Curriculum & Courses

This class serves as an entry into the historical, theoretical and practical concerns of creative writing as an art form in itself and as a vital element of interdisciplinary projects. We explore the possibilities of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, plays and hybrid practices as writing for the page, as well as for performance, sound, installation, and image-based pieces. Students are assigned reading and writing exercises, and discuss each other's writing in workshop or small critique sessions.

This class serves as an entry into the historical, theoretical and practical concerns of creative writing as an art form in itself and as a vital element of interdisciplinary projects. We explore the possibilities of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, plays and hybrid practices as writing for the page, as well as for performance, sound, installation, and image-based pieces. Students are assigned reading and writing exercises, and discuss each other's writing in workshop or small critique sessions.

This class serves as an entry into the historical, theoretical and practical concerns of creative writing as an art form in itself and as a vital element of interdisciplinary projects. We explore the possibilities of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, plays and hybrid practices as writing for the page, as well as for performance, sound, installation, and image-based pieces. Students are assigned reading and writing exercises, and discuss each other's writing in workshop or small critique sessions.

This class serves as an entry into the historical, theoretical and practical concerns of creative writing as an art form in itself and as a vital element of interdisciplinary projects. We explore the possibilities of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, plays and hybrid practices as writing for the page, as well as for performance, sound, installation, and image-based pieces. Students are assigned reading and writing exercises, and discuss each other's writing in workshop or small critique sessions.

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.

This playwriting course is generative, using exercises developed out of gossip, overheard conversation, dream journals, and family story. Students are encouraged to write from a variety of sources while writing in class, rewriting quickly, performing scenes newly minted to surprise yourself and the class. We will be on our feet with each other?s scenes, acting, playing, reading aloud. We will make a number of new scenes towards a one act play. Readings include Dylan Thomas Under Milkwood, Thornton Wilder?s Our Town, Kristianna Colon?s Good Friday and Wallace Shawn?s Evening at the Talk House.

How do poets conceive of and work with the most essential particles of poetry? What are poetry�s basic units of composition, and how do their deployments affect the larger structures and rhythms of poems? This class aims to investigate, through a range of readings and creative exercises, various units of composition that make up poems. We will study and imitate traditional formal approaches, such as the poetic foot, meter, and rhythm. We also will study and imitate modernist and contemporary �units,� such as the free verse line, the sentence, and the page. Readings will draw from a wide selection of canonical and contemporary poetry and prose by poets. Students should expect to turn in several poems, lead class discussion, and participate in weekly workshops.

Writing of the fl�neur, Walter Benjamin notes that the flaneur �enjoys the incomparable privilege of being himself and someone else as he sees fit. Like a roving soul in search of a body, he enters another person whenever he wishes.' Fernando Pessoa in Lisbon, Virginia Woolf in London, Frank O�Hara in New York City; writers, philosophers and artists of all kinds have long created, expanded, and contracted the self through walking. We will spend this semester walking and reading and writing fiction structured around the movement of the self in the city and country, at home and away, considering both content and representations of the body in space. We will read authors from a wide range of linguistic and cultural backgrounds to ask: What kind of literary devices (metaphor, imagery, realism, satire, irony, surrealism, magic realism, meta-fiction, etc.) does the author use? How does the tone/style contribute to the work as a whole? How does the text build, sentence by sentence, as well as chapter by chapter? Are specific images repeated and/or used differently throughout the work? How do thoughts, images and events branch out, and how does this contribute to the development of specific, dynamic characters and encounters? How are your expectations of what fiction should be disrupted, delivered, (de) or (re) constructed as you read? We�ll read short- and long-form works, to examine how writers work�contracting and expanding time, organizing structure, shifting among points of view, creating spaces, controlling tensions�so that you can develop skills and craft your own long story or linked short pieces. Readings may include excerpts from: My Paris, Gail Scott, The Rings of Saturn, W G Sebald, Open City, Teju Cole Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf, The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa.

What does it mean to write queerly? Is the personal truly political? What constraints do dominant structural expectations of form and craft place in the non-conforming imagination? Combining critical reading and reflection with writing and student-centered workshop practice, this course explores themes and aesthetics present in the work of contemporary queer personal narrative. Through the study of authors including Melissa Febos, Saeed Jones, Alexander Chee, Mattilda Sycamore Bernstein, Kai Cheng Thom, and Cooper Lee Bombardier, we contemplate the juxtapositions between intersectional identities, marginalization, and social and historical context in the art of personal writing. Weekly reading response journals and creative exploration combined with vigorous craft discussion culminate in composing and revising two potentially publishable personal essays.

Studying a specific genre is a good way to understand how genre works in general. We�ll examine the genre of the haunted house story, beginning with some 19th stories and Henry James� classic Turn of the Screw (including excerpts from its treatment as an opera by Benjamin Britten). We�ll consider the intersection of the genre with race, class and gender with novels by Toni Morrison and Helen Oyeyemi, and Bong Joon-ho�s movie �Parasite,� and finish with Laura Mullen�s book length poem The Tales of Horror. Writing assignments will alternate between short critical responses to the readings and creative exercises. Your final project can be a creative piece or a critical paper.

OoOoOoO: Concrete Poetry & Text Art. OoOoO is an investigative studio that explores concrete poetry, visual poetry, text art, and the body of work that occupies the zone between literary and visual art. oOoOoO examines language as a visual (and occasionally sonic) medium that extends beyond conventional syntactical-grammatical structures into typographically based forms that consciously employ page space, visual structure, scattering, and dimensionality and that requests non-traditional approaches to reading. In oOoOoO students will research and create poetic/visual art works and responsive sound works while exploring the historical context of visual poetry and text art.

In this generative seminar we examine the materials, forms and structures of books as they have developed historically and cross-culturally, and their influence on the fields of contemporary artists� books, small-press publishing, and related literary and studio practices. We explore and construct models of pamphlet, side stitch, accordion, codex and case bindings as means to develop both practical craft skills and conceptual acuity. Weekly exercises and tutorials attend to the application of these skills to individual or collective projects. Field trips to local archives, such as the Joan Flasch Artists� Books Collection, the Ryerson Library and the Newberry Library augment our study. Coursework includes completion of weekly exercises, an annotated bibliography of historic and contemporary artist book references, and a final project. This course requires commitment to an asynchronous studio practice that utilizes the Writing Program's BookLab outside of class time.

We read work by pioneers of immersive journalism from the mid 20th century and its contemporary practitioners, and attempt versions of the practice ourselves. We explore how seeking new experiences sharpens detail in written work and how immersion can provide fodder for any genre of writing or visual art. Students produce work that stems from life experience sought for the specific purpose of making. This is an opportunity to practice careful first-hand observation; capturing dialogue; and conducting research and interviews. Short, low-stakes assignments are given throughout the course, and one larger, longer work is presented near the end of the semester. Authors include Gloria Steinem, Barbara Ehrenreich, George Plimpton, and Amy Hempel.

Open to anyone working in long fictional narrative form (novel, novella, epic poem, etc). While the primary reading is work written by members of the class, the course will also attend to questions of process--that of writing a novel (novella, etc), but also the act of reading one as it's being written, keeping in mind the issues that sometimes arise in beginning and sustaining work on a long narrative in an environment of regular critique. In some ways the class is meant to intervene in the usual modes of (institutional) critique-- not to dismiss them outright, but rather to foreground an awareness of them. How, for example, does writing a novel/long narrative 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? We will read three or four short novels, in addition to student work, including: GEOMETRIC REGIONAL NOVEL by Gert Jonke, THE PASSION ACCORDING TO GH by Clarice Lispector and THE PASSPORT by Herta Muller.

This course is a workshop for incessant making and the examination of incessant making. Graduate students in all disciplines are invited to share and engage, shuffle and invent best studio practices. In addition to sharing what we make, we want to know: How do you make things? And where, what, why, with whom???? What is your daily practice? What do you do when you're not making work? How do you keep on living? And goodness, what about the future? Are you prepared? preparing? We will bring the studio into the classroom. And the classroom out of the room. Including, but not limited to, language, image, sound, material, dishwashing, and dog walking. Cookies will be provided. Not for the faint of heart. This course was created to serve students across the graduate division and works best with an interdisciplinary cohort. All are welcome.

This workshop provides tools for refining your unique point of view or the 'voice' of your work. We'll explore the practice of persona in narrative forms, performance monologues, and the solos and arias of music. We'll look at portraiture to prompt and sustain vibrant characters and luscious language. We'll find structural and lyric inspiration in asides and soliloquies from Shakespeare, the Greeks, opera and soap opera. Readings will include Susan Sontag's Alice in Bed, Caryl Churchill'sSkriker, Anais Nin's Winter of Artifice, as well as Ozen Yula, Atom Egoyan, Richard Wagner, Taylor Mac, Slavoj Zizek, Heiner Mueller, Hidden Fires (Calcutta, India), Diamanda Galas, Robert Ashley, etc. and the American voiceovers of Richard Foreman, Out From Under female performance artists of the 1980s and HowlRound. Project-driven with ample time for writing, high intuition and workshopping new projects. Open to all disciplines.

To write in any genre is a gesture that puts one in a relationship with predecessors and precursors. While this relationship if often constructed as a dialogue, it can also be a conflict, full of clatter, disagreement and intentional offensiveness. In this sense, the writer's mark crosses out the predecessors' work, and functions as an act of desecration. Furthermore, writing itself might internalize this structure, making a text that turns back on itself via contradiction and negation. In this workshop, we will try out various exercises of textual desecration on both our own and others' writing (for example, cutups, collages, erasures, etc.). We will draw comparisons with tendencies in the visual arts and read widely in modern and contemporary writing, likely including work by Tristan Tzara, Leonora Carrington, Ted Berrigan, Nikki Wallschlaeger, and Alice Notley.

We are constantly writing and rewriting our own stories as we learn more about ourselves and the world around us. This course will attempt to create a map of human experiences through the medium of comics. By comparing and contrasting different authors' approaches to humanity, we will be able to better understand our own. Readings and discussions will be a central focus of this course. Some readings will be self-selected, and some will be assigned. Be prepared to be reading one or more graphic novels a week. Selections will vary based on the interests of the class, but may include such comic giants as Art Speigelman, Julie Doucet, Marjane Satrapi, Will Eisner, Naoki Urasawa, Tove Jansson, Osama Tezuka, Jillian and Mariko Tamaki, George Herriman, Eleanor Davis, and more. Course work will be largely focused on cultivating our own lineages throughout the contextual history of comics, critical analysis of students� own work, and researching the connections between various creators' work. Fans, casual readers, cartoonists, and storytellers in all walks of life are welcome.

This exploratory seminar provides an opportunity to experiment with blending literary and artistic forms as a way to create something new. Be prepared to take risks and favor questions on our expedition. Some hybrid forms include: prose poetry, flash non/fiction, lyric essay, text and image, video poem/essay, epistolary, and more. To assist us, we study hybridity from practitioners Carole Maso, Terrance Hayes, Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, Torrey Peters, Kristen Radke, Kazim Ali, among others. Through generative exercises, group-led reading responses, a collaborative presentation on a hybrid form, and sharing new work in feedback sessions, the course culminates with a final project studio day. This class is open to writers and artists across all disciplines.

Jonathan Swift once defined style as �Proper words in proper places.� Writing handbooks�such as Strunk and White�s Elements of Style� often speak without compromise about what makes a sentence �good� or 'bad.� This class widens the lens, investigating �good� and �bad� style with a rowdy interest in how stylistic codes function as a means of power. I aim to make my theoretical alliances explicit, but we�re not going to stay at the theoretical level; this is a workshop on sentences, so expect to study syntax and diction and trope in highly granular ways. You�ll write in class�in a notebook as well as on the board with other people�and workshop sentences in order to better understand their architectural variants. Standard English will be treated not as King, but as one of many dialects. Why might you need to know SE well, and where might you want to leave it dead on the roadside? Readings on style from various writers, including Thomas Macaulay, Gloria Anzaldua, James Baldwin, June Jordan, Gabriel Okara, William Gass, M. Nourbese Philip, and Amy Tan.