2021-2022

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.

Exploration of traditional nonfiction genres including literary journalism, memoir, and genre-writing. In a workshop environment, writers will develop working familiarity with basic aspects of craft in reportage and narrative. An added focus to the course is the exploration of “American space” and memory, particularly through autobiographical writing by American women (including work by Joan Didion, Margo Jefferson, Vivian Gornick, and MFK Fisher).

Day/Time: Thursday, 9:30am-12:20pm

There’s really no such thing as the “voiceless.” There is only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.~~Arundhati Roy 

Invasion and occupation, waves of nomads and immigrants, the African slave trade, the Underground Railroad, the Great Migration, the Trail of Tears, the Dust Bowl, and the “southern border,” our American story contains multitudes, united in motion. Wanderers and drifters, exiles and refugees, we are on the run and in the mix, our collective experience one of forced migration as well as voluntary uprooting—we’re at once victims and agents, objects and subjects. Oral History, “the poetry of the everyday,” the literature of the street, is perfectly poised to open a unique window onto our migration stories, offering a narrative space where an interviewer, listening with empathy and identification, and a story-teller, seizing an occasion to perform an account of events and experiences, co-create a relationship and reveal a universe of meaning-making. Seeking authenticity, oral historians become attuned to contradiction, tension, disagreements, silences, inconsistencies, ambiguities, paradoxes, uncertainties, and every other kind of human muddle; we dive head-first into the wide, wild world of human experience and human meaning-making, offering an important antidote to propaganda, dogma, imposition and stereotype. We look for what happened, what people say happened, and the webs of significance people construct to make sense of what happened. In this seminar we will study the theory and practice of Oral History, and we will create original oral accounts of migration from our own families as well as from a much wider range of Chicago communities. 

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

This course invites readers to reconsider Chicago as collage constructed through literary, journeyed, and virtual navigation.  We’ll examine work by writers and artists including Claude Dangerfield, Thomas Dyja, Eve Ewing, Bradley Garrett, Aleksandar Hemon, Richard Nickel, Mike Shea, and Chris Ware.  At what points does Chicago’s necropolis “peek out?”  Versus Walt Whitman, how does the artist’s eye retain defining power in the twenty-first century?  Is there such a thing as a “Chicago flâneuse or flâneur?”  In exploration of these questions, participants will develop their own individual and collaborative creative responses to “the world’s second most closely observed city.” 

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

This course seeks to study the mixed literary history of coming-of-age narratives, beginning with 19th century autobiography and the Bildungsroman through to modern memoir in order to inform the writing of our own coming-of-age narratives. The analytical and creative habits of mind will be closely linked in this course as we learn about how childhood, adolescence and development took on new significance in the nineteenth century, setting generic terms that were continually mobilized, revised and reimagined in the coming-of-age memoirs of the twentieth century and beyond. Readings by Mary Prince, John Stuart Mill, Charlotte Bronte, George Orwell, Blake Morrison, Helen McDonald, and Jan Morris. 

Day/Time: Tuesday, 9:00am-12:20pm

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: Wednesday, 12:30-3:20pm

In this writing workshop, students will go through all the stages 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 and re-write pitches, learning how to highlight the potential story in these ideas. 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 through drafts 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/reporters about their process. In the end, we should be able to put together a publication that contains all of these feature stories.

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

Like so many essential and life-sustaining processes—relationship maintenance, money management, digestion—revision is something we often talk about without “really” talking about it (to use the words of writer Matthew Salesses). Yet by refusing (or failing) to “really” talk about revision, writers deny themselves the opportunity to actively engage with the potentialities of their work: the different shapes, forms, and shifts it might take. In this class, we will demystify the revision process by analyzing the works of writers—such as Anna Kavan, Edwidge Danticat, and Suzanne Scanlon—who have pursued radical revisions to their projects, including expansions (short stories developed into novels), compressions (longer works condensed into shorter pieces), point of view changes, and dramatic stylistic transformations. With a combination of creative exercises and workshops, we will also work toward our own radical revisions.

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

In this workshop based course we'll investigate how strangeness and magic function in short fiction. We'll read stories by authors like Kelly Link, Carmen Maria Machado, and Alice Sola Kim, examining how these writers portray the fantastical and impossible. We'll explore concepts like defamiliarization, versimilitude, and the uncanny. We will contemplate how magical realism and surrealism differ from sci-fi and fantasy genre writing, and ask how we, as writers, can make the quotidian seem extraordinary and the improbable seem inevitable, and to what end? Students will complete several short creative exercises and workshop one story that utilizes magic or strange effects. Students will also be expected to write thoughtful, constructive critiques of peer work. Throughout the course, we'll consider how the expectations of literary fiction might constrain such narratives, and we can engage with and transcend these archetypes.  

Day/Time: Wednesday, 10:30am-1:20pm

Where do art and fact meet? Our seminar will explore how creative nonfiction responds to timely issues through vivid scene work, responsible fact-checking, and artistic expression. We will investigate the ways to communicate enormous subjects to a readership. Students will develop a clearer vision of how to approach current crises of climate change, social justice, public health, and more, through storytelling. Our readings will highlight the ways in which creative nonfiction is borne of traditions in reportage and literary writing. To wit, we will ask how “lyrical” reportage is driven not only by narrative and veracity, but language, tone, image, and form. Through close readings and brief writing assignments, students will engage with models of how to: use different kinds of media to recreate very specific spaces; make music of technical jargon; hone creative, humanist approaches to writing research. Readings will include texts by Eula Biss, Timothy Egan, Maggie Nelson, Elena Passarello, Claudia Rankine, Luis Alberto Urrea, and *visiting writers.*

Day/Time: Monday, 9:30am-12:20pm