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. 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.

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.

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.

Please see topic description for specific descriptions.

This class aims to help students develop their styles and to uncover the rhetorical possibilities traveling under the name 'essay.' Depending on your habits, you may write anywhere from two to two hundred essays this semester. Your obligation to the workshop, however, is to turn in your best two essays for the scrutiny of others. This means taking a piece of writing as far as possible on your own, to achieve what feels, at least for the time being, like a stable, fully amplified, stylistically polished text. You will read 3-7 essays per week and turn in a reaction paper every other week that identifies and discusses the essays you have read. Class culminates with a take-home exam with three short-answer questions, asking you to think about what you learned in the workshop and how. This class is an excellent introduction to the essay form, useful to all students who intend to put themselves forward in writing.

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.

True re-vision is an active process of 'seeing again,' of discovering what each draft reveals to its author. As memoirist and poet Patricia Hampl notes, it?s a matter of paying attention to ?what it wants, not what I want?. With this in mind, students writing across the genres will have an opportunity to explore and integrate a variety of re-vision methods that encourage multiple permutations of at least two different workshop submissions. In addition to responding to each other?s work, students will be asked to present on their revision method as demonstrated in a piece completed for this class. To prepare a solid foundation, we will examine annotated drafts of a single work by selected published writers. Readings to come from Robert Olen Butler, Elizabeth Bishop, Pam Houston, Susan Neville, Pablo Medina, among others.

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.

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.

This research- and practice-driven workshop centers writing across a range of physical materials and contexts, such as printed posters, embroidered textiles, sculptural installation, and architectural inscription. You¿ll be introduced to on-campus fabrication, printing and media resources as practical means to generate work. We¿ll practice visual grammars¿such as typography, color, ornament, composition, and form¿in relation to writing. We¿ll ask the question: How do materials and contexts amplify or diminish our texts? We¿ll engage with collections, archives, studios, and artists to enhance our collective knowledge of resources and practices. Coursework includes workshopping independent and/or collaborative projects that emphasize material fabrication and visual literacy; a short bibliography of practitioners who have influenced you; and a brief artist statement about the work you¿ve generated in class. Open to writers and artists in all media.

NARRATIVE DESIGN. What makes a story? How does form reveal meaning? How do narrative structures orient a reader to what?s important in a text? This is a workshop in fiction writing with a built-in, inescapable, in-your-face focus on narrative design. Concepts to include arc, plot, scene, rate of revelation, modular, linear and lyric structures. The readings focus on concepts that the workshops will integrate as we roll along. Don't take this class unless you have already drafted two stories.

Might there be a kind of poem that acts like a parasite latched on to a host body? A poem whose very life is the fusion of various sources, voices, discourses? This poetry workshop invites students to read and write poetry that, either overtly or subtly, engages with other texts or weaves together various discourses. We'll examine ways that poems create intertextual relationships (e.g. quoting, voicing, alluding, echoing, stealing, sampling, imitating, translating...) and test out these methods in our own writing. While the focus of the readings and exercises will mainly be on poetry, students writing prose, fiction, or hybrid genres are invited to join and work in their own genres. Afterall, the theoretical concept of intertextuality comes from Bakhtin's critical texts on Rablais and Dostoyevsky! Readings will likely sample older intertextual models (such as ballads), as well as modern and contemporary explorations, such as work by Ted Berrigan, Terrance Hayes, Rosmarie Waldrop, Jack Spicer, Maggie Nelson, and others.

Working from a premise that dialogue is the pulse of a play and story its skin, we will generate new work for the stage. From first scenes to a completed rough draft, students will write a one-act or full-length play over the course of the semester. We will begin with a series of generative exercises, using dialogue and experiment to focus in on elements of character and story in the beginning of a play. We will then choose one of your new scenes to continue forward, moving into the center or crisis section of the play. In the final weeks of class, we will bring the new piece to a conclusion. Over the course of a semester, we will work on editing, rewriting, and reimagining the play into a full rough draft form. Previous playwriting experience is not required. Assigned texts will vary according to students' needs and interests, but will typically include readings of contemporary and modern plays. Some of the artists we may study in this course include playwrights Caryl Churchill, Suzan-Lori Parks, August Wilson, Wallace Shawn, Samuel Beckett and Edward Albee; as well as SAIC writing program alumni Kristiana Colón, Idris Goodwin and Jenny Magnus. The class will end with a staged reading of a section of each student¿s play.

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 their 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 diverse techniques of narrative structure employed by contemporary English language novelists. Writers we're likely to read are: Kazuo Ishiguro (Remains of The Day), Uzodinma Iweala (Beasts of No Nation), James Welch (Winter in the Blood), Elizabeth Strout (Olive Kitteridge), Alison Bechdel (Fun House: a Tragicomic) Julian Barnes (Flaubert¿s Parrot) & Charles Johnson (Middle Passage). Accompanying mimetic writing exercises will focus on options for structuring short or long fictions. These will inform your completion of a novel chapter, presented in two alternating structures.

In this course, we will think across the different disciplinary modes of translation: between languages, between aesthetic mediums, and between forms of thought. It is not required nor essential that students be multilingual, but we will play with the act of translation as a form of re-creation, whether as a 'sacralization' or 'desecration' of aesthetic and textual signification. In thinking through translation, we will also approach and think through alterity ('otherness') as a contrapuntal force that allows for creative rhythms to occur and resonate between difference and repetition. We will read broadly (from John Dryden to Anne Carson) and experiment with the different approaches and theories that have defined translation over the years, especially in writing and literature, and we'll work on translating other works into the language of our own medium. Course work will vary but typically will include weekly reading assignments, short low-stakes writing assignments, a research-oriented group project, and a final creative project that engages with the course topic.

This graduate seminar is for all types of writers (creative writers, critics, and scholars) who want to analyze the dimensions of literary, paraliterary, and scholarly forms of description, interpretation, and explanation, and their interdisciplinary intersections and boundaries. Poetry, short stories, personal essays, passages from novels, and art-history articles will form the ground for weekly encounters with works of art in the Art Institute of Chicago, as we compare what we read to what we encounter in person.
Each class meeting has a tripartite structure, as we compare a literary or paraliterary engagement with a work of art, evaluate a scholarly argument about the same piece or its creator, and personally engage the same or similar work in the Art Institute of Chicago. We will respond to the works of art currently on display, and, as warranted, pair the appropriate scholarship with creative works by writers such as Ada Limón, Victoria Chang, Hilton Als, Ben Lerner, Diane Seuss, Mark Doty, Hanif Abdurraqib, Wayne Koestenbaum, Vivek Shraya, Cris Kraus, Teju Cole, Eileen Myles, Gwendolyn Brooks, Paisley Rekdal, Rachel Cohen, Jeffrey Yang, and John Ashbery, among others.
Students will write concise analyses of every reading assignment plus a weekly follow-up reflection as preparation for a final hybrid research paper that situates their personal moment of encounter with a work of art in the Art Institute of Chicago within art-historical scholarship. The goal is for students to probe their personal experiences with art for wider cultural implications.

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.

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.

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.

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.