CRWR

How do we convincingly recreate important episodes from our life? How do we help our readers inhabit those moments that continue to live so urgently within our memory? How much invention are we allowed to employ, and how do we ensure that such accounts remain “truthful”? In this technical seminar in nonfiction, we will explore the craft of dramatization in personal essay and memoir. We will discuss many tools that are familiar to the fiction writer, including scene-building, characterization, and dialogue, as well as aspects unique to the art of nonfiction, such as the incorporation of testimonials, research, and letters, all in the service of dramatizing significant moments from our lived experience. Students will produce reading responses, craft analyses, and short creative exercises putting learned skills into practice.

In this class we’ll think about and try to generate literary forms capable of holding, inviting, or emitting a kind of otherworldly glow; expressing or representing access to some other mode of being. How have writers done this in the past?

We’ll look to a wide range of sources for models, including the visionary writings of William Blake, poems by Allen Ginsberg, narratives by early Christian mystics (Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen), Buddhist sutras, 20th century phenomenological artworks and writing about them (including films and/or writing by Joan Jonas, Michael Snow, Robert Irwin, and Peter Kubelka), poetry and narratives of channeling (Alice Notley, James Merrill), writings of and about psychedelic experience (Aldous Huxley, Terence McKenna), immersive experimental poetics (M. NourbeSe Philip), and contemporary Thai experimental film (Apichatpong Weerasethakul), among others.

Students will leave this class with an enhanced familiarity with an array of visionary forms and their history in Western writing and poetics, as well as hopefully new or renewed access to another mode of writing and thinking for themselves

This thesis workshop is for students writing a creative BA or MA thesis in poetry, as well as creative writing minors completing the portfolio. Because it is a thesis workshop, the course will focus on various ways of organizing larger poetic “projects.” We will consider the poetic sequence, the chapbook, and the poetry collection as ways of extending the practice of poetry beyond the individual lyric text. We will also problematize the notion of broad poetic “projects,” considering the consequences of imposing a predetermined conceptual framework on the elusive, spontaneous, and subversive act of lyric writing. Because this class is designed as a poetry workshop, your fellow students’ work will be the primary text over the course of the quarter.

“Which one of us, in his moments of ambition, has not dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose," wrote Charles Baudelaire in Paris Spleen,"... supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the jibes of conscience?” This genre-blurring workshop will explore elements of the history and practice of the prose poem, and other poems and texts that combine strategies, forms and gestures of prose (fiction, nonfiction, etc.) with those of poetry. We will also read texts that are difficult to classify in terms of genre. “Flash Fiction,” “Short Shorts,” the fable, the letter, the mini-essay, and the lyric essay will be examined, among others. We will discuss the literary usefulness (or lack of it) of genre and form labels. The class will be taught as a workshop: students will try their hand at writing in their choices of hybrid forms, and will be encouraged to experiment. Writers from all genres are welcome, as what we will be studying, discussing, and writing will involve the fruitful collision of literary genres.

This thesis workshop is for students writing a creative BA or MA thesis in fiction, as well as creative writing minors completing the portfolio. It is primarily a workshop, so please come to our first class with your project in progress (a story collection, a novel, or a novella), ready for you to discuss and to submit some part of for critique. As in any writing workshop, we will stress the fundamentals of craft like language, voice, and plot and character development, with an eye also on how to shape your work for the longer form you have chosen. And as a supplement to our workshops, we will have brief student presentations on the writing life: our literary influences, potential avenues towards publication, etc.

This course invites writers to reconsider the influence of Chicago’s public spaces on artistic impulse. In particular this quarter, we will examine aspects and depictions of a "fantastic Chicago." If Chicago is a city that "dreams itself," what do its spaces of violence and environmental devastation say about that dream? Students will analyze and explore Chicago writers' work in prose and poetry, then develop their own creative responses, building connections to adopted critical approaches. To these ends, we will examine work by writers including Jeffrey Renard Allen, Daniel Borzutzky, Bette Howland, Erik Larson, Bayo Ojikutu, and Ava Tomasula y Garcia, as well as the city's rich legacies in documentary and the visual arts.

An inquiry into what makes art “good” or “lasting,” particularly in the age of our algorithm-shaped exposure. Students will read “viral” texts across three genres from ~1750 to 2024, including Matthew Lewis, 20th century gossip columns, and BookTok sensations like R.F. Kuang. Texts will be read in conversation with both historical and contemporary writing on craft, allowing students to respond both critically and creatively to the virality of these texts, ultimately deciding for themselves how we can begin to approach the role of the artist in the age of the algorithm.

“Write what you know,” as a literary motto, doesn’t mean writers focus narrowly on their own experiences. Thankfully, we can get to know other people as well—through conversations, careful observation and research. Writing a profile is an act of empathy. Though weekly reading assignments and writing exercises, students in this profile writing workshop will learn how to conduct interviews and do basic reporting, and they will hone their skills as nonfiction storytellers. Some of the reporting and writing will look at Chicago and Chicagoans—getting to know and make sense of people around us. Other subjects will visit during class time. In considering the extent to which we can’t fully know the people we portray, students will also consider how writers (along with documentary filmmakers, historians, journalists, obituary writers) address these limitations creatively in their work. Students will complete a short profile each week, and they will write one longer and revised profile as a final. If you wish to add this course during add/drop please email the instructor to be added to the waitlist. 

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.

This workshop will focus on the fantastical in contemporary literature, and the logistical issues and questions that commonly arise around it. We will look at the role of fantastical in puncturing the veil of "realism." What is the fantastical doing that can't be done through other narrative modes? How does the narrative metabolize this disruption? How should the fantastical be tempered by the mundane? Students who apply for this course should already have developed drafts of speculative fiction. Note that this course does not focus exclusively on fantasy or science fiction, though there may be some genre overlap. Readings may include works by Rachel Ingalls, Ted Chiang, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah.