2021-2022

Beginning with a notation of a “false Chicago” on Marquette’s map, this course works with texts as maps (and maps as texts) to explore the imagined, walked, and disappearing city. In particular, we’ll explore fictionalized versions of the city (i.e., Frank Baum’s Oz, the “White City” of the 1893 World’s Fair, the city as one stop along Sun Ra’s space of cosmic flight, etc.). Participants will examine area maps (i.e., Marquette's mapping of Lake Michigan, CTA maps, Richard J. Daley's proposed Aquaport, etc.), then build parallels within work by writers including Baum, Daniel Borzutzky, Alexai Galaviz-Budziszewski, Kenneth Rexroth, Salima Rivera, Mike Royko, Carl Sandburg, and William Sites. What serious geographic play echoes in Chicago’s architecture and urban blues? What points of transit mark the fictive Chicagos that emerge in the course’s maps and texts? How are poems, stories, and autobiography also markers of (dis)placement? In exploration of these questions, participants will develop their own individual and collaborative creative responses to “the Paris of the Midwest.”

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

“All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey toward a lost land.” So wrote Janet Frame, a singularly talented author who was institutionalized at the age of 21, then saved from a lobotomy only because she won a literary prize. In keeping with Frame’s reflection, this craft-based course will focus on strategies for saving our lives through fiction writing: how to cultivate a convincing voice; how to extract strength from our writerly weaknesses; and, ultimately, how to forge a home for ourselves in our own words. Through a combination of creative exercises and workshops, we will explore and examine the craft components of strong, original fictions, including character development, descriptive detail, compelling dialogue, and rich sentences. We’ll also learn how to read the works of published writers for creative inspiration, mining texts by established masters such as Janet Frame, Alice Munro, and Julio Cortazar, as well as lesser-known contemporary voices. We will workshop our writings throughout the term, developing a portfolio of stories that reflect our individual interests, desires, and needs as writers.

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

What is the role of the self in our writing? Are we known or made things, even to ourselves, in our work? This workshop focuses on writing and revising poems that capture the nuances of our often-intersectional identities, centering the questions: How is my work representative of me, and Who is the person represented in my work? Throughout the quarter, we will read, write, and discuss contemporary poems dealing with issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, ethnicity and cultural background, etc., and develop strategies for addressing similar ideas in our own work. Throughout the quarter, you will learnthrough practice, writing drafts that engage with craft elements like imagery, form, rhythm, and voice. We will workshop these drafts as a class, building a supportive, process-oriented community that focuses on creative and critical feedback. By the end of the quarter, you will revise your work into a cumulative portfolio, and will be able to articulate your own work’s place in the landscape of contemporary poetry. While fellow students’ work will be the primary texts, other possible readings include work by Cortney Lamar Charleston, Su Cho, Tarfia Faizullah, Nikky Finney, Dorothy Chan, torrin a. greathouse, Jillian Weise, and others.

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

In her seminal essay “On Being Ill,” Virginia Woolf writes, “Literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear. […] On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes.” This seminar will actively examine these bodily interventions in writing, and explore the merits of engaging deeply and precisely with the taboo subjects of sex, aging, illness, bodily change, and bodily difference. We will also discuss the concept of embodied writing—and the embodiment of physical experience through writing—using the body-centered prose of Bruno Schulz, Annie Ernaux, Rebecca Brown, Yasunari Kawabata, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, and other writers. Assignments will include short critical and creative responses, a presentation, and a critical essay.

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

This technical seminar will investigate the purposes and possibilities of beginnings in fiction. Students will read opening lines, paragraphs, pages, and occasionally chapters, from Aimee Bender, Miranda July, Dorthe Nors, Kobe Abe, and others, asking: what work do these beginnings do—and why, to what end? Of course, this means we will also read the stories that follow, to analyze these introductions in the framework of their narratives. How do openings guide—or mislead—the reader? How should they balance introduction and momentum? How do they orient us, not only to character, setting, and conflict, but also to elements like tone and sensibility, to a story’s own sense of itself? What archetypes or common “moves” can we identify and use? What are the implications and meanings of beginnings—of starting in a particular place and way, when a story might very well start in any number of places? And how do such authorial decisions ripple through the story? Students will be responsible for reading responses, short craft analyses, vigorous class participation, and several creative exercises putting what they learn into practice.

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

The advantage of working within a non-genre is best understood as a spatial metaphor: the house of fiction has kicked us out, but so what? That only means we are free to roam a limitless landscape, mingling with other genres and establishing new traditions. In recent years small presses have begun to celebrate the hybrid impulses of nonfiction writers, and as a result we are witnessing an exciting explosion of books that challenge our impulse to categorize literature. To name a few pioneers, many of whom are women of color: Claudia Rankine, Solmaz Sharif, Jenny Boully, Anne Carson, and Natalie Diaz. In this course, students will unlock a new way of reading and writing postmodern works that dissolve the lines between poetry, prose, visual and performance art, exploring what is becoming known as “the performative essay.” Central to our aim is defining the limits and possibilities of literature that subverts our expectations and defies description. Topics will include Viktor Shklovsky’s defamiliarization, Andy Graff’s Foundational Narrative Design, and deviation from John Gardner’s “fictional dream.” Each week, students will playfully experiment with prompts targeting innovative sources of narrative momentum and share original hybrid works in progress. Self-assessments, conferences, and workshops will be student-led. To conclude the quarter, students will perform revisions of the workshop essay and reflect on the power of performative works to incite social change.

Day/Time: Fridays, 11:30am-2:20pm

This course introduces students to the field of Translation Studies and its key concepts, including fidelity, equivalence, and untranslatability, as well as the ethics and politics of translation. We will investigate the metaphors and models that have been used to think about translation and will consider translation as a transnational practice, exploring how “world histories” may be hidden within “word histories,” as Emily Apter puts it. In the process, we will assess theories of translation and poetry from classical antiquity to the present; compare multiple translations of the same text; and examine notable recent translations. Students will carry out translation exercises and create a final translation project of their own.

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, 1:30-4:20pm

In the same way that water is composed of two elements—hydrogen and oxygen—the personal essay essentially consists of anecdotes and reflections, i.e., facts and thoughts, or the objective and the subjective. What happened, and what what happened means. The artistry of the essay consists of not only balancing these two elements but combining them so that they complement but also contradict one another. In this workshop you’ll write multiple drafts of your own attempt at the form while line editing and critiquing your classmates’ attempts. At the same time we’ll read (and write about) foundational essays that are in overt dialogue with one another, starting with “Why I Write,” by George Orwell, and “Why I Write,” by Joan Didion. We’ll read James Baldwin in conjunction with the seminal essay he inspired Adrienne Rich to write, then look at infusions of poetry into the form via Natalia Ginzburg and Margaret Atwood. We'll end by reading Didion’s essay, “Goodbye to All That,” paired with Eula Biss' cover version, also titled "Goodbye to All That." You'll leave knowing the recent history, basic theory, and practice of nonfiction's most fundamental form.

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

A long tradition of scientific and environmental writing animates the genre of creative nonfiction. In this introductory workshop, you will develop a writing practice and deepened understanding of nonfiction through readings and prompts focused on expressing ecological realities and scientific facts through literary art. Writing prompts will offer techniques in translating jargon into lyricism, data into story. Bring your love of memoir and personal essay, and we will also trouble notions of nature and reconsider how language shapes our relationship to the environment. In exciting the boundaries of the essay, we might, as David Quamman puts it, write wild thoughts from wild places. Throughout the course of the quarter, we will examine our own work and others' from a critical perspective, looking carefully at tenets of voice, language, and form. We will finish the course with a more nuanced understanding of creative nonfiction as a whole, as well as our position within the field and the changing world more generally. Readings will include texts by Linda Hogan, Lacy Johnson, Helen MacDonald, Arundhati Roy, Esmé Weijun Wang, and *visiting writers.*

Day/Time: Friday, 9:30-12:20pm