2020-2021

Where should a poem end and what should that ending feel like? We’ll acquaint ourselves with many possible answers to these questions as we read a range of poems from the past and present, seeking out new models to challenge and refine our ideas and habits around closure. To better understand closural strategies in our own and others’ poetry, we’ll examine narrative and lyric expectations, prosody, epiphany, seriality, anti-closure, and procedure, discussing the sociohistorical context and politics of poets’ formal choices. Course readings will be determined by the needs and interests of the group and will enrich the workshop dialogue around your own poetry. Students will be asked to write and share a new poem each week and to participate rigorously in discussion.

Day/Time: Friday, 1:50-3:50 PM

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: Friday, 10:20-12:20 PM

“If you want a compelling story, put your protagonist among the damned.” --Charles Baxter

While crisis is to be avoided in life, when it comes to narrative, trouble is your friend. In this advanced workshop we'll explore the complex ways writers create conflict in their stories, be it internal or external, spiritual or physical, romantic, financial or familial. We'll read masters of the form like Edward P. Jones, George Saunders, ZZ Packer, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Yiyun Li, and discuss how they generate conflict that feels organic, character-driven, and inevitable. Weekly writing exercises will encourage you to take creative risks and hone new skills. Each student will workshop two stories, with strong emphasis on focused and productive peer critique and in-class commentary.

Day/Time: Monday, 1:50 -3:50 PM

Writing fiction is in large part a matter of convincing world-building, no matter what genre you write in. And convincing world-building is about creating a seamless reality within the elements of that world: from character dynamics, to setting, to social systems, and even the story or novel’s conceptual conceit. And whether it be within a genre of realism, historical fiction, or science fiction, building a convincing world takes a good deal of research. So while we look closely at the tools and methods of successful world-building, we will also dig into the process of research. From how and where to mine the right details, to what to look for. We will also focus on how research can make a fertile ground for harvesting ideas and even story. Students will read various works of long and short fiction with an eye to its world-building, as well as critical and craft texts. They will write short weekly reading responses and some creative exercises as well. Each student will also be expected to make a brief presentation and turn in a final paper for the class. He class will also be linked with the History Department’s ExoTerra Imagination Lab:

https://history.uchicago.edu/sites/history.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/ExoTerraImaginationLab-StudentAnnouncement.pdf  

(Participation in ExoTerra will be for extra credit and optional.) 

Day/Time: Thursday, 9:40-12:40

In this advanced fiction workshop, students will work on novel-length projects, completing one to two polished chapters and an outline of a full novel. We will explore how to structure a book that is both propulsive and character-driven, and how to create a compelling, unique narrative voice. Works by James Baldwin, Edith Wharton, Ha Jin, Vladimir Nabokov, and Akhil Sharma will help us consider the crucial relationship between characters and their contexts.

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

To revise a piece of writing isn’t merely to polish it. Revision is transformation and yields an alternate reality. A new view, a re-vision. This course will examine the radical potential of revision, drawing case studies from a range of writers such as Marguerite Duras, Jorge Luis Borges, Elizabeth Bishop, Dionne Brand, Li-Young Lee, Janet Malcolm, Lydia Davis, Terrance Hayes, Yiyun Li, francine j. harris, Bhanu Kapil, Shane McCrae, and Chase Berggrun. We’ll start by tracking compositional process, looking at brilliant and disastrous drafts to compare the aesthetic and political consequences of different choices on the page. We’ll then study poems, essays, and stories that refute themselves and self-revise as they unfold, dramatizing mixed feelings and changing minds. We’ll end by considering erasure poetry as a form of critical revision. Our conversations will inspire weekly writing exercises and invite you to experiment with various creative revision strategies. Students will be asked to lead one presentation and to share their writing for group discussion.    

Day/Time: Friday, 1:50-3:50

How does language perform and represent mourning? How should writing commemorate the dead? Can an elegy address the full complexity of a person, resisting hagiography? We’ll begin our investigation of elegy by looking briefly at its Classical origins, reading examples by Catullus, Sappho, and Ovid, among others, and considering the early life of elegy as a poetic form not necessarily related to death and lament. We’ll then turn our attention toward a range of modern and contemporary interpretations of the elegy, spanning fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Readings may include works by Virginia Woolf, Paul Celan, Jamaica Kincaid, Raúl Zurita, Samuel Delany, Federico García Lorca, Allen Ginsberg, Brandon Shimoda, Alice Oswald, Isaac Babel, and Solmaz Sharif. As we read, we’ll pay particular attention to literary structures and devices writers use to manifest absence and incarnate the dead in the body of a text. Students will be asked to lead one presentation and to write weekly creative and/or critical responses for group discussion.

Day/Time: Thursday, 2:40-5:40

This workshop will explore literary translation as a mode of embodied reading and creative writing. Through comparative and iterative readings across multiple translations of both poetry and fiction, we will examine the interpretive decisions that translators routinely encounter when assigning an English to a work of literature first written in another language, as well as the range of creative strategies available to translators when devising a treatment for a literary text in English. Students will complete weekly writing exercises in retranslation and English-to-English translation, building to the retranslation of either a short piece of fiction or selection of poems. No foreign language proficiency is required to participate in this course.

Day/Time: Monday/Wednesday, 1:50-3:10

What do we create in creative nonfiction? In this introductory workshop, we will explore the imaginative possibilities of the genre with a focus on bringing place to life. We will begin by asking: what meets the essayist’s eye?  How do we tell the stories of a particular world that are difficult to see? We will define place richly, as landscape, geography, locale, yes; but also as memory, people, language, carapace, and ecosystem. To wit, place is context. Place is an invitation, in the tradition of creative nonfiction, to weave from facts a story yet to be told. 

In this class, you will learn to render landscape as a character and ecological disruption as a human narrative. You will practice translating technical lingo into the voice of your piece. We will unsettle our ideas of culture/nature divide. Throughout the course of the quarter, we will engage enthusiastically with one another’s work, developing a vocabulary for a critical perspective that recognizes the aim and potential of each piece. You will leave this course with a strong grasp of the tenets of voice, language, and form, and a more nuanced understanding of creative nonfiction as a whole. Readings will include: Linda Hogan; J Drew Lanham; Helen McDonald; Ocean Vuong *texts/visiting writers*

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

What does it mean to study another person’s life—a real person—and craft the collected pieces into a work of nonfiction? How do we gain insight into other people? How can we write about them with authority? As students report and write profiles in this nonfiction workshop, we will explore the practice and limits of this popular genre. Through weekly writing exercises and reading assignments, we will study techniques of interviewing and observing subjects, of using secondary sources and social and historical context. We will develop the abilities to depict people through physical detail, dialogue and action. In considering the extent to which we can and can’t know the real people we portray, we will also explore how writers (along with documentary filmmakers, historians, sociologists, writers of case studies) address these limitations in their work. Students will complete a short profile each week, and they will write one longer, workshopped and revised profile.

Day/Time: Friday, 12:40-2:40