Writing: Courses

Contemporary Practices: Intro to Creative Writing This class serves as an entry into the historical, theoretical and practical concerns of creative writing. We explore the possibilities of fiction,non-fiction, poetry, plays and hybrid practices. Students are assigned reading and writing exercises, and discuss each other?s work in workshop or small critique sessions.

Contemporary Practices: Monsters & Ghosts To understand what it means to be human, study the monster. This class examines the monster as warning or omen, and the ghost as repetition. Through various approaches to creative writing, we examine several categories of monster, including the living animated from the non-living (the Golem of Prague), creatures that combine parts of recognizable animals (the Minotaur), monstrous shifts of scale (Godzilla), and creatures within creatures (parasites). Case studies include the monsters of Greek mythology and their relation to thresholds, Biblical monster imagery and differing conceptions of time, the non-human in Gothic literature, and the neurological and cybernetic anxieties captured in contemporary science fiction. Readings include Ovid?s Metamorphosis, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, the film Spirit of the Beehive, The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, and The Beggarwoman of Locarno by Heinrich von Kleist. Students present their own research and writing in the form of creative responses to the lectures, the class readings, and one another?s work.

Wksp: Cabinet of Curiosities The Wunderkammer, or Cabinet of Curiosities, prevalent in 16th and 17th Century Europe, is the inspiration for this course. These 'cabinets' were encyclopedic collections of objects kept by rulers, aristocrats, and early practitioners of science. In this prompt-driven workshop we create our own cabinet of wonders?not a collection of physical objects, but of writing?arising from images, ideas, constraints, noises, observations, and other stimuli. The bulk of the writing for the course is completed during classroom studio sessions in which we approach writing as a collective exercise, taking the position that writing together, for a specific period of time, is a powerful and transformative act. Weekly homework includes the creation of time-based prompts and constraints?the ?curiosities? used in the classroom. Writing exercises are read aloud in their virgin state; edited pieces may be workshopped at the discretion of the student. This course is open to writers of all disciplines as well as studio artists interested in writing as a spontaneous practice.

Students trace the history and culture of hip hop and rap with a particular emphasis on language and lyric. Class sessions include close listening and watching, as well as participatory exercises. Students create their own rap lyrics and/or performance, and also work in collaborative groups.

Wksp: Lyric Voice The term ?lyric? is aquiver with contrasts--spontaneous and reflective, emotional and impersonal, shocking and quiet--though it is still used consistently to describe language rooted in music. In this course we pluck at defining notions of the lyric, yet also cut a few of the lyre?s strings to see what other sounds it might make. We work to identify how the lyric?s concision, metrical unification, subjectivity, imagery, and sensuality exist both within and outside of the realm of the poem, and we will see if we can identify what makes a cartoon, retablo, performance, or vase lyrical. Every week we read and listen to lyric poems, investigate new and evolving lyrical forms, write our own lyrical pieces, and critically respond to all of the above. By the end of the course, every student will have at least ten lyrical pieces that can be played on a saw, sprinkled into strumming, or simply read from a page.

Adv Writ: Writing the Scene In this workshop we discuss the elements of story building, including character, setting, pacing, and dialogue, with an emphasis on the dramatic scene. Students may work on short stories, novel chapters, or prose poems. We read the works of various fiction practitioners, and come together for a reciprocal dialogue about both readings and student work.

Adv Wrt: Walking:A Poetics The textures of walking and writing are deeply woven together. In this workshop we walk and explore various theories and practices of walking, approaching them from the perspectives of poetry, essay, aphorism, anthropology, architecture and hybrid writing. We read Thomas A. Clark, Thoreau, Annie Dillard, Rousseau, Whitman, Lisa Robertson, Devin Johnston, Jeffrey C. Robinson, Basho, Rebecca Solnit, Bruce Chatwin and Shawn Micallof. Though the classroom is our workshop, the environs of Chicago will be our experimental laboratory. Classwork involves weekly walking requirements, topological writing assignments, and regular reflections, as well as occasional group expeditions and forays in which we experience varieties of walking: sauntering, strolling, strutting, foraging, skulking.

Adv Writ: Show/Tell:Comics A combined seminar/workshop, this course allows writers and visual artists to directly engage with visual representation, narrative, and language by studying and making comics. We consider comics? rich history alongside innovative contemporary work, from the modernist wordplay of George Herriman and the gorgeous dreamscapes of Winsor McCay to Jim Woodring?s surreal fables and the Hernandez Brothers' elaborate narratives. With a series of in-class exercises, weekly assignments, and longer projects, we explore the hybrid relationship of image and language inherent to comics. The final project is a short-run, self-published comic. Prior completion of Writing Workshop: Sequential Storytelling, WRIT 2140, is recommended but not required for students wishing to enroll in this course.

Gen Sem: Artists' Books in a Critical Context. This is an opportunity for students who have prior experience with the ideas, materials and forms of artists? books to conduct pertinent research and produce independent projects that may include books and other printed publications. Students regularly present their work for discussion and feedback, and also respond to weekly reading assignments that address historical and critical readings in the field. This advanced-level course may assist the completion of projects for both the BFAW thesis and the BFA thesis exhibition.

Gen Sem: Electronic Writing Writing in the twenty-first century is computational, writes literary critic N. Katherine Hayles. She explains that while this is true of any work that uses digital software as its production environment before being output to print, it is particularly evident in works of electronic literature that are designed to be encountered on the computer screen. The practitioner of electronic writing is an author who combines human language and computer code to create new kinds of literary experience. Works of electronic literature can exceed the possibilities of print in their scale, dynamic variability, visual and temporal qualities, and attentiveness to the reader. The environment of the network (internet) also provides new opportunities for collaboration and sampling of found material. In this writing studio, we will survey varied forms of electronic literature including interactive hypertext/hypermedia, multi-user environments, codeworks, e-poetry, writing for virtual reality, and text-driven digital performance. Students engage the potential of computational literature by creating original works using a variety of web-based programming languages taught in the weekly sessions. No previous programming experience is required.

Gen Sem: Aloud Text/Voice/Proc ALOUD is an experimental creative writing workshop that explores the process of writing as the performance of reading, or the process of talking as the performance of writing, or in other words talking aloud. It concerns itself primarily with works derived from, or composed for, speaking. ALOUD mines the possibilities of writing for your own voice, or writing for another person's voice, in such vocal endeavors as radio plays, spontaneous poetry, and compositions derived from vocal improvisation. We address questions such as: What happens when we speak extemporaneously? What mysteries of connection happen in the flow of speech in the moment? What do so-called ?mistakes? and ?slips of the tongue? reveal about thought and language, and should they remain in a work? What if the mistake is an integral part of the writing process? What needs to be edited in a work and what needs to remain? We examine the work of artists such as Caroline Bergvall, Kenneth Goldsmith, David Antin, Erik Belgum, and others. ALOUD is open to all genres and recommended for graduating students who intend to participate in the BFAW reading.

Gen Sem: Mixed Genre Work in Progress This course facilitates ongoing revision of texts in progress for mixed-genre pieces including performance, video and sound/music projects. Students present work for intensive discussion and response from an interdisciplinary perspective, and conduct individualized research relevant to their concerns. This advanced-level seminar intends to assist the completion of work that may have taken root in beginning-level intermedia workshops, or that may be used toward completion of projects for both the BFAW thesis and the BFA thesis exhibition.

This course is highly individualized to guide a student in constructing his or her thesis. Students meet both as a group and independently with the instructor to develop his or her own innovative project and to deepen investigations into bodies of work that are a part of its larger context. Readings and inquiries are driven both by students? work and by their own research; as such, students read and comment on each other?s work in relation to the ideas that inform it. The goal of the course is for each student to complete a thesis while enriching his or her understanding of how the work fits into a larger tradition.

An alternative to the traditional workshop. Though the primary reading will be novels (just begun, nearly finished, somewhere in between) being written by members of the class, the course will focus more on process- that of writing a novel, but also that of reading one as it's being written. In some ways the class is meant to interfere with the usual modes of (institutional) critique, not to dismiss them outright (or replace one mode of critique with another), but rather to foreground an awareness of them. How, for example, does writing a novel in an academic institution differ from writing one outside it? What are some of the implicit assumptions about writing- and reading-a novel in this context? Given that, in this setting, writing a novel is at least a partially public process, how can a writer make the best use of that process, and how can the process be broken down in such a way as to allow any number of difference in sensibility, intention, ideology, etc.

Misheard Respoken: The In Betweens This generative workshop will highlight the gaps and spaces that exist within the process of artistic and literary production. The workshop will trace and invent links between language, image, and materiality. Investigating both the critical and poetic approaches to literal and material translations, each student will develop their own expressive methodologies in a series of collaborative and independent experimental projects. The class discussion will be informed by visiting artists and writers sharing their approaches to the possibilities of translation.

Graduate Poetry Workshop: Word Work & Hybridity In this poetry workshop we will focus on poetry's conventions: word choice, line break, concision, use of white space, syntax, and the sonic elements of language. We will simultaneously consider hybrid texts: works that move between poetry and prose, work that experiments with fonts, handwriting, and other visuals such as photographs and stitching. Our focus will be on the page as primary frame, though we may also consider text for the wall, the screen, or handmade book. Writers of any genre are welcome in this workshop, as well as other graduate students who want to get the most out of text in their work. We will discuss each others poems and texts, and we will do in-class exercises to generate new work and revise. Readings of contemporary poets will include Kamau Brathwaite, Susan Howe, M. NourbeSe Philip, Douglas Kearney, Cecilia Vicu?a, Leslie Scalapino, Bhanu Kapil, Paolo Javier, Jen Hofer, and Jen Bervin. We will also consider the textual gestures of artists such as Jenny Holzer, Glen Ligon, Louise Bourgeois, and Brendan Fernandes.

By seriously examining and editing stories written by others (i.e. measuring and helping advance the success of stories according to their authors? intentions), writers not only develop a greater capacity to strengthen their own work, but a clearer understanding of their own literary values. In this workshop students write a number of stories for critique, and closely read and critique those of their classmates. Focusing primarily on style and structure, we each make it our goal to help others improve their writing through line-editing and in-class discussion, in accordance with the authors? perceived intentions. Additionally, we read stories by a variety of published authors, and reverse-engineer them to determine the ways in which they function. In-class generative exercises may occasionally be assigned.

This class will explore one particular Situationist concept: the derive, 'a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences. 'Classes will vary between actual derives (conducted outdoors) and in-classroom meetings wherein we discuss the derive and the particular results of our derives. The core of the reading will be basic Situationist literature: Society of the Spectacle, and Revolution of Everyday Life. Those who enroll should be prepared for a good deal of walking.

?Given its genre mingling, the lyric essay often accretes by fragments, taking shape mosaically??its import visible only when one stands back and sees it whole.? ?Editors, Seneca Review The lyric essay has been defined by its similarity to poetry, in its attention to the musicality of language, associative leaps, intuitive connections, and compression. Many writers have referred to the lyric essay as a mosaic, montage, or collage. It?s a genre-bending form, straddling and blurring literary boundaries. For example, Brenda Miller states: ?the lyric essay has a tendency toward fragmentation that invites the reader into those gaps, that emphasizes what is unknown rather than the already articulated known. By infusing prose with tools normally relegated to the poetic sensibility, the lyric essayist creates anew, each time, a form that is interactive, alive, full of new spaces in which meaning can germinate.? In this course, we will further examine what has been deemed the lyric essay by creating and sharing our own. Readings will come from Anne Carson, Albert Goldbarth, Lia Purpura, Lawrence Sutrin, Brenda Miller, Deborah Tall, and others.

This course examines writing formulated and structured according to systems of thought and expression, derived from various disciplines and technologies including dentistry, alphabets, calendars, medicine, and the poetics of literary history. Students will produce and present their own writing through in-class exercises and creative responses to one another's work and to readings. Class readings will include the work of Richard Powers, Gertrude Stein, Jennifer Moxley, Julie Carr, and Paul Hoover.

All strong fiction is made of strong sentences, strong strings of words that make us want to linger even as they push us toward the next strong string. This class will focus on how to make stronger sentences. We will read strong sentences by all kinds of authors and discover exactly what makes them strong. We'll do in-class exercises to master our intentions. We will read student sentences and take them apart. We will force student sentences to box and do yoga and sleep and sing opera. We will smash them up and twist them to find their strengths. If they have no strengths, we will put them to death, and feed their cold bones to other, better sentences in need of more calcium. We will find all the fun and have it.

'Then away out in the woods I heard that kind of a sound that a ghost makes when it wants to tell about something that's on its mind and can't make itself understood, and so can't rest easy in its grave, and has to go about that way every night grieving.' Starting from the premise that Mark Twain?s novel is one of the essential influences on the modern story, we will read and discuss J.D Salinger, CATCHER IN THE RYE, Joyce Carol Oates, FOXFIRE: THE CONFESSIONS OF A GIRL GANG, Anthony Burgess, THE CLOCKWORK ORANGE, Russell Banks, RULE OF THE BONE, Marilyn Robinson, HOUSEKEEPING, Suzan-Lori Parks, TOPDOG /UNDERDOG, and Rian Johnson's 2005 neo-noir film BRICK.

We are accustomed to thinking of fiction as emanating, first, as ?voice,? i.e. as a formalization of oral language, almost instinctive, and easily available. In truth, for the writer to rely primarily on first impulse is also to discover how exceptionally limited ?instinct? is to the construction of a longer work; the novel. While narrative voice is critical, the novel must often rely on multiple techniques of structure, point of view and pacing, to sustain the reader?s (and writer?s) curiosity, challenging his/her interest. In fact, the novel?s architecture, like a rite of courtship, coyly unfolds and withholds plot, illuminates then complicates character, and radically subverts time and space. For anyone considering writing a novel, this course explores the diverse techniques of narrative structure employed by contemporary English language novelists (i.e: American, Australian, British & Canadian). Writers we?ll read are: Uzodinma Iweala (Beasts of No Nation), James Welch (Winter in the Blood), Kazuo Ishiguro (Remains of the Day), Julian Barnes (Flaubert?s Parrot), Claudia Rankine (Don?t let me Be Lonely), Elizabeth Strout (Olive Kitteridge) & Meg Cabot (Boy Meets Girl). Accompanying mimetic writing exercises will focus on options for structuring short or long fictions. These will inform your writing the opening of your novel, presented in two alternating structures.

We will be reading the whole of the Brothers Grimm and thereafter varying it in variations of our own invention. That is ? the members of the class, independently, will take tales and turn them. This work may be done in fiction or in verse, as one chooses -- even in art of one sort or another. The method of criticism will be the same as used in my LYING CLASS: Asking. This method will be taught along with the work of varying.

Surrealism is not only one of the most important art movements of the 20th century, but it continues to provide a wealth of methods for creative practice, and a rich point from which to view the role of art and its relationship to social and political life. In this seminar, we will focus on two sites dear to the Surrealists: the wunderkammer, or wonder cabinet, and the flea market. Alternating with surrealist exercises (some created as a group), we will read or view key surrealists and their decedents in many genres: Andre Breton, Rikki Ducornet, Angela Carter, Cornell's boxes, and the animations of the Brothers Quay, as well as Dadaist Kurt Schwitter's Mertzbau and accounts of early Surrealist gallery shows.

In this course we explore alternative models of research and publishing as a creative project. We review the seminal and ongoing projects of small publishers, with an emphasis on how the activity ofpublishing informs and influences one's practice. Working independently or collectively, students theorize, curate, organize, produce and distribute a publication, utilizing their own work and that of others as content. Though printed forms are emphasized, students from all disciplines are welcome to contribute their interests in electronic and other forms of production.

This interdisciplinary workshop initially engages elements of narrative in isolation to generate single lines of text, looking for how narrative asserts itself through implication, considering how much untold can be communicated by discrete concentrated or compressed units of the told. Shortly we?ll take our own paths, making text-based work or combining aspects of narrative with another medium, with many opportunities to share works in progress through manuscript exchange, screenings, performances, and studio visits.

Contemporary Practices: Intro to Creative Writing This class serves as an entry into the historical, theoretical and practical concerns of creative writing. We explore the possibilities of fiction,non-fiction, poetry, plays and hybrid practices. Students are assigned reading and writing exercises, and discuss each other?s work in workshop or small critique sessions.

Contemporary Practices: Intro to Creative Writing This class serves as an entry into the historical, theoretical and practical concerns of creative writing. We explore the possibilities of fiction,non-fiction, poetry, plays and hybrid practices. Students are assigned reading and writing exercises, and discuss each other?s work in workshop or small critique sessions.

The persona poem is a poem in the voice of an assumed character; it has roots going back to Medieval examples like 'The Dream of the Rood,' flowers into its strongest expression with Victorian poets like Robert Browning and Alfred Lord Tennyson, and flourishes in odd corners of poetry to this day. Students will respond to examples from these and more contemporary poets (Edgar Lee Masters, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Hayden, Sylvia Plath) with original efforts and experiments of their own in this genre.

This course examines literary form and convention not as models to aspire to but as examples of how writers before us represented experience and literary expression. Four areas of activity are addressed: 1) We establish a shared vocabulary of literary convention and form. 2) We find language to describe our own and classmates? native forms and weirdness. 3) We channel our own matter through these architectures and discuss what magic or madness various forms work on our 'stuff.' 4) We practice reading texts like writers, attentive mainly to moves that clarify, expand our challenge our own.

Student work is the primary focus of this workshop, along with analysis of short stories with a wide variety of themes and styles. Students learn and practice elements of the craft of writing short fiction, such as the development of form, story, character, dialogue, and style. In-class workshop sessions offer a means of acquiring skills for critical analysis of one?s own writing and that of others, as well as attendant strategies for the process of revision. Readings may include stories by Hawthorne, Poe, Crane, James, Woolf, Mansfield, Faulkner, Kafka, Hemingway, Singer, Borges, O?Connor, Barthelme, Paley, as well as contemporary practitioners.

In this course we will examine the work of seven contemporary poets--Eleni Sikelianos, Robyn Schiff, Srikanth Reddy, Graham Foust, Tracy K. Smith, Cathy Park Hong, and Geoffrey O'Brien--and trace back some of their foundational influences, including A.R. Ammons, Lorine Niedecker, Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Creeley, Barbara Guest, and Charles Olson. Students will write both creative & analytical responses to this work. The final project will be a collection of revised poems and a short essay considering their own poetic influences.

By seriously examining and editing stories written by others (i.e. measuring and helping advance the success of stories according to their authors' intentions), writers not only develop a greater capacity to strengthen their own work, but a clearer understanding of their own literary values. In this workshop, students will turn in a number of stories for critique, and closely read and critique stories by their classmates. Focusing primarily on style and structure, we will each make it our goal to help authors improve their stories through line-editing and in-class discussion, and always in accordance with the authors' perceived intentions. We will, as well, read stories by a variety of published authors, and reverse-engineer them to determine the ways in which they function. The published stories will be available on the web, for the most part through Docutek. In-class generative exercises may occasionally be assigned.

This course focuses on the reading and writing of the personal essay. Its chief aim is to forge a connection between the reading life and the writing life since the best writing seldom happens in a vacuum. To that end, we?ll be looking at the traditions and methods of the personal essay--Specifically its exploratory nature, shifting discourse, associative movement, and love of small things. This course should develop your awareness and engagement with the essay as a genre, sharpen your writing skills on both the micro and macro level, help you mine both world and text for writing material, and make you a more astute reader of other people?s work as well as your own.

This writing workshop's point of departure is a creative response to Charles and Ray Eames' influential film Powers of Ten and George Perec's essay Species of Spaces. In Powers of Ten, the Eames' explore humankind's scale in a progression of images in powers of ten as seen from an individual cell to Earth's position in the galaxy. In a similar fashion, Perec examines increasingly greater scales of experience--from a blank piece of paper to the world and outer space. Using these concepts of scales of magnification we write fiction and poetry about an imaginary universe of our own devising--from the outer limits of space to life on a microscopic scale. We examine contemporary micro-nations, science fiction, the natural world, and other sources as exemplar and inspiration.

In an effort to explode the notion of what a 'play' is and what drives it forward, we investigate some of the basic tools of writing for performing voices: dialogue, involving two or more people; monologue, in which we explore and contrast modern monologues and soliloquies; and silence, wherein non-speaking action, sound and contemplation are driving narrative forces. Students both write and read examples of these modes and learn to move fluidly between them, as well as participate in reading and moving physically through their own and others' work.

Gen Sem: Complex Narratives: Engineering Comics In this course we focus on refining ideas and methods for telling stories through comics by exploring the complex relationship and interactive development of sequential text and image. Students engage with visual representation, narrative, and language by studying and making comics. Required readings supplement the creative assignments, and may include the work of Eleanor Davis, Joseph Lambert, Los Bros Hernandez, Alan Moore, Jason Lutes, Lynda Barry, Joe Sacco, Jen Wang and many others. Class meetings include writing and drawing exercises, critical analysis of comics and their forms, discussions and workshops for weekly assignments and longer projects. This class is recommended for students who have experience in narrative, storytelling, writing and mark-making.

The detail, the distinct voice and character of a play, can be found in its dialogue. This playwriting course is generative, using exercises developed out of gossip, overheard conversation, dream ournals, family story, song and photograph to make new work. The student is encouraged to work from a variety of sources while writing in class, rewriting quickly, and performing scenes newly minted that will surprise us all. We will make a number of new scenes and one act plays in the course of a semester and will develop at least one of them from each student for a final performance. The story, plot and dialogue work can have a direct application to all prose forms. Students of other disciplines are encouraged to take this class. PARTIAL READING LIST: Samuel Beckett, Caryl Churchill, David Mamet, Dylan Thomas, Harold Pinter, Anton Chekhov, Dorothy Parker; local playwrights Mickle Maher and Jenny Magnus; the fiction of Lorrie Moore, Donald Barthelme, Franz Kafka, Lars Gustafson; the performance artist Karen Finley; and the radio work of Ira Glass and friends.

Found object, objet trouve, ready-made: removed from one context and placed within another--aesthetic, critical, creative, or explicitly anti-expressive. In this class we recycle, rearrange, reiterate, recombine, replay; seek and stumble upon; cut, orchestrate, shape; read and re-read. We workshop your experiments and investigations of found language with the eyes of scientists, testing process and the validity of your hypothesis. We consider history and pop, books, signage, lists, collage, spectacle. Readings may include projects by writers, artists, and composers such as Blaise Cendrars, Kathy Acker, Bern Porter, and Hart Seely, with particular attention to their sources.

This is a class for students to work on a single, extended writing (or writing-related) project of any sort, involving any media- this can include traditional literary forms (linked short prose works, poem sequences)- as well as cross-disciplinary forms (e.g. graphic novel, performance, music or sound piece) and non- traditional formats and venues- (public space writing project, zines, comics). Your project can be made up of many disparate parts, but those parts should be part of a single whole. Your project does not have to focus primarily on writing, but writing should be an integral part of the project's conception. This is not a traditional workshop that focuses on presentation and group critique of work, but rather a forum for articulating and discussing ideas and process as you work through a project-so while the class will include presentation and discussion of your work, we will approach it from a process- oriented perspective that focuses on open-ended questioning and exploring rather than intervention and critique. You can be at any stage in your project (beginning, middle, end), but if you haven't begun it, you should have articulated a clear enough sense of it both to begin work by the first class and remain committed to it through the last. Graduate students from all disciplines, working in all media, are welcome.

This course explores the notion that a work, regardless of genre, has its own needs. The writer's role, then, is to get out of the way and let it emerge. As Patricia Hampl notes, it's a matter of paying attention to 'what it wants, not what I want. The difference has to do with the relation ? any writer--?has to unconscious or half-known intentions and impulses in composition.' With this in mind, writers will have an opportunity to investigate not only the genesis of their work but also the choices made along the way to completion. In addition to reading and responding to each other's work, students will give individual presentations on their artistic process in relation to a piece generated in this class. Although the focus will be primarily on student makings, we will examine some readings of flash fiction and nonfiction, prose poems, short stories, essays--and view selected art work.

In this course, you will learn how to translate personal experience and research into literary writing. We?ll look at published pieces and workshop your own nonfiction stories (memoir, travel writing, personal essay, whatever you're drawn to). On an ethical level, we will delve into the considerations that come into play when writing from 'real' life. On a formal level, we will probe the artistic necessity of selecting an architecture for the writing that advances the most compelling truth-telling. Reading list will range from Benjamin Franklin to Eula Biss, Mark Twain to Susan Orleans.

Or finding your voice, which is something more complex than style. In music, the ability to hear yourself--know when you're singing in tune, let's say--entails the ability and stamina to critique yourself. In this workshop/seminar, you will be asked to critique your own work as well as your classmates' and to lead a discussion of a writer you choose from the many whose work has inspired and influenced you. Inspiration is one of those touchy-feely words we aren?t supposed to touch, so instead let?s say we will endeavor to bring forth your mojo. What poems/art cast a spell on you, haunt you, what art do you aspire to work/live up to? Attention paid to aesthetics and poetic sensibility.

Break away from interior life and venture out into the broader world. The frequent and fascinating collisions of humans and nature serve as a spur to generating new work in this class. As a group, we?ll take three field trips to urban natural areas, and individually, students will be planning and executing their own excursions. Creating a field notebook with writings, drawing and other media is required; students will use the notebooks as the basis for producing a final project. Readings include stories and selections from Rick Bass, Joy Williams, Michael Pollan, Charles Baxter, and Carol Kaesuk-Yoon.

This workshop is for students either beginning a novel, or continuing work on one. The goals will be to help participants make significant progress with their own work, and to develop skills in critiquing the work of others in a way that will help them move forward. We will also address issues specific to the novel, or as they apply to the longer form - matters such as pacing, choice of narrator and narrative stance, setting and holding tone, writing what you can then building on what you have. Students should arrive at the workshop with at least a promising idea and a readiness to make tracks.

First Year MFAW priority. What happens to a text when it?s transformed? Does it matter? What must be considered, both in revising already existing texts and in encountering them? When is a transformation primarily a translation? Beginning with the written text, we'll look at ways different artists have seen and 'revised' them. Sometimes such revisions are done as 'homage' (e.g. some film adaptations of novels); sometimes they're done as an effort to 'reclaim' a particular story (e.g. slave/captivity narratives); sometimes to subvert or to show another perspective (e.g. feminist retellings of fairy tales; Angela Carter's retellings of a number of stories, including Lizzie Borden); and sometimes with no apparent agenda other than a desire to 'tell the story' (e.g. any number of versions of Salome: the biblical story, Wilde's play, Beardsley's drawings, etc.). We'll consider questions of aesthetics, cultural/political agenda, artistic 'intentionality,' etc. The class will include exercises in such revision, and each student will choose a text of any sort to 'revise' in any medium.

We will read a number of short story collections and explore, amongst other things, the ways that sequencing, setting, voice, and theme affect the dynamic of each collection as a whole. Students will give creative presentations and turn in fiction. Potential texts: NATASHA by Bezmozgis, DROWN by Junot Diaz, AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL STORIES by Babel, PETERSBURG TALES by Gogol, THE LITTLE DISTURBANCES OF MAN by Paley, CIVILWARLAND IN BAD DECLINE by Saunders, TWENTY GRAND by Rebecca Curtis, THE COAST OF CHICAGO by Dybek, BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN by DF Wallace, BAD BEHAVIOR by Gaitskill, THE ANGEL ESMERALDA by Don DeLillo, SAMUEL JOHNSON IS INDIGNANT by Lydia Davis, THE KNIFE THROWER by Millhauser, ALTMANN'S TONGUE by Brian Evenson, THE VOICE IMITATOR by Bernhard, WILLFUL CREATURES by Aimee Bender.

We will be reading aloud powerful poems, memorizing poems, considering the biographies, lives and deaths of poets, and finding what it means for poetry to involve the body and the tongue. Readings may range through all of human history.

In this course, students will propose and then begin to execute the composition of a long poem. Proposals will focus not only on quality of inspiration in subject and idea, but also on formal concerns (in what manner to write a long poem), and issues of feasibility. Our reading material will be several long poems written in English, each demonstrating formal and subjective concerns, including: Wordsworth's two-part 'Prelude' (1799) (self and historical events as subject; blank verse); Whitman's 'Song of Myself' (1855) (self as subject; free verse; serial form); Hopkins' 'The Wreck of the Deutschland' (1875) (catastrophe as subject; rhymed verse; serial form); Mina Loy's 'Songs to Joannes' (1917) (love/passion as subject; free verse; serial form); Robinson Jeffers' 'The Roan Stallion' (1925) (violence/natural world as subject; blank-free verse; narrative form); H.D.'s, 'Trilogy' (1944) (war/catastrophe/esotericism as subject; free verse; serial form); Aime Cesaire's 'Notebook of a Return to a Native Land' (1947) (post-colonialism/ surrealism as subject; free verse/prose-poem; notebook form); Basil Bunting's 'Briggflatts' (1965) (self/sex as subject; free/rhymed verse; seasonal form); Ronald Johnson's Radios (1977) (Milton/cosmos as subject; poem-by-excision as form); and Anne Carson's 'Glass Essay' (1995) (literature/break-up as subject; free verse; narrative form). The goal of the course is to have students on their way to completing their own long poems by the end of sixteen weeks.

In our intensely visual culture, one of the last great advantages written narratives hold over television and film is their ability to represent their characters' inner lives. This course will focus on the representation of consciousness, with an emphasis on texts that transform this project into an organizational principle of their narratives. In other words, consciousness isn't just the 'what' of these texts, but the 'how' of them as well. We will examine a wide-range of works written by both contemporary and not-so-contemporary writers. Though fiction will be our central concern, we will also analyze memoirs devoted to mental illness along with works of non-fiction that address the inner life of their real-world subjects. This course will balance readings with writing exercises and will be run primarily through class discussions.

Many of the so-called authoritative lists of the great innovative prose writers are, more often than not, made up mostly of men, but in fact women have been at the forefront of literary innovation for quite some time. Women are responsible for much of the most provocative, energetic, stirring, hilarious, and intelligent experimental fiction of the 20th and 21st centuries. We will read a number of texts by authors which may include Gertrude Stein, Nathalie Sarraute, Yoko Ono, Lydia Davis, Julie Doucet, Renee Gladman, and more, and consider whether we see a pattern in how they address questions about tradition, identity, memory, time, sex, politics, narrative, and much more. Students will do one presentation each, and, inspired by the reading, we will do numerous prose exercises, which will turn into full pieces for workshop.

The purpose of this class is to reexamine basic assumptions about what we do when we write poetry. What is language? What is literature? What separates poetry from prose, and distinguishes its use of language? In determining the meaning of a poem, how much depends on the writer?s intention; how much on the reader?s interpretation; how much on the traditions and historical traditions that surround the text? What is poetry supposed to do? How is it supposed to change the world, if at all? Every week, we will discuss a key seminal text of poetic theory in conjunction with one or two poems. Students will have the choice of a short response paper, or a poem in the parameters of the form or genre being discussed that week. The final project is a personal statement of poetics, which students may find useful in assembling their MFA manuscripts.

First Year MFAW priority. This course examines established literary form and convention not as models to aspire to but as examples of how writers before us represented experience and literary expression. In addition to establishing a shared vocabulary of historical forms, we?ll gain practice in close reading of texts that formally honor, extend or transgress these definitions. Students may be asked to present course material and lead discussions or to invent writing prompts that allow class members to channel their own material through these architectures.