Three people reading out loud into a microphone from works placed on a music stand in front of them.
Writing

Curriculum & Courses

Graduate Curriculum Overview

WRIT 5001 Writing Workshop 

12  

WRIT 5500 Topics in Writing Seminar

12  

MFA 6009 Graduate Projects 

(minimum of 12 credits with writing advisors)

24  

Electives

Courses at the 3000 level or above. Art History courses must be at the 4000 level or above.

12  

Participation in four graduate critiques 

 

Inclusion in graduate publication or participation in the Graduate Exhibition or equivalent 

 

Completion of the thesis 

 

Total Credit Hours

60  

Students may elect internships to satisfy up to 6 hours of elective credit.

Degree Requirements and Specifications

  1. Completion schedule: Students have a maximum of four years to complete the degree (this includes time off for leaves-of-absence).
  2. Transfer credits: A minimum of 45 credit hours must be completed at SAIC. Up to 15 transfer credits may be requested at the time of application for admission and are subject to approval at that time. No transfer credit will be permitted after a student is admitted.
  3. Thesis requirement: During their final semester, students are required to submit a thesis of appropriate length in any genre.
  4. Exhibition requirements: MFAW students planning to participate in the Graduate Thesis Exhibition or Time Arts events are required to complete at least 6 studio credits by the end of the third semester AND to advise with a studio faculty member in their final semester.
  5. Studio space: Individual studio space is not provided automatically to students in the MFA in Writing; however, Writing students with a visual arts practice in addition to their writing may apply for a space through the Administrative Director, Graduate Division, at gradstudio@saic.edu.
  6. Graduate Projects: MFA 6009 Graduate Projects enrollments must be in increments of 3 credit hours. No more than two advisors and a total of 6 credit hours may be scheduled for a given semester. The number of credits earned by the student has no correlation with length or frequency of the advising sessions or to faculty assessment of student work.

Students may elect internships to satisfy up to 6 hours of elective credit.

Courses

Title Catalog Instructor Schedule

Description

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.

Class Number

1427

Credits

3

Department

Writing

Location

Lakeview - 803

Description

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.

Class Number

1428

Credits

3

Department

Writing

Location

Lakeview - 808

Description

If we define the ordinary as that which can be overlooked, or that which we value most when it is absent -- how can we consider such ordinariness in language or image a generative, creative foundation? This course examines selected examples of writing and art formulated and structured according to principles of the ordinary. Case studies of writing from and through the ordinary include works by Charles Olson, Amina Cain, Remedios Varo (tr. by Margaret Carson), Jay Wright, Robert Creeley, and George Perec (tr. by Marc Lowenthal). Each student will present their own work twice through the semester, for respectful response from the classroom community. Students will participate in several in-class writing activities through the semester. Students will take a mid-term vocabulary test of key words that present themselves in lectures and conversations in the first half of the semester.

Class Number

1429

Credits

3

Department

Writing

Location

Lakeview - 808

Description

In this beginning workshop, we will engage in generative sessions that facilitate writerly observation and curiosity to spark new writing. Ongoing journaling exercises, observational walks, deep listening activities, and ekphrastic writing at museum and campus galleries will prompt writing ideas that spring from paying attention and seeing the familiar as refreshed and redefined. In tandem with these sessions, we’ll read and discuss excerpts from Alexandra Horowitz’s book, On Looking: A Walker’s Guide to the Art of Observation. We’ll also investigate and analyze examples of poetry and prose rooted in similar aspects of noticing by a wide range of writers such as Sei Shonagon, David Sedaris, Mary Oliver, Stuart Dybek, Julia Alvarez, and Aminatta Forna. Students will create early drafts based on their individual experiences and free writing responses to our generative sessions and discussions. Then, with a focus on both building strong drafts through revision and cultivating a keener sense of individual voice as it surfaces and continues to develop, we’ll workshop student writing across the semester. Students should expect to write daily in a journal, participate in frequent class walks outside, and create several drafts of fresh writing toward finished pieces as a final project portfolio.

Class Number

2322

Credits

3

Department

Writing

Location

Lakeview - 808

Description

All writing begins with a writer. The writer alone, the writer entering a history of writers, the writer-child, the writer-citizen. Maya Angelou wrote: “A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song.” In short it has an “I Am.” To own up to first person is not to claim supremacy and hierarchy, but to recognize life as a source, a fountain, an ecology. From which, through your senses, those receptors of attention, you enter in vibrant conversation. This is not a course in autobiography but you will explore your body, origins, processes, senses, dreams, Muses – in an iterative fashion. Readings include poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Some artists we'll read are: Lynda Barry, Rita Dove, Stuart Dybek, Miranda July, Layli Long Soldier, Marc Richard, ZZ Packer, Leslie Jamison and David Whyte. They are our point of departure for analyzing techniques to create vibrant sensory images, shift from microscope to satellite narrative views, and enlarge our individual presence to include the Body Politic. Studio exercises will ask you to pull the world near to taste-test it, with synergy, inspiration, and playfulness. The Sophomore Seminar's Keystone Assignments are: DIY Future Project & Documentation of Practice. Your creative writing project 'This I Write' will receive an all-class workshop, for you to follow up with a re-vision.

Prerequisites

Prerequisite: Must be a sophomore to enroll.

Class Number

2181

Credits

3

Department

Writing

Location

Lakeview - 803

Description

A writer's creative output is not strictly limited to novels, poems, plays, stories, and other traditional literary forms, but may also include texts historically viewed as private documents: diaries, letters, personal reflections. In this class, we will consider these latter forms as literature unto themselves, along with interviews and public performances of the creative self, small-scale and large. We will focus on interviews and conversations by authors including James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, David Foster Wallace, Bob Dylan, August Wilson, and Imogen Binnie. We will look at journals and letters by Samuel Beckett, Flannery O'Connor, Alice Walker, and Anais Nin, to examine how private writings and correspondences inform the creation of the artistic self. We will write our own journals and letters, and conduct and transcribe interviews with peers on the events of the day. This class is recommended for students with an interest in literary biography and ephemera, as well as experimental generative practices.

Class Number

1430

Credits

3

Department

Writing

Location

Lakeview - 808

Description

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.

Class Number

2172

Credits

3

Department

Writing

Location

Lakeview - 803

Description

This class will have as its focus the development of support materials and methods for professional practice relating to the work of writers and artists who engage in interdisciplinary projects with writing as a central element. This section is open to both BFAW Program students as well as non-BFAW students who are interested in developing professional practices strategies from that perspective. Across the semester, you will work to generate and fine-tune professional practice support materials such as artist statements and artist resumes, tap into SAIC?s CAPX and research other current online resources for funding, publication and exhibition opportunities, and align and present your body of work in order to further define and articulate central lines of concept and inquiry. Additionally, we?ll discuss assigned relevant readings and meet and speak with a local writer/artist concerning their own body of work and professional practice Course work results in creating professional practice materials supporting a digital portfolio of your work and collaboratively participating in an exhibition and literary reading event.

Prerequisites

Prerequisite: 2900 course

Class Number

2174

Credits

3

Department

Writing

Area of Study

Books and Publishing

Location

Lakeview - 808

Description

They say brevity is the soul of wit, and in some definitions, it’s also an essential characteristic of lyric poetry. In this course, we’ll read diverse examples of relatively brief poetic forms, such as epigrams, aphorisms, haikus, tankas, prose poems, golden shovels, duplexes, and sonnets. We’ll also consider the way short forms can be linked to form longer, iterative poetic sequences. Finally, we’ll also practice revising poems for economy: that is, cutting as many words as possible from every draft. Using our readings, students will try out several short forms, revise work, and complete short critical writing exercises.

Prerequisites

Prerequisite: WRIT 1102 or WRIT 2040 or permission of the instructor.

Class Number

1438

Credits

3

Department

Writing

Location

Lakeview - 808

Description

In this generative seminar you will produce a new poem a week based on writing prompts as well as discuss poems and their genesis by contemporary poets included in The Eloquent Poem: 128 Contemporary Poems and Their Making. This anthology is inspired by classes Paschen has taught at SAIC and includes the work of our most influential contemporary poets such as Joy Harjo, Cornelius Eady, Martin Espada, Billy Collins, Kimiko Hahn and Marilyn Nelson, as well as poems by debut writers, including former SAIC students. Your weekly writing prompts will include aubades & nocturnes, ars poeticas, litanies, ekphrasis, prose poems, mirror poems, concrete poems and collage poems. The class is open to students exploring any genre.

Prerequisites

Prerequisite: WRIT 1102 or WRIT 2040 or permission of the instructor.

Class Number

1436

Credits

3

Department

Writing

Location

Lakeview - 803

Description

From an early age we learn that conflict is a necessary ingredient in any compelling story. But what exactly is conflict? This course will investigate this question at length, primarily through close readings of short stories. Among the questions we will explore: What must a writer do with a conflict once it has been introduced? Does a conventional short story have only one conflict, or are multiple (perhaps interwoven) conflicts common? What exactly does it mean to satisfactorily resolve a conflict? And must a conflict, or must all conflicts, be resolved for a narrative to satisfy? Most of our stories will be written by contemporary writers, such as Charles Yu, Etgar Keret, Edward Jones, David Means, Alice Munro, and Lydia Davis, along with earlier writers, such as Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, and John Cheever. This course will balance readings with writing exercises and student workshops, and will be run primarily through class discussions.

Prerequisites

Prerequisite: WRIT 1102 or WRIT 2040 or permission of the instructor.

Class Number

2173

Credits

3

Department

Writing

Location

Lakeview - 803

Description

In this course students will create a singular written project and enrich their understanding of how that project fits into a larger tradition. Through full-class workshops, small-group critiques, individual conferences, and engaged revision, students will deepen the grooves of their writing process and cultivate a practice that is open to feedback and that lets in surprise. Students’ thesis projects can take multiple forms: poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, comics, drama, hypertext, performance, hybrid work, or a combination thereof. The course’s readings and inquiries will be driven both by students’ own studies into material significant to their writing and by their productive engagement with their classmates’ work. By the end of the semester, students will have completed a BFAW thesis, consisting of three parts: (1) a creative project; (2) an annotated bibliography; and (3) a reflective essay, which will examine an issue of craft, subject, process, or genre.

Prerequisites

Prerequisite: 3900 course

Class Number

1791

Credits

3

Department

Writing

Location

Lakeview - 803

Description

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.

Class Number

1433

Credits

3

Department

Writing

Location

Lakeview - 803

Description

Artists' Book & Indie Publishing | This is an opportunity to research and produce independent projects that grapple with the ideas, materials and forms of artists’ books and independent print publishing. Students regularly present their work for discussion and feedback, and participate in independent and small group tutorials as needed. Field trips to local archives, such as the Joan Flasch Artists’ Books Collection, the Ryerson Library and the Newberry Library augment our study. Course work includes active participation in workshops, the development of an annotated bibliography of artists’ books and related critical readings relevant to one's practice, and a final project. This course may assist the development of projects toward the MFA Thesis Exhibition and/or the material presentation of the MFAW thesis. Students from all disciplines are welcome.

Class Number

1431

Credits

3

Department

Writing

Location

Lakeview - 808

Description

What do we mean when we say that something is poetic? How would you describe the unique poetics at play within your own work? While contemplation about poetics can be traced back thousands of years, it has surged in the last half-century as artists and scholars attempt to account for the accelerated diversification of creative forms in a rapidly evolving technoculture. This course is a laboratory for experiments that embrace poetics as a way of thinking and making across disciplines. We will explore a selectively broad range of expanded and media-based poetic practices including constraint-based composition, hypertext, digital poetry, performance writing, virtual poetics, and bio-poetry as we discover and develop unique interdisciplinary projects. Open to a multiplicity of influences and outputs, text-centric or otherwise, the course is appropriate to artists with interests in language, semantics, code, and systems. No specific technical experience is required but the course is advanced in its expectation of a self-directed creative commitment and a significant contribution to group discourse in relation to the topic.

Class Number

1441

Credits

3

Department

Writing

Location

MacLean 402

Description

This class is for the poet with a taste for prose or the performer with a zest for language and story, or any artist or scholar intrigued with the connections and potential of prose, poetry and performance. We'll start with models: poems by Anne Sexton and Allen Ginsberg, plays by Harold Pinter, August Wilson and Caryl Churchill, songs from Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan, short fiction by Alice Munro, Imogen Binnie and David Sedaris. We'll take them apart and build new ideas out of the bones of the known work. We'll create new work with a goal of making 12 short pieces in the course of the semester, writing sometimes in collaboration, sometimes solo. We will read and respond to the prose poems of Nin Andrews, Lydia Davis, Lynn Emanuel, James Tate, Charles Simic, Wang Ping, Elizabeth Bishop among others. The class will culminate with a performance of your new work.

Class Number

2467

Credits

3

Department

Writing

Location

Lakeview - 808

Description

Workshop: Childhood: Reading, Writing, Remembering Imagining (or re-imagining) childhood is one of the slipperiest challenges a writer of fiction, poetry or memoir can take on. How does one – can one? – write an authentic-sounding child's voice? By what means can we transform our own experience into something artful, coherent and emotionally compelling? From what distance is the story best told, in what kind of language, in what tone – animus, affection or 'objective reportage,' in the spirit of chronicle? We will make brief forays into film and graphic memoir and our reading will range from psychologist Ernst Schactel to brilliant observers of childhood like Vivian Paley, and onward to Babel and Woolf, Elizabeth Bishop and Gwendolyn Brooks and to younger writers like ZZ Packer, Yiyun Li and Uwem Akpan, all of whom have long memories and many (borrowable) strategies for evoking them. This workshop will invite short weekly contributions of real and imagined recollection in any genre – brand-new and provisional – and one longer culminating project.

Class Number

2479

Credits

3

Department

Writing

Location

Online

Description

This course examines writing formulated and structured according to systems of thought and expression. The nine trans-disciplinary system types presented in the class derive from various modes and technologies of language and presentation: abecedarium, collection, calendar, dialectic, experiment, lipogram, palimpsest, substitution, transposition. Case studies of system-based writing include works by Richard Powers, Andrea Rexilius, Gertrude Stein, Cesar Vallejo (tr. Joseph Mulligan), Renee Gladman, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko (tr. Ana Lucic and Shushan Avagyan), and Jay Wright. Further references include Jen Bervin, Ann Hamilton, Viktor Shklovsky, and Kenzaburo Oe. Each student will make two presentations during the semester: a primary presentation of work; a response (the following week) to the primary presentation of another; or a response to one of the readings. All presentations last a maximum 15 minutes, happen in the room, and involve language and the systems discourse in some way. Students also participate in three in-class writing sessions through the semester.

Class Number

1437

Credits

3

Department

Writing

Location

Lakeview - 808

Description

Poetics is the study of literary language, traditionally opposed to 'rhetoric,' the study of persuasive or argumentative language. In the 20th Century, poetics also came to denote a sort of artist?s statement written by a poet or on behalf of a movement, or, alternatively, the philosophical basis for interpretation ('critical theory'). This course provides context for writers that is historical, theoretical, and generative. Readings are primarily essays in poetics, poetics 'statements,' and manifestos. We remain close to traditions in Anglophone poetics, begin in ancient Greece, dwell on modernism and post-modern avant-gardes. Think of this course as the theoretical axis on which a basic literary-historical timeline could and will be drawn according to your own interests as a writer. A final project includes the composition of your own poetics statement, a text that harnesses the resources available to creative pursuits, and that is also expository and declarative, a hybrid-genre work.

Class Number

1435

Credits

3

Department

Writing

Location

Lakeview - 803

Description

This is a process-oriented seminar on writing a novel. We’ll touch on the novel’s development as a historical form, but the bulk of the class focuses on questions that arise for novelists as they try to pull their books from what Virginia Woolf once termed “the far side of the gulf.” Two short novels will be assigned and analyzed for form, but most weeks the readings are light to ensure that you make time to write. We’ll sample novelists’ notebooks, diaries, letters, and craft essays in order to illuminate the novelist’s terrain. You are expected to work seriously on a novel, read aloud from your novel, write three different-length summaries of your novel, and keep a daily logbook of your progress. Topics include how to organize your materials, structure your novel, navigate genre, and understand your manuscript’s place in the publishing landscape. This class is designed as a shelter for writers who are interested in being in community with other novelists while teaching themselves to work alone.

Class Number

2376

Credits

3

Department

Writing

Location

Lakeview - 808

Take the Next Step

Visit the graduate admissions website or contact the graduate admissions office at 312.629.6100, 800.232.7242 or gradmiss@saic.edu.