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 and their intersections with performance, sound, installation, and visual art.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In this course, we will explore the history and nature of landscape in literature, but especially as a practice of description, catalogue, attention, and scale. With a specific attention to ekphrasis (the description or reproduction of a visual work in a literary format), we will practice 'decolonizing' landscape from its problematic entanglements with the enclosure movement and the history of colonialism, and seek out ways of redefining landscape within urban and bucolic environments, at once gaining a new understanding of what Donna Haraway called 'natureculture,' the entangled multispecies aspects of environment that thrive in hybridity and codependence. We will experiment with different forms of writing, incorporating, and deconstructing landscape within our writing and creative practices. Course work will vary but typically will include weekly reading assignments, short low-stakes writing assignments, 2 workshop slots, and a final creative project that engages with the course topic.

Requiring more sustained attention than a short story, and a more exclusive and disciplined structure than a novel, middle-length fiction (spanning between 30-150 pages) has much to teach the developing writer about compression and story arc and what Nabokov described as 'diminishing large things and enlarging small ones'. In this workshop, students read and analyze several exemplary examples of novellas and novelettes that could include authors ranging from Franz Kafka and Nella Larsen to Rachel Ingalls and Justin Torres, among others. In addition to completing weekly journals based on their observations of craft and writerly process and weekly discussions centered on craft elements in the mid-length form, students will develop their own mid-length fiction draft, through student-centered and ethical critique and feedback practice.

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.

This interdisciplinary course will consider parts of things and things in parts as we create work that celebrates the power of fragments; as incomplete beginnings, generous openings, and instigating instants. We will read widely, including fiction, poetry, essays, and drama by Sappho, Matsuo Basho, Francis Ponge, Jorge Luis Borges, Richard Wright, Samuel Beckett, Gwendolyn Brooks, Inger Christensen, Donald Barthelme, Carol Bracho, Susan Howe, Kathy Acker, Alice Oswald, Saskia Hamilton, Jenny Offill, Robin Coste Lewis, Natalie Diaz, Renee Gladman, Jenny Xie, and more. We'll write creative and critical responses for group discussion and present on our own work. Along the way, we'll ask the following of our own and others' experiments: What space do fragments require? What freedom do fragments allow and how might they behave irresponsibly? How does fragmentary writing encourage juxtaposition, collaboration, and collage? And what pressure do fragments place on us as readers? Students will leave class with a revised final portfolio and an enlivened practice.

The myth of Orpheus covers impressive range: the greatest poet and musician of the mythical age, he married Eurydice after voyaging with the Argonauts, his song capable of taming wild nature, drawing listening animals into his aura, only to have his beloved slain by a serpent's bite. From there, he charmed his way into the underworld with his lyrics, gaining permission to bring Eurydice back to the world on the condition he not look back, one that he couldn't abide. In his grief, he sang mournful chants and praised Apollo above all, inspiring the wrath of Dionysus, who compelled his Maenads to thrash him to pieces. The legend concludes with Orpheus' head bobbing down the Hebrus River, to wash finally to a cave on Lesbos, where it prophesied for ages until quieted by a command from Apollo. But was Orpheus' voice ever truly silenced? There are four kinds of Orphic poets: the poet who sings plaintive songs of love; the poet who sings the glories of nature; the poet who, having visited the underworld, reveals its magic and mysteries; and the poet-prophet. In this poetry workshop, we will examine the works of seven modern poets who exemplify one or more of these traits: Mina Loy (love and mysteries); Lorine Niedecker and Ed Roberson (nature); Ronald Johnson and Cody-Rose Clevidence (nature, mysteries, prophecy); and Rainer Maria Rilke and Robert Duncan (all four traits). In addition to modeling their work after these poets, students will fashion their own version of the Orpheus myth.

This undergraduate seminar is for all types of writers (critics, creative writers, and scholars) who want to analyze the dimensions of literary and scholarly forms of description, interpretation, and explanation. 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 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, Diane Seuss, Mark Doty, Hanif Abdurraqib, Wayne Koestenbaum, Vivek Shraya, Cris Kraus, Ben Lerner, Teju Cole, Eileen Myles, Gwendolyn Brooks, Paisley Rekdal, Zadie Smith, 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.

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.

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 class will focus on students' artistic works that are nearing completion and/or production. These projects can include plays, film scripts, podcasts, poetry chapbooks, books of essays and beyond. After reading and discussing students' existing works in progress, we will select one piece for each student to focus on and complete. We will hear from local theater producers, recording engineers, playwrights and publishers. We will read interviews with artists including playwright August Wilson, radio producer Ira Glass, novelist Margaret Atwood and cabaret performer Justin Vivian Bond. The class will end with a presentation of the finished works.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

How can attending to sensual detail make writing more vivid and grounded? How does this enhance the imagining of other points of view, both human and animal? How do the limits of the senses limit our understanding? How does the experience of sensual input accord with our scientific understanding of how the senses work? In service of these discussions, we will look at how sensual observation shapes memory in Proust's Swann's Way, and how the rhythm of jazz shapes Nathaniel Mackey's poetic prose in The Bedouin Hornbook. We will look at Michel Pastoureau's memoir of colors, and Jen Bervin's poetic meditation on the subject position of silkworms. Ross Gay's poems on basketball will give us insights into proprioception, and the Japanese incense game will help us develop a vocabulary of scent. We will alternate between readings and creative workshops.