2023-2024

Might there be a kind of poem that acts like a parasite latched on to a host body? A poem whose very life is the fusion of various sources, voices, discourses? This poetry workshop invites students to read and write poetry that, either overtly or subtly, engages with other texts. We’ll examine ways that poems create intertextual relationships (e.g. quoting, voicing, alluding, echoing, stealing, sampling, imitating, translating…) and test out these methods in our own writing. Students should expect to engage with the basic question of how their work relates to other poets and poems. Expect to read a substantial amount of work by modern and contemporary poets, submit new original poems for workshop, complete intertextual writing exercises, participate in discussion forums with both initial response papers and follow-up comments, critique peers’ work, and submit a final portfolio. A substantial amount of class time will be spent workshopping student work.

This course will be a deep dive into prosody. What is prosody? Merriam-Webster describes it as “the rhythmic and intonational aspect of language” — we might also describe it as the way poems move, and how they move their reader. Arguably one of the most important (and least visible) aspects of poetic composition, prosody can teach you to see and write differently. We’ll begin with an introduction to historical metrics (the boring but necessary part), and then move on to studying more contemporary models. Readings will include a bit of scholarly work on prosody by Rosemary Gates and Boris Maslov, but mostly we’ll read poems, from the 12th century to the 21st, that foreground prosody and rhythmic structure. This will be a practice-intensive class—you will be asked to produce several exercises a week, in addition to a final paper or project.

This workshop-centered course introduces writers to foundational concepts and tools in the craft of poetry, including form, diction, voice, line, and meter. Regular assignments include both prompts and imitations in poetry writing, and will culminate in a final portfolio developed in working consultation with the instructor. In particular, we will explore formal adaptations of “the line” as “measure” within American poets' work. A short unit within the course will also be dedicated to the translation of poets writing outside of English. Poets whose work will be discussed include Emily Dickinson, Nate Marshall, Bernadette Mayer, Frank O'Hara, Adrienne Rich, Sappho, César Vallejo, Walt Whitman, and poets visiting the UChicago campus.

As live performance, public ritual, and sheer melodrama, sports give lavish expression to some of our most deeply held cultural attitudes. As sports-related industries have grown exponentially in the past decades, and as the material and political fortunes at stake in these games has also grown, so too has the need for serious writing about sports. The world’s stadiums and arenas have become theaters of very real battles over race and gender, class and religion, colonialism and social justice. At the same time, the games themselves have also changed in fascinating and telling ways. This workshop invites writers who are curious about sports as a subject for literary exploration. We examine the subject through various genres of nonfiction, from longform journalism to personal essay to audio storytelling. Our readings will include both canonical and contemporary voices in sports writing. Workshop writers can choose to build a portfolio of three pieces of original nonfiction, or one long piece in three parts. No previous knowledge of sports is required.

A writer setting out to write a long piece of nonfiction prose may assume that the world of the piece is given, but in fact the nonfiction writer has significant work to do to create a space where a reader can live. In writing creative biography, history, memoir, literary criticism, art writing, and narrative journalism, there are wonderful possibilities for archival research, visiting places and spaces, making first hand observations, interviewing, finding settings and characters, and atmospheric research, whether reading old magazines, listening to radio shows, or studying weather patterns. In this course, advanced writers will immerse themselves in one longer project, developing it in notebooks and weekly postings and exercises. The first half of the course will focus more on practicing and reading (writers including Elizabeth Rush, Zbigniew Herbert, Valeria Luiselli, and James Baldwin), the second half will focus on workshopping as the longer pieces develop. Students will finish the course with a sustained piece of prose.

When does a body of writing become “literary”? What stories might be found inside the hastily scrawled lines of a postcard buried in the attic or an incomplete to-do list drifting down the sidewalk? Beginning with the modern epistle and epistolary novel, this cross-genre seminar orbits the space where non- literary documents give way to artistic compositions that a given set of experts would otherwise neatly categorize and deposit somewhere literature is supposed to belong. As we practice the interplay of research and imagination toward the realization of a final project, we’ll examine how writers of nonfiction and documentary poetics have used everything from blueprints of a prison cell to vaudeville ephemera to frame, develop, and heighten true stories. We’ll consider ethics of authority such as information access, authentication, and journalistic objectivity alongside rhetorical matters of credibility, emotional truth, and the serviceability of facts. Come play in the archives and observe the power of repurposed material.

Though we live in an era glutted with data, facts don’t speak for themselves. It’s story that moves us. In this class, we will engage in an exploration of creative nonfiction, investigating how to repurpose lived experience and researched material for a memorable story. Together we will read exemplary forms of creative nonfiction—personal essay, memoir, lyric nonfiction, science writing, nature writing, and cultural criticism—to ask how events are shaped into stories, facts into truths. This course will be conducted as a writing workshop, and we will examine the readings and workshop submissions from a critical perspective, looking carefully at issues of style, content, and relevance. In doing so, we hope to gain a more nuanced understanding of creative nonfiction as a whole, as well our particular positions within the genre. Readings will include: James Baldwin, Eula Biss, Derga Chew-Bose, John D'Agata, Jenny Zhang, and others.

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.

A story's end point determines its meaning. The history of a life can be covered in a sentence, a few pages or seven volumes. How do writers decide? In this advanced workshop, we'll look at different ways to handle narrative time, paying special attention to building blocks like direct and summary scene, flashback, compression, slowed time and fabulist time. We'll examine work by writers whose long stories feel like novels, like Alice Munro and Edward P. Jones, alongside those who say everything in a short single scene of a page or two, like Grace Paley and Justin Torres. Students will be encouraged to experiment with time in both writing exercises and their own drafts as they work toward a polished final story. Strong emphasis on focused and productive peer critique and in-class commentary.

This workshop-based course proceeds from the premise that disorder and disruption are fruitful aesthetics that might be applied to numerous elements of fiction to unlock new possibilities in our work. Students will seek to identify typical narrative conventions and lyrical patterns and then write away from them—or write over them, toward subversion, surprise, and perhaps even a productive anarchy. Students will search for hidden structures in work by Taeko Kono, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Diane Williams, Garielle Lutz, and others, examining the methods these writers use to lead readers to unexpected, original, and transgressive places. Students will complete several short creative exercises in which they practice disruption and disorder in plot, pace, dialogue, and syntax. In the second half of the course, students will workshop one story or excerpt and write thoughtful, constructive critiques of peer work. Revision is also a crucial component of this class, as it is an opportunity to radically warp and deviate from our prior visions. Throughout the quarter, we will attempt to interrupt and shake up our own inclinations as artists.