4:50pm

What is the nature of the encounter between a narrator and a character, and how do elements of character and plot play out in narrative points of view? Drawing on the narratological work of theorists such as Gérard Genette and Monika Fludernik and of critics such as James Wood, this technical seminar considers questions of point of view, perspective, and focalization. Readings may include stories by Jamil Jan Kochai, Lorrie Moore, Jamaica Kincaid, William Faulkner, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, and Edith Wharton, among others, and will introduce instances of first-person-plural and second-person narrative, as well as modes of representing speech and thought such as free indirect discourse. Over the course of the quarter, students will write short analyses and creative exercises, culminating in a final project.

Tuesday 12:30pm-3:20pm

T. S. Eliot once said that “good writers borrow, great writers steal.” In this class we will look at modeling as a springboard for original creativity. What makes a piece of writing original? Is it possible to borrow a famous writer’s story structure, theme, or even attempt their voice, yet produce something wholly original? How specifically are writers influenced and then inspired? Readings will pair writers with the influences they’ve talked or written about, such as Yiyun Li and Anton Chekhov; Edward P. Jones and Alice Walker; Sigrid Nunez and Elizabeth Hardwick, and George Saunders and Nikolai Gogol. Writing exercises will experiment with aspects of voice, narrative structure, point of view, tone, and use of dialog. While this is not a workshop course, come prepared to write and share work in class. Students will pursue both creative work and critical papers.

In 1925, The New Negro: An Interpretation, a collection of poems, short stories, and essays was published—it ushered a new era, what was then called the New Negro Renaissance. An artistic and literary movement with the objective to subvert what Alain Locke called the “Old Negro,” by providing a corrective and aspirational image of contemporary Negro life, was borne. Around forty years later, Black Arts: An Anthology galvanized the Black Arts Movement, what Larry Neal called the “aesthetic and spiritual sister” of the Black Power Movement. The Best American Short Stories and the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women are two more examples of anthologies, one to cultivate the genre and the other to recover the literature of marginalized women writers. 

In this course, we’ll examine anthologies, a word derived from the Greek for “a gathering of flowers.” As we study these “flowers,” we’ll discern the objectives that shape their construction, as well as what was put in and what was left out. In short essays and exercises, we’ll also investigate the social, cultural, and political contexts that influenced these objectives, as well as the resultant literary and cultural implications. For your final, you’ll design your own literary anthology.

Tuesday 9:30am-12:20pm

This course invites writers to reconsider the influence of Chicago’s public spaces on artistic impulse. In particular this quarter, we will examine aspects and depictions of a “fantastic Chicago.” If Chicago is a city that “dreams itself,” what do its spaces of violence and environmental devastation say about that dream? Students will analyze and explore Chicago writers’ work in prose and poetry, then develop their own creative responses, building connections to adopted critical approaches. To these ends, we will examine work by writers including Jeffery Renard Allen, Daniel Borzutzky, Bette Howland, Erik Larson, Bayo Ojikutu, and Ava Tomasula y Garcia, as well as the city’s rich legacies in documentary and the visual arts. 

Thursday 12:30pm-3:20pm