CRWR

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.

Required for CW majors and MAPH CW Option students completing creative BA and MA theses in fiction and CW minors completing minor portfolios in fiction.

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

This thesis workshop is for students writing a creative BA or MA thesis or minor portfolio in either fiction or nonfiction--or both. In other words, your project may take a number of forms: fiction only, nonfiction only, a short story and an essay, a novel chapter and a piece of narrative journalism, and so on. This course might be of special interest to those working on highly autobiographical pieces or incorporating substantial research into their creative process--fiction that hews close to fact, say, or nonfiction that leans heavily into storytelling. And/or it might be useful for those who want to pursue hybrid or between-genres projects or simply want to continue working in more than one form. We'll be open to many possibilities.

It's not a prerequisite that you've taken both a fiction and creative nonfiction course previously, but it will nonetheless be quite helpful to have done so. Note, too, that this is the cumulative course in Creative Writing. There will still be room to explore and rethink (sometimes radically) the pieces you've drafted in previous classes, but please do come to our first session with a clear sense of what you want to work on over the quarter. 

Required for CW majors and MAPH CW Option students completing creative BA and MA theses in fiction or nonfiction and CW minors completing minor portfolios in fiction or nonfiction.

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

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.

Required for CW majors and MAPH CW Option students completing creative BA and MA theses in fiction and CW minors completing minor portfolios in fiction.

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

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.

Required for CW majors and MAPH CW Option students completing creative BA and MA theses in fiction and CW minors completing minor portfolios in fiction.

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

Consider your story of water. The drip at your faucet connecting you through a map of pipelines to the lake. Your neighborhood river that was also a highway. The familiar shoreline that now only appears in family pictures and old maps. An endless blue horizon that someone you loved crossed. Our relationship to water shapes our everyday lives and connects us to environmental change and social realities. When we tell the story of a body of water, we also tell the story of the people whose memories, livelihoods, and futures depend on it. It is a story both personal and global. In your workshop, you will write two essays. The first will contextualize a personal story within a broader story of water. In this process, you will further develop your understanding of structure, refine your ability to weave research into narrative, and practice yielding surprise from juxtaposing the social and ecological. Your second essay will be piece of environmental journalism. Through conducting interviews, document research, and field work, this essay will embody an encounter with our current changing water geography and consequent social upheaval. During this unit, our class will speak with two environmental journalists about their career paths and current work. Essay topics will be wide-ranging and should be driven by student experiences and interests. Readings will include texts from Robin Wall Kimmerer, Naomi Klein, Angela Palm, Elizabeth Rush*texts/visiting writers*

Day/Time: Monday, 3:00-5:00 PM

Rivers move -- over land, through history, among peoples -- and they make:  landscapes and civilizations. They are the boundaries on our maps, the dividers of nations, of families, of the living and the dead, but they are also the arteries that connect us. They are meditative, meandering journeys and implacable, surging power. They are metaphors but also so plainly, corporeally themselves. In this course, we will encounter creative work about rivers, real and imaginary, from the Styx to the Chicago River and the Amazon. Through poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and film, we will consider what rivers are, what they mean to us, and how they are represented in art and literature. Rivers will also be the topic and inspiration for our own forays into creative writing. Students will be asked to keep a reading notebook as well as to produce weekly creative and critical responses for class discussion. 

Day/Time: Monday, 10:20-12:20 PM

"Do you like sentences?" Such is the litmus test posed to would-be writers in Annie Dillard's The Writing Life. In order to understand narrative, we often go abstract—we summarize, we speak of structure, we read between the lines—yet everything that happens in fiction still happens in sentences. Some writers therefore make the sentence the cynosure of all effort: they dazzle. Others forge a rough music out of odd locutions and interrupted sense. In this course we'll study (and appreciate) such limit cases, as well as sentences of quieter grace, while reserving the most of our effort for sentences of our own, testing them against the manifold requirements of narrative: pace, logic, voice, and flow. In exercises and communal editing sessions we'll trim, paste, lard, complicate, rewrite, recast, and sometimes simply delete sentences by ourselves and others. And the more we relish what might seem like tedium, the more we'll prove that we do like sentences.

Day/Time: Tuesday, 9:40-12:40 PM

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 reading 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? Case studies may include poetry and prose by Bashō, Sei Shōnagon, Homer, John Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Jean Toomer, D. H. Lawrence, Lorine Niedecker, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Sylvia Plath, Ai, Elaine Scarry, Wanda Coleman, Toni Morrison, Hai-Dang Phan, Nathaniel Mackey, Durga Chew-Bose, Justin Torres, and Jenny Zhang. These writers will provide inspiration for your own creative experiments on the page. Students will be asked to lead one presentation during the quarter and to write short weekly pieces to extend the group discussion.

Day/Time: Thursday, 2:40–5:40 PM

All writing is revision, and this holds true for the practice of literary translation as well. We will critique each other’s longer manuscripts-in-progress of prose, poetry, or drama, and examine various revision techniques—from the line-by-line approach of Lydia Davis, to the “driving-in-the-dark” model of Peter Constantine, and several approaches in between. We will consider questions of different reading audiences while preparing manuscripts for submission for publication, along with the contextualization of the work with a translator’s preface or afterword. Our efforts will culminate in not only an advanced-stage manuscript, but also with various strategies in hand to use for future projects. Students who wish to take this workshop should have at least an intermediate proficiency in a foreign language and already be working on a longer translation project.

Day/Time: Monday, 1:50 - 5:00 PM

Place—and the writing of places—is a conundrum of the imagination. We live in the present moment, yet we are haunted by remnants of our history: repurposed buildings, lands containing layers of legacy. We live in a world that constantly pushes toward new development while much of our natural environment is disappearing. In this class, we will explore critical questions inherent to the writing of place in a world of disappearing landscapes: How can we write place in a way that embodies the fleeting sensation of being there? How can we use place to evoke—precisely—the most elusive parts of experience: the topography of emotions, the clouded shapes of memories? Through the place-driven writing of Italo Calvino, Cesar Aira, Anna Kavan, Lucia Berlin, Edwidge Danticat, Ottessa Moshfegh, and other contemporary authors, we will discover strategies for descriptive world-building and illustrating environmental change. With a combination of creative exercises and workshops, we will also write our own place-driven stories.

Day/Time: Thursday, 4:20 - 7:20 PM