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.

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.

In Stanzas in Meditation, Gertrude Stein writes, ¿I call carelessly that the door is open / Which if they can refuse to open / No one can rush to close.¿ Playing on the Latin root of stanza as a standing space or room, Stein writes her stanzas as rooms, spaces, and boundary zones that are equally porous and enclosed. Is the stanza a coordination of limits and encasements, or is it a liminal space of experimentation and transgression? Does the stanza bear a similar relation to the body of a poem as a paragraph does to the flow of a narrative or argument? In this course, we will be writing, workshopping, and thinking in and through the stanza as a unit of form and function within poetic composition and lyric prose. We¿ll also engage with prose poetry and lyric prose in which the paragraph functions as a destabilizing or deterritorializing event in narrative form. We¿ll read classic and contemporary theories about the stanza, as well as read across various stanzaic forms, ranging from classical standards drawn from Sappho, Spenser, and Swinburne, as well contemporary experiments in the stanza and the prose poem by poets like Lyn Hejinian, Jericho Brown, Juan Felipe Herrera, Anne Waldman, and Nathaniel Mackey. Course work will consist of weekly creative writing assignments, revision exercises, in-class review sessions, a brief two-page research statement, and a final portfolio of work.

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.

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 themselves through walking the city. We will spend this semester walking and reading and writing fiction structured around the movement of the self in the city. We will consider the walk as form and content. 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, and controlling tensions¿so that you can develop skills and craft your own fictions. Students will write three new works of fiction over the course of the semester, to be developed into a final portfolio.

Poetry can provide a necessary circular path¿ where the page offers a place to think out loud. But poetry, simultaneously, provides a way OUT of the circularity and the spin. It can provide unexpected resolution¿a quick turn, surprise, a daring jump, or rupture¿¿ writes Layli Long Soldier, a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation. In this advanced workshop, we will challenge and reinvigorate your approach to writing poetry. We will experiment with poetic hybrids, exploring collage, docupoetics, ecopoetics, ekphrastic, and erasure, to name a few. We will read the work of groundbreaking contemporary writers such as Layli Long Soldier, Claudia Rankine, Craig Santoz Perez, Kimiko Hahn, Harryette Mullen, Victoria Chang, Forrest Gander, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Ilya Kaminsky, and others. Each week, you will be offered writing prompts to create your own poetic possibilities. For the final class, you will present at least six pieces you have written during the course of the semester. This class is open to students exploring any genre.

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.

In this course, we¿ll take speculative fiction seriously, diving headfirst into science-fiction, fantasy, horror, romance and works of alternative history. This means we¿ll be looking at things like tropes and conventions of the genre and how literary craft works in mediums that might run toward camp or pulp. To help us ask these questions, we¿ll look at writers like Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Eve Ewing, TANAIS and Saidiya Hartman. We¿ll also engage with TV and film adaptations of speculative fiction, thinking about what is added and what gets lost when a work crosses from page to screen. Students can expect generative writing prompts, mini-workshops and exercises in literary criticism. By the end, each student will have written one piece of speculative fiction of their own, as well as one piece of criticism regarding a work of speculative fiction read in class.

Course topics vary by term and instructor. See topic description for more information.

What do writers and artists do with surplus, with extras, leftovers, and other excesses of production? Is there a creative use to put them to? When viewed in the context of ecology and economy, what are the ethical dimensions of working with surplus? Are there also ethics and aesthetics of the ¿useless¿? With these guiding questions, this course will explore creative approaches to waste, and develop revision practices that draw on the reuse of material surplus. We will consider forms of excess (literary, artistic, economic, material, etc.), and examine diverse types of waste and things that ¿waste¿, including literal trash, ruins, the body, time, the dream, and everyday texts (such as emails, text messages, rough drafts, conversations, and ephemeral media).

This course concentrates on animal as character??either as narrator or designated subject??in nonfiction, fiction, poetry and hybrid forms. To provide a foundation for creative work we read from Lydia Davis, J.M. Coetze, Etgar Keret, John Berger, Paisley Rekdal and view visual art from Sue Coe, Paula Rego and Richard Barnes, among others. We do animal observations, create generative exercises, and take a field trip. We investigate: How does one?s identification of and curiosity about animals inform a text? How does one negotiate an anthropomorphic urge? What are the issues surrounding sentimentality and animals on and off the page? What kinds of constraints are apparent (or not) in animal characterizations? How do animals we read and see impact our culture? How do we impact theirs? Throughout the semester, students will have several opportunities to share and receive feedback on their work. This class is open to writers and artists across all disciplines.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Many sections of this course, best characterized as a generative seminar, are offered each semester. The course focuses on aspects of literary art, the work of individual writers, literary criticism, new forms, and issues in contemporary culture, usually with an emphasis on generating new work. Students are often required to make presentations and lead discussion in these seminars. Please see the Degree Course Schedule for current offerings. Students enroll in one topics seminar each semester.

This is a process-oriented seminar on how to build creative habits. Emphasis is on a de-romanticized approach to the creative process. Discussion topics include the romantic approach (why it beckons, how it fails), rituals, self-knowledge, building a support system, organizing your materials, reading to write, navigating criticism, understanding the larger literary landscape, and failure. This is a good course to take at the beginning of your time at SAIC to ensure you know how to make use of your time, but students further along may benefit from its emphasis on the cultivation of a disciplined writing practice. Requirements include a writer's diary, an in-class partner meeting in which you set artistic goals for the following week, an interview with a working writer, and a final reflective essay.

A seminar in which we'll be thinking about surface-depth and foreground-background relations in our writing practices; also, we'll read across material poetries, book-objects, and visual poetry. As a supplement, we'll also engage in a history of close reading practices that moves from close-reading, to distant-reading, to surface-reading, each of which covers a specific methodology of reading and critical thinking (so, the New Critics to Helen Vendler, to Franco Moretti, to Best and Marcus), while also providing a way of reading/revising one's own work in a critical mode.

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.

Many sections of this course, best characterized as a generative seminar, are offered each semester. The course focuses on aspects of literary art, the work of individual writers, literary criticism, new forms, and issues in contemporary culture, usually with an emphasis on generating new work. Students are often required to make presentations and lead discussion in these seminars. Please see the Degree Course Schedule for current offerings. Students enroll in one topics seminar each semester.

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.

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.

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.