Curriculum & Courses
Graduate Curriculum Overview
WRIT 5001 Writing Workshop | 12 |
WRIT 5500 Topics in Writing Seminar | 12 |
Graduate Projects 6009 (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 the MFAW annual publication or participation in the MFAW Thesis Reading or equivalent MFA Exhibition or event |
|
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
- Completion schedule: Students have a maximum of four years to complete the degree (this includes time off for leaves-of-absence).
- 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.
- Thesis requirement: During their final semester, students are required to submit a thesis of appropriate length in any genre.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intro to Writing as Art | 1102 (001) | Mon
12:15 PM - 3:00 PM In Person |
|
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. Readings include diverse examples of genre and form, as well as investigations of literary and thematic terminology. Students generate weekly responses to reading and writing exercises that focus on understanding the mechanics of writing, and are introduced to workshopping techniques and etiquette.
|
Class Number |
Credits |
DepartmentLocation |
| Intro to Writing as Art | 1102 (002) | Tues
3:30 PM - 6:15 PM In Person |
|
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. Readings include diverse examples of genre and form, as well as investigations of literary and thematic terminology. Students generate weekly responses to reading and writing exercises that focus on understanding the mechanics of writing, and are introduced to workshopping techniques and etiquette.
|
Class Number |
Credits |
DepartmentLocation |
| Wksp:Scenecraft | 2040 (001) | Richard O'Reilly | Fri
12:15 PM - 3:00 PM In Person |
Description
Scenecraft: The Art of Hearing Voices
Any prose benefits from sharpening the tools most often associated with playwriting: monologue, dialogue, and silence. Whether the example is the compelling presence of the monologue in the radio work of NPR's Ira Glass and David Sedaris, the sharp stylized dialogue in the films of Mike Leigh, the comic outrageousness and vulgarity of Sarah Silverman, the naturalistic street smart sweep of David Simon's The Wire, or the wry poignant humor in the stories of Lorrie Moore, modern prose leans heavily on theatrical lessons of how people speak to each other and to themselves. The class will include looking at these examples as a bridge to generative writing. Using gossip, dreams, photographs, listening to voices reading aloud, writing in the room, and working collaboratively, interdisciplinary experiments will be undertaken to create different modes of dialogue and monologue. Working with actors and performing, the class will make writing that steps off the page and into the mouths of real and imagined people. This workshop welcomes makers from performance, sound, design, or any other forms. |
Class Number |
Credits |
DepartmentLocation |
| Wksp:Monsters and Ghosts | 2040 (002) | Matthew Goulish | Wed
8:30 AM - 11:15 AM In Person |
Description
To understand the human, study the monster. To understand the living, study the ghost. This class examines monsters as warnings or omens regarding the future, and ghosts as repetitions of past events. Through various approaches to creative writing, we examine categories of monster, including the living animated from the non-living (the Golem of Prague), creatures that combine parts of recognizable animals (the Minotaur), and differing conceptions of time that ghosts manifest. We draw non-human case studies from Greek mythology, Gothic literature, and contemporary neurological and cybernetic anxieties. Readings may include Ovid?s Metamorphosis, Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti, The Beggarwoman of Locarno by Heinrich von Kleist, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, The Turn of the Screw and The Jolly Corner by Henry James, A Werewolf Problem in Central Europe by Victor Pelevin, and A Haunted House by Virginia Woolf. Students present their own writing in the form of creative responses to the lectures and the course readings.
|
Class Number |
Credits |
DepartmentLocation |
| Sophomore Seminar: Interdisciplinary | 2900 (091) | Kathie Bergquist | Thurs
8:30 AM - 11:15 AM In Person |
Description
What are the concerns that drive one's creative practice? How does one set the terms for its future development? Sophomore Seminar offers strategies for students to explore, reflect upon, and connect common themes and interests in the development of an emerging creative practice that will serve as the basis of their ongoing studies at SAIC and beyond. Students will examine historical and contemporary influences and contextualize their work in relation to the diverse art-worlds of the 21st Century. Readings, screenings, and field trips will vary each semester. Presentations by visiting artists and guest speakers will provide the opportunity for students to hear unique perspectives on sustaining a creative practice. One-on-one meetings with faculty will provide students with individualized mentorship throughout the semester. During interdisciplinary critiques, students will explore a variety of formats and tools to analyze work and provide peer feedback. The class mid-term project asks students to imagine a plan for their creative life and devise a self-directed course of study for their time at school. The course concludes with an assignment asking students to develop and document a project or body of work demonstrating how the interplay of ideas, technical skills, and formal concerns evolve through iteration, experimentation and revision.
Prerequisite: Must be a sophomore to enroll. PrerequisitesPrerequisite: Must be a sophomore to enroll. |
Class Number |
Credits |
DepartmentLocation |
| Adv Writ:Novella/Long Story | 3140 (002) | Kathie Bergquist | Tues
12:15 PM - 3:00 PM In Person |
Description
By seriously examining and editing fiction written by others (i.e. measuring and helping advance the success of a fiction 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 one long story or novella (40-100 pages) for critique, and closely read and critique novellas and long stories by their classmates. Focusing primarily on style and structure, we will each make it our goal to help authors improve their work through line-editing and in-class discussion, and always in accordance with the authors? perceived intentions. We will, as well, read published novellas, and reverse-engineer them to determine the ways in which they function.
|
Class Number |
Credits |
DepartmentLocation |
| Advanced Writing Workshop | 3140 (003) | Thurs
3:30 PM - 6:15 PM In Person |
|
Description
Course topics vary by term and instructor. See topic description for more information.
|
Class Number |
Credits |
DepartmentLocation |
| WRIT: Writing Junior Seminar | 3933 (001) | Jenny Magnus | Thurs
12:15 PM - 3:00 PM In Person |
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. PrerequisitesPrerequisite: Sophomore seminar course |
Class Number |
Credits |
DepartmentArea of StudyLocation |
| Gen Sem: Documentary Poetics | 4001 (001) | Leila A Wilson | Fri
8:30 AM - 11:15 AM In Person |
Description
An artist marks her journal with traces of food. An essayist compiles a glossary of terms for moving water. A novelist invents fragments of an outlaw's short life, while poets pay tribute to beech trees, miners, and railroads. They all document. They process their investigations through sketches and journal entries, interviews and testimonies, video clips and photographs, songs and maps. In this multi-genre course, students will research and write into one of their preoccupations. Through fieldwork, reading, critique, and revision, they will capture their discoveries. The final project will be a box that holds a creative work in dialogue with an archive of documents. Readings, references, and examples will draw from work by Lorine Niedecker, Terrence Hayes, Muriel Rukeyser, Robin Coste Lewis, Juliana Spahr, Paisley Rekdal, C.D. Wright, Robert Macfarlane, Claudia Rankine, Susan Howe, Mai Der Vang, Michael Ondaatje, and more.
PrerequisitesPrerequisite: WRIT 1102 or WRIT 2040 or permission of the instructor. |
Class Number |
Credits |
DepartmentLocation |
| Gen Sem:Narrative Prose | 4001 (002) | Suzanne Scanlon | Mon
8:30 AM - 11:15 AM In Person |
Description
Course topics vary by term and instructor. See topic description for more information.
PrerequisitesPrerequisite: WRIT 1102 or WRIT 2040 or permission of the instructor. |
Class Number |
Credits |
DepartmentLocation |
| WRIT: BFAW Thesis Workshop | 4927 (001) | Jose Moctezuma | Wed
12:15 PM - 3:00 PM In Person |
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.
PrerequisitesPrerequisite: Professional practice course |
Class Number |
Credits |
DepartmentLocation |
| Graduate Writing Workshop | 5001 (001) | Thurs
12:15 PM - 3:00 PM In Person |
|
Description
Writing workshops meet once a week for three-hour sessions and focus primarily on the work of students enrolled in the program, although published works will often be examined as well. Workshop sections vary in focus, emphasizing single genre, mixed genre, or new forms. Please see the Degree Course Schedule for current offerings. Students enroll in one writing workshop each semester.
|
Class Number |
Credits |
DepartmentLocation |
| Wksp: Exploring the Margins | 5001 (002) | Jill Riddell | Fri
8:30 AM - 11:15 AM In Person |
Description
In Exploring the Margins: Edges and Alleys, students learn to study what lies outside the center of cultural attention, developing a practice of inquiry grounded in curiosity, rigor, and imaginative focus. By undertaking new experiences and utilizing research skills, students will develop illuminating and surprising ways of uncovering the overlooked. This is a cross-genre course with a fiction and non-fiction emphasis. We will read the work of both ancient and contemporary observers and study their processes of research and creative experimentation. Students will generate new writing or deepen an existing project by expanding their focus beyond the obvious¿by learning to see and study what others might not. This class is a chance to cultivate transferable skills such as observation, ideation, critical analysis, and contextual research, and its topics and assignments will prepare the class¿s participants to be nimble thinkers who are well-positioned for future work in writing, cultural production, and creative leadership.
|
Class Number |
Credits |
DepartmentLocation |
| Wksp: Graphic Novels | 5001 (003) | Beth Kathleen Hetland | Tues
8:30 AM - 11:15 AM In Person |
Description
Will Eisner was a trailblazer in many ways, one of which was to put the term 'graphic novel' on his 1978 book, A Contract with God. He was a tireless advocate for comics and wanted them to be included in scholarly discussions, reach a wide audience, but most importantly be appreciated as a medium, not a genre. A storytelling medium that could be used to tell an infinite number of stories in vastly different ways. By labeling his book as a graphic novel, he was able to do all of that and more. Comics aren't visual arts and they're not prose. They're a medium that exists in the tension between images and text. Readings will supplement this course and provide context and expectations for producing high caliber work paralleled with managing a studio practice and your health. Selections will vary but typically include This One Summer by Jillian and Mariko Tamaki, From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, BTTM FDRS by Ezra Claytan Daniels and Ben Passmore, and The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui. Course work will be largely focused on developing, writing, workshopping, and beginning the visual planning stages for a long form narrative in graphic novel format. Work will be primarily created with the intention to communicate a plan (thumbnails and sketching) not finished artworks. Depending on each individual's needs, there will be varying supplemental material that is created, including but not limited to sketches, visual studies, and research. You don't need to be a master draftsperson to take this course, but you should be ready to visualize what you write.
|
Class Number |
Credits |
DepartmentLocation |
| Wksp:Prose Style | 5001 (004) | Todd S. Hasak-Lowy | Mon
12:15 PM - 3:00 PM In Person |
Description
This workshop focuses on the mechanics and politics of style. We'll look at commonplace virtues such as 'clarity,' 'energy,' 'fresh expression' and try to understand, technically, what is meant by these terms and, culturally, how they're constructed so as to appear desirable or natural. Readings in cultural theory, but emphasis on writing well: when looking at a sentence, how to put the thingamiggy here and what happens if you move the whosits there. Students will write in class and do wildly satisfying exercises on sentence rhythm, subordination and coordination, metaphor, and diction.
|
Class Number |
Credits |
DepartmentLocation |
| Writing Workshop | 5001 (005) | Wed
8:30 AM - 11:15 AM In Person |
|
Description
Writing workshops meet once a week for three-hour sessions and focus primarily on the work of students enrolled in the program, although published works will often be examined as well. Workshop sections vary in focus, emphasizing single genre, mixed genre, or new forms. Please see the Degree Course Schedule for current offerings. Students enroll in one writing workshop each semester.
|
Class Number |
Credits |
DepartmentLocation |
| Systems of Writing Seminar | 5500 (001) | Matthew Goulish | Mon
8:30 AM - 11:15 AM In Person |
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 |
Credits |
DepartmentLocation |
| Sem: Hybrid Forms | 5500 (003) | Richard O'Reilly | Mon
6:45 PM - 9:30 PM In Person |
Description
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.
|
Class Number |
Credits |
DepartmentLocation |
| Collaboration Seminar | 5500 (004) | Nathan Hoks | Wed
12:15 PM - 3:00 PM In Person |
Description
While collaboration is often central to the practice of studio artists, most writers have typically written alone, their work usually seen as the product of a single imaginative 'vision.' Writing collaboratively raises many questions, challenges and opportunities, from working out differences in style and process to grappling with the notion of authorial intent. At its best, collaboration can open up the individual artist to new ways of thinking about form, language, and process. We will read a number of collaborative texts, and exercises and projects will be collaboratively developed in response to those texts; each student will have a chance to work with every other member of the class, and will also have an extended partnership with one or two other students. Texts will include work from Harry Mathews, Georges Bataille, Leslie Scalapino, Robert Creeley, and many others. While the focus of the collaborations is on writing, projects in the past have included elements of performance, video, drawing, etc and artists from all disciplines are welcome in the class.
|
Class Number |
Credits |
DepartmentLocation |
| Grad Projects:Writing | 6009 (001) | Sally Alatalo |
TBD - TBD In Person |
Description
Taken every semester, the Graduate Projects courses allow students to focus in private sessions on the development of their work. Students register for 6 hours of Graduate Project credit in each semester of study.
PrerequisitesOpen to MFA, MFAW and MAVCS students only |
Class Number |
Credits |
DepartmentLocation |
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.