CRWR

Ancient Mesopotamian flood narratives, Cold War nuclear Armageddon, existential climate catastrophe: as long as literature has existed, we have used it to speculate on our own demise. In this Intro to Genres course, we will explore apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic writing, how it intersects with other genres, how it has fluctuated or remained stable as a genre over time, and how it reveals our changing cultural anxieties about what threatens us as a species. We will read broadly across poetry, fiction, nonfiction and film, exploring the various flavors of apocalyptic writing, from scientific excess to natural disasters, and examining the role style and tone play in creating meaning around devastation. Representative authors will include T.S. Elliott, Rachel Carson, Elissa Washuta, Carmen Maria Machado, Ursula K. Leguin, and Chris Marker. Students will be asked to write and workshop their own creative writing in a chosen genre and produce a critical essay that focuses on one thematic element of the class.

Choices about form and shape are not unique to nonfiction writing, but nonfiction presents unique challenges. Unlike fiction we cannot simply invent information or insert details in order to maintain traditional narrative forms. Instead, we are tasked with finding or creating forms that meets the needs of our content. In this beginning workshop we will explore a range of possible forms that fit the needs of various genres of nonfiction. From traditional narrative nonfiction and memoir that follow the kinds of story arcs or hero's journeys familiar to fiction and theatre on the one hand, to more associative and fractured structures that make space for uncertainty and missing information on the other, we will explore the role form plays in shaping the content of nonfiction. We will read more traditional essays from classic and contemporary writers like James Baldwin, Joan Didion, John Jeremiah Sullivan and Hanif Abdduraquib and compare these works to formally experimental work from writers such as Renee Gladman, Aisha Sbatini Sloan, Eula Biss, and Maggie Nelson. Students will be asked to produce their own work that explores the potentials and limitations of both traditional and experimental forms, engage in respectful and constructive workshop, and reflect on the role of form as it relates to the works we have read in one critical essay.

Love it or hate it, research is an essential part of nonfiction writing. But it’s about more than just gathering facts; diving into research means navigating the gaps, challenges, and surprises that come with combing through archives and interviewing subjects. In this course, we'll explore how research puzzles can become treasure troves of creativity and storytelling. We’ll read authors like A. Van Jordan, Stacy Schiff, and M. Nourbese Philip, who have faced these unknown realms of research head-on and emerged with powerful, compelling stories. Through lively class discussions, collective strategizing, and composing short essays, you’ll engage with difficulties like incomplete archives or unreliable sources and learn how to turn them into compelling narratives. Throughout the term, you will pursue a single multi-faceted research question that you propose in the first few weeks. To this end, you’ll also keep a research journal, tracking your discoveries, challenges, and new questions that arise as you dig deeper into your chosen topic. In addition, we’ll work together to create our own class archive, where you’ll explore primary sources and unearth hidden gems from your research adventures. By the end of the course, you’ll not only have completed a research-driven creative project but will have navigated the wilds of research, transforming every research challenge into a creative adventure.

What makes a portrait come to life? Whether through a camera’s lens or the written word, portraits expose truths, reveal choices, and capture the complexity of a person or moment. In this course, we’ll explore how the creative process of nonfiction writing parallels photography, using the tools of framing, perspective, and composition to capture the essence of a subject. We’ll dive into this intersection between writing and visual art through activities like ekphrastic writing prompts and a field trip to the Smart Museum of Art, discovering along the way how these experiences can inform our writing and deepen our understanding of truth and representation. We’ll study photographs by Ansel Adams and Lewis Hine, read Maggie Nelson, and analyze films like I, Tonya to explore how to tell stories with multiple truths. The first half of the term will focus on testing and broadening your skills with photography-inspired assignments. By midterm, you’ll pitch your own written portrait of a local Chicago resident using the techniques we’ve studied. The second half will be dedicated to workshopping these portraits, allowing for collaboration and feedback to refine your work. By the end of the course, you’ll submit a final portfolio that includes a fully realized written portrait and that reflects the evolution of your creative voice, showcasing your ability to authentically capture the complexity and humanity of real individuals.

What do a diagnosis and a narrative essay have in common? How can research be made accessible and jargon lyrical? And what can the structure of the circulatory system teach us about the structure of an essay? In this beginning workshop, we will practice writing from medicine, illness, and the body, focusing on ways we can turn knowledge and information into compelling and deeply felt essays. We will consider medical writing from the perspectives of doctors, nurses, interpreters, researchers, and patients, and examine ways of approaching medical topics and stories that may not fit neatly into linear narratives. Our course will look at contemporary texts in the field of medical writing like Eula Biss' "The Pain Scale," Andrea Long Chu’s, “China Brain” and Leslie Jamison’s “Devil’s Bait” for models of how to make the scientific personal and the personal impactful in a broader political or cultural conversation. Participants will either share or discuss obstacles, successes and questions stemming from their work in supportive, process-oriented small group workshops that focus on the goals of the writer. This course is an opportunity to think about medicine from a new perspective, to create messy first and second drafts, and to explore what might be familiar subjects from a place of uncertainty and exploration.

Nowadays, we love when stories occupy a shared universe. Yet what often gives true power to the story cycle or novel-in-stories is the gaps between these connected works. The spaces left untold, where characters leave us and return changed. In this course, we will investigate the art of not telling. How do authors calibrate these gaps, showing us not too much but not too little? How do these discrepancies complicate and enrich the world of the narrative? What work do we do as readers, and how does it impact our experience? We will read connected stories from Peter Orner, Denis Johnson, Evan S. Connell, Tove Jansson and others. Students will be responsible for craft analyses, vigorous participation, and relevant creative exercises.

Beginning Workshops are intended for students who may or may not have previous writing experience, but are interested in gaining experience in a particular genre. These workshops focus on the fundamentals of craft and feature workshops of student writing. See the course description for this particular workshop section in the notes below.

Many physicists posit that time is not linear—and in fiction, it doesn’t have to be either. Within a single story, we can be pulled to the to the past, the future, and a liminal space existing outside of time. In this course, we will investigate how authors manipulate our perception of time, in both conventional and unconventional ways, to deliver information and drive tension, to both orient and disorient us within the narrative. How do these moves impact our perception of meaning, the indelible, and the sublime? In addition to submitting two stories or excerpts for workshop, expect to read and discuss published works from Clarice Lispector, Stuart Dybek, Joy Williams, Denis Johnson, Tobias Wolff, and others.

This technical seminar will investigate how we can use speculation as a tool in our creative nonfiction narratives. How can we bring imagination and fantasy into our discussion of "fact" and "reality," and do those ideas, in fact, change what "fact" and "reality" mean to us? We'll read Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House and Alan Weisman's The World Without Us to deepen our thinking. Students will then practice using speculation in their own nonfiction narratives through short creative exercises. They will also write analytical papers on our chosen works to investigate how each author uses speculation to support and inspire their nonfiction narratives.

Beginning Workshops are intended for students who may or may not have previous writing experience, but are interested in gaining experience in a particular genre. These workshops focus on the fundamentals of craft and feature workshops of student writing. See the course description for this particular workshop section in the notes below.

The first person voice has the capacity to create rich characters, ironic and surprising conflict, and worlds filtered through a tantalizingly subjective lens. But it also poses technical and ethical challenges for writers, particularly in the genre of nonfiction. In this beginning workshop, students will explore both the potential and limitations of the first person voice in their nonfiction writing. To understand the full scope of this mode, we will examine the basic techniques and the limit cases of first-person narration— the unreliable narrators, the intentional deceptions, and the altered states that can make the first person both troubling and compelling. Over the course of the semester, students will apply what they have discovered to three creative writing exercises and participate in a respectful, constructive workshop of one of their pieces. Students will also be asked to write critically about weekly readings. The course will culminate in a final revision of one creative piece and a reflective essay that explores a major problem or possibility within the first person. Representative authors will include Hanif Abdurraquib, James Baldwin, Andrea Long Chu, Carolyne Forche, Leslie Jamison, Ottessa Moshfegh, Claudia Rankine, and Lauren Slater.

In this course, we will investigate narratives of investigation. Detective stories without answers, in which characters piece together clues, trying to understand, yet something always remains elusive. Mysteries that defy conclusion and pull us deeper into the sublime, embracing what Robert Boswell calls "the half- known world." How do writers combine elements of the detective and literary genres to create and frustrate a reader's appetite for knowledge? How do writers elevate these stories to offer the spiritual alongside the factual? In addition to reading published texts from Patrick Modiano, Keith Ridgway, W.G. Sebald, Scott Blackwood, and others, students will produce craft analyses and creative work that puts course learnings into practice.