CRWR

Characterization in any literary form seeks to bring a person, their world, and their worldview to life. Doing that effectively requires more than imagination and knowledge of our genre and craft. It begins with cultivating a personal understanding of human beings and asking ourselves what it means, on the page as in life, to be a character and to have character. And more deeply, even when our characters are nothing like us, it involves looking inward at who we think we are as an individual and how we see the world and our place within it. In this course, we’ll examine the various lenses all of us use, for better or for worse, to define ourselves and others: like the lens of truth, of morality, of empathy, of desire. And in our readings in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry (as well as creative writing exercises and presentations), we’ll learn how to approach characterization not only as a vehicle for storytelling and self-expression, but as an inquiry into our own humanity and the kinds of people we’re most interested in bringing to life in our work. 

Most passionate readers and writers have literary touchstones --those texts we return to again and again for personal or aesthetic influence and inspiration. When we are asked what book we would want with us if we were stranded on a desert isle, our touchstones are the ones that leap immediately to mind. Some texts are fairly ubiquitous touchstones: The Great Gatsby, Harry Potter and the [take your pick], The Bell Jar, Little Women, Letters to a Young Poet, Leaves of Grass. Others are quirkier, more idiosyncratic. What -- if any -- qualities do these touchstones share, within and across genres? What lessons about writing craft can be drawn from them? In this course, we'll read texts that are commonly cited as touchstones, along with fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction that students bring to the table -- their own literary touchstones. In that sense, our reading list will be collaborative, and students will be expected to contribute content as well as an analytical presentation on the craft issues raised by their selections. Our assignments will include reading responses, creative writing exercises, short essays and presentations.

“Rats who build the labyrinth from which they will try to escape” is how Raymond Queneau famously described the members of Oulipo, a group of international writers and mathematicians founded in France in 1960, and which still thrives today. The group’s aim is to use constraints and procedures to create new literary forms. (“Oulipo” is an acronym that stands for Workshop or Sewing Circle of Potential Literature.) In a similar spirit of playful experiment, we will take a hands-on approach, with students composing new drafts each week. We will experiment with a variety of methods, ranging from traditional verse forms to concrete poetry; creative translations; re-writing; erasures; collages; documentary and research-based poetics; site-specific and ritual poetry; incorporating film, sound, image; and a selection of stimulating Oulipian constraints (e.g. only using certain letters or writing three versions of the same poem, etc.). As we workshop students’ drafts, we will discuss topics including inspiration, authorship, form, copying and plagiarism; poetry, activism, and social justice; and the idea of “fact” in poetry. At the end of the quarter, you’ll revise your drafts and collect them in a portfolio.

From ancient Sumerian temple hymns to 7th-century Japanese death poems to avant-garde ekphrasis in the 21st century, the history of poetry is as rich in genres as it is in forms. Why does it feel so good to write a curse? What is an ode and how is it different from an aubade? In this technical seminar we will study the origins, transcultural functions, and evolving conventions of some of the oldest-living genres of lyric poetry – the ode, the elegy, the love poem, the curse, to name a few. We will read living writers such as Alice Oswald, Danez Smith, Kim Hyesoon, and Natalie Diaz alongside historical forerunners including Aesop, Sei Shonagon, John Keats. Federico Garcia Lorca, Sylvia Plath, and Paul Celan. Students will write weekly experiments of their own in response to our readings, and for a final project they will edit a mini-anthology of a genre of their choice, including a short critical introduction.

This course guides students in exercises that work with both the actual sounds of poetry, like alliteration and rhythm, and the inaudible, “imagined” music of the mind, to write and workshop poems. We read diverse contemporary and classic poets, write several poems, and workshop peer work weekly, culminating in a portfolio of new poems as a final project. 

What topics, ideas, or narratives merit a book-length exploration? In this advanced nonfiction workshop, we will explore the capacity of the book-length essay, the subjects that can sustain and justify such lengthy works, and the structures professional writers have employed to maintain the project’s integrity even as it expands across one hundred or more pages. Each week, we will read short, book-length essays, on topics ranging from the nature of beauty to the Salvadoran Civil War, analyzing the conventions of these manuscripts, the commonalities in their subject matter, and the tactics each writer uses to maintain and organize their project. Students will propose and write weekly on a topic of their choosing, and workshops will consist of collating and arranging sections of a potential book-length project using this written material. A final paper will lay out both a plan for completing a longer project as well as an analysis of the structures and conventions the writer has used or plans to use in their piece. 

Apart from not being fiction, a nonfiction feature is a lot like a short story: in terms of length, scenes, characters, world building and all the potential innovations of storytelling. In this writing workshop, students will go through each stage 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 pitches. 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 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 and reporters about their process. There will be an emphasis in the class on Chicago writers and their beats; in weekly writing assignments, students will also report on local stories.

In "Technical Seminar in Nonfiction: Breaking the Frame," students will explore the creative possibilities of narrative structure in nonfiction, from traditional forms like the pyramid and the circle to experimental and unconventional shapes. Through close readings of works by authors like John McPhee, Maggie Nelson, and Lauren Russell, students will analyze how structure shapes meaning and craft their own uniquely structured pieces. Weekly exercises will culminate in a final project that challenges the boundaries of traditional narrative forms.

The personal essay is arguably the most protean form in literature. Highly elastic in shape and size, it can also take on any subject. From the inward-looking and intimate to the outward-facing and encompassing, the essay appeals to many writers because it is so multi-faceted and universally useful. Like a good pocketknife, essays can do just about anything. In this course, we will explore the personal essay through all it can do: meditate, argue, confess, study a person, go to a place and tell a story, to name some of the seemingly endless possibilities. We will consider classic and contemporary examples of the personal essay and write many, many of our own. 

This course seeks to develop your abilities in the writing of literary nonfiction as well as in the editing of your own and others’ prose in a workshop environment.  Through short assignments and shared readings, you will be introduced to basic considerations of craft in nonfiction, including style and narrative. Formally this quarter, we will explore the review—reconsidering reviews of movies, food, products, and even oneself. To these ends, we will examine work by contemporary writers including M.F.K. Fisher, Pauline Kael, Margo Jefferson, and Kevin Killian (including his collected Amazon reviews).