Creative Writing Course Descriptions

11401/37400. Writing Law
11600. Writing Arts Reviews
11800/31800. Unreal Cities: Poetry of the Metropolis
12200. The Art of Nonfiction Literature, David Hadju.
12400/32400. Writing Fiction
12701. Writing Memoir
12900/42900. Poetry Workshop: Radical Strategies
12901/42901. Poetry Workshop: Poetic Forms
13000. The Little Red Schoolhouse (Academic and Professional Writing)
13100. Fiction Writing
13200/33200. Beginning Poetry Writing
13201/33201. Beginning Poetry Writing
13400/33400. Graduate Poetry Workshop
13600/33600. Playwriting
13700/33700. Advanced Playwriting
14300/34300. Advanced Poetry Workshop
14301/34301. Advanced Poetry Writing
14302/34302. Advanced Poetry Writing
14400/34400. Advanced Fiction Writing
14500. Screenwriting with John Petrakis
14700. Creative Writing: Fiction
14701. Advanced Creative Writing: Fiction
37100. Writing as a Public Intellectual
37200. Writing Arts Reviews

11401/37400. Writing Law.
(=MAPH 37400) Description TBA

11500. Writing Science Journalism.
This course will not teach you how to write scientific research papers. Instead, we'll learn how to "translate" scientific and technical research for a non-specialist audience and how to communicate with a broader public about scientific issues that concern us all. We will read and use as models science writing in several genres: science journalism in newspapers and periodicals, science books intended for general audiences, and critical essays on the role of science in the public sphere. T. Weiner. Spring 2003.

11600. Writing Arts Reviews.
One good way to understand how something works is to do it yourself. One good way to understand how criticism works is to write criticism yourself. This is a pragmatic course in writing (and understanding) criticism of the arts for the popular press. We will examine samples of journalistic criticism drawn from a wide range of publications, both "high brow" ( e.g. The New Yorker) and more popular ( e.g. Entertainment weekly). Students will criticize the critics, first by discussisng the goals and strategies of the different kinds of criticism they read and then by writing assignments that imitate, explore, challenge, and improvise on those strategies. Students will write every week, focusing on specific aspects of making critical assessments of the arts ( painting, theater, film, music, performance art, etc.) and writing those assessments in a style suited to publication in newspapers, magazines, and other popular venues. Each week, we will use one class session to discuss the students' own work: H.Sartin

11800/31800. Unreal Cities: Poetry of the Metropolis
(=MAPH 31800, ENGL 31800). This seminar considers poetic responses to urban experience, the city as refracted and reflected in the poet's eye, and imaginative transformations of space and place. How does the collision of the lyric moment with the contingencies of urban encounter destabilize the lyric "I"? What happens to the poem's time in responding to the multiple levels of city-time, resulting in synchronic fabulations sometimes exhilarating, sometimes ghostly, sometimes appalling? We will discuss the flaneur, the Surrealist "encounter," the poetry of dailiness, and other relevant notions, exploring poetic treatments of Paris, New York, London, Petersburg, Berlin, San Francisco, and of course, Chicago. Reading will include Baudelaire, Breton, Rilke, Hart Crane, T.S. Eliot, Frank O'Hara, Langston Hughes, Alice Notley, Osip Mandelstam, and Gwendolyn Brooks. K.Volkman. Spring 2003. (D)

12200. The Art of Nonfiction Literature
Can nonfiction be literature? This course explores how past and working masters have used reportage, memory, and history to make art -- and how students can aim for the same goal in their writing. It is a study of how nonfiction can evoke poetic truths as well as recount facts. The class is a workshop: Each student will write a sizable work of serious nonfiction, to be completed by the end of the term. Readings include Good-Bye to All That, by Robert Graves, Speak, Memory, by Vladimir Nabokov, and Herman Melville, by Elizabeth Hardwick. D. Hadju. Winter 2003.

12400/32400. Writing Fiction.
PQ: Consent of instructor; submit writing sample to G-B 309 by September 1, 2002). This class is run as a workshop, meaning that student writing is its soul and subject. Our concentration is on language and craft, and we talk about some of the practical aspects of the writing life. Each student submits two stories or chapters from a work in progress for group discussion, and then meets with the instructor for a conference. Each student substantially rewrites one of his/her stories. In addition, we read a number of recent works of fiction by contemporary writers. Finally, there are brief, periodic lectures on different elements of fiction writing (e.g., plot, character, and point of view) followed by open discussion. S.Schaeffer. Autumn 2002.(E)

12701. Memoir.
(=MAPH?) M. Stielstra. Spring 2003.

12900/42900. Poetry Workshop: Radical Strategies.
(=ENGL 42900, MAPH 32900) For this workshop, we will read poems and documents from some of the major avant-garde movements of the last century (including French Surrealism, Russian Futurism, and Oulipo), discussing and borrowing strategies from each. Students will write poems each week and keep a reading journal. Workshop discussion will necessarily focus on how to critique and evaluate innovative work, and will engage current debate over the problematic nature of terms such as experimental and avant-garde. K.Volkman. Winter 2003. (D)

12901/42901. Poetry Workshop: Poetic Forms.
(ENGL 42901, MAPH 32901) This creative writing course will focus on the exploration of poetic form. Using Eavan Boland and Mark Strand's anthology The Making of a Poem as a central text, we will consider historical models and contemporary variations of major forms in the Western tradition, including the sonnet, sestina, and elegy. We will also explore notions of form representing alternate traditions--including set forms from Eastern cultures (ghazal, tanka, haiku) and oral traditions--and innovations such as projective verse and the prose poem which directly respond to conventional prosodies. The goal is to extend awareness of the ongoing revision and adaptation of tradition to contemporary concerns and to the compulsions of the individual maker, and to empower participation in that dialogue. A further ambition is to make the history of forms a living and vital element in students' relationship to a complex poetic legacy. You will write poems in the forms discussed as well as exploring a form-type or formal concern in a final paper. K. Volkman, Autumn 2002. (D)

13000/33000. The Little Red Schoolhouse (Academic and Professional Writing).
PQ: Third- or fourth-year standing. P/N grading optional for non-English concentrators. This course teaches the skills needed to write clear and coherent expository prose and to edit the writing of others. The course consists of weekly lectures on Thursdays, immediately followed by tutorials addressing the issues in the lecture. On Tuesdays, students discuss short weekly papers in two-hour tutorials consisting of seven students and a tutor. Students may replace the last three papers with a longer paper and, with the consent of relevant faculty, write it in conjunction with another class or as part of the senior project. Materials fee $20. L. McEnerney, K. Cochran, T. Weiner. Winter, Spring 2003.

13100. Fiction Writing.
S. Paretzky. Winter 2003.

13200. Beginning Poetry Writing.
Through interaction between their own writing and readings of poetry, poetics, and manifestoes, students will gain a broader and deeper understanding of their own writing and of poetry. Students will write at least one poem per week. These will be discussed in class, along with readings by poets including Pound, Stevens, Stein, Creeley, Rukeyser, Oppen, Niedecker, Spicer, Ashbery, Plath, Howe, Palmer, Bernstein, and Notley as well as with poetic ideas associated with Russian Formalism, The Black Mountain School, The San Francisco Renaissance, Oulipo, Language Poetry and others. M. Sloan, Winter 2003 (D)

13201/33201. Beginning Poetry Writing.
The Writing of Poetry is designed to give poets at all levels a workshop atmosphere in which to present poems for group discussion and criticism. Assignments will be offered to emphasize various elements of poetry: rhythm and meter, imagery, person, tone and diction, form theme and mood, but students will be free to present work of their own choice if they prefer. Emphasis will be placed on the fact that writing can and should be a matter for hard work and improvement. Though the course will focus on student work, poems by contemporary American poets as well as works from English and foreign literature will be brought in as time allows. Topics for continuing discussion will include clarity, economy, revision, translation, imitation, publication, prevailing styles, fixed forms, and the cultivation of a writer's life and career. C. McGrath.

13400/33400. Graduate Poetry Workshop.
(=MAPH 33400, ENGL 33400) This graduate-level workshop features intensive reading, discussion, and critique, as well as occasional exercises. Along with students' weekly writing, we will discuss a number of recent books, considering a range of lyric gestures, deformations of convention, music and movement, and the poetic possibilities (and perplexities) they imply. (Although first priority is given to graduate students, graduating seniors may apply for admission based on a manuscript submission and statement of interest.) K.Volkman. Winter 2003. (D)

13600/33600. Playwriting.
(=ENGL 13600, GSHU 26600). PQ: Consent of instructor; consult Tiffany Trent (702-9021) for more information. This course meets the general education requirement in the dramatic, musical, and visual arts. This course introduces the basic principles and techniques of playwriting through creative exercises, discussion, and the viewing of contemporary theater. Structural components of plot, character, and setting are covered as students develop their dramatic voices through exercises in observation, memory, emotion, imagination, and improvisation. C. Allen. Autumn, Spring. (F)

13700/33700. Advanced Playwriting.
(=ENGL 13700, GSHU 26700). PQ: ENGL 13600 and consent of instructor. This course presumes the basic principles and techniques of playwriting and explores the steps toward developing a production-worthy script for contemporary theater. In addition to the instructor, students have the benefit of Michelle Volansky, dramaturg and literary manager at Steppenwolf Theater, who discusses dramatic structure and what she looks for in a play; and Sandy Shinner, artistic associate at Victory Gardens Theater, who shares a director's viewpoint for bringing the text to production. E. Sobel. Winter. (F)

14300/34300. Advanced Poetry Workshop.
For students who have completed one or more poetry workshops. This course requires extensive reading, writing, and preliminary attempts by the student to place his or her work within the ongoing dialogue of tradition and innovation. We will start by reading T.S. Eliot's somewhat fusty "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and begin to frame our own definitions of broad and variable terms such as tradition and influence. Our reading will pair predecessor poets with a later figure, considering them in terms of legacy and cultural inheritance, focusing on Whitman/Ginsberg, Dickinson/Plath, Stevens/Ashbery, and Hughes/Komunyaaka. Students will write new poems prompted by the poets we discuss, and will explore influences on their own writing and the relationship of another set of poets in two short papers. K. Volkman. Autumn 2002. (D)

14301/34301. Advanced Poetry Writing.
TBA

14302/34302 Advanced Poetry Writing.
TBA

14400/34400. Advanced Fiction Writing.
PQ: Consent of instructor; submit three to five sample poems to G-B 309 by September 1, 2002 S. Schaeffer Autumn 2002. (E)

14500. Screenwriting with John Petrakis.
TBA.

14700. Creative Writing: Fiction.
PQ: Consent of instructor; submit a short story to G-B 309 by September 1, 2001 A workshop that will meet once weekly to read, discuss and analyze students' original work. Students will be expected to re-write, revise and re- evaluate from week to week. Lectures will be based on issues that arise from student work. There will be occasional exercises outside the students' own writing. The Instructor is Achy Obejas, author of the novel Days of Awe (one of the best fiction books of 2001 according to the L.A. Times), Memory Mambo, a novel (1996) and We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?,a collection of short stories (1994). She lives in Chicago, is a feature writer for the Chicago Tribune, and is by all accounts a lively and gifted teacher as well as writer. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College in NC. A. Obejas. Autumn 2002. (E)

14701. Advanced Creative Writing: Fiction.
PQ: Consent of instructor; submit three to five sample poems to G-B 309 by September 1, 2002 The Advanced Creative writing workshop is for students who already have a background in creative writing and are currently working on a manuscript, either a novel or related stories. Students are expected to rewrite, revise and reevaluate their original work on a week to week based on out readings, discussions, and analysis. Lectures are based on issues that arise from student work. There are occasional exercises outside the students' own writing. A. Obejas. Autumn. (E)

37100. Writing as a Public Intellectual.
One of the questions raised as part of the Masters Program in the Humanities is "What it might mean to be a public intellectual?" This course is designed to address a very practical issue for public intellectuals - how do we write to communicate with an audience broader than academia, in the popular press. This is primarily a writing course - the class will work on writing about "big ideas" for the popular press, focusing on writing cultural criticism of two types: the review and the longer "feature" essay. In addition to writing, the students will examine examples of journalistic criticism and essay writing drawn from a wide range of publications. They will discuss the goals of cultural criticism in print media and consider and practice some strategies used in criticism. The instructor, Hank Sartin, is a freelance teacher and journalist. He is a film critic for the Chicago Free Press, and his work has appeared in many venues, including the Chicago Tribune, the Windy City Times, and Midwesterner Magazine. He holds a PhD in Film from the University of Chicago (where he served as a MAPH preceptor).

37200. Writing Arts Reviews.
One good way to understand how something works is to do it yourself. One good way to understand how criticism works is to write criticism yourself. This is a pragmatic course in writing (and understanding) criticism of the arts for the popular press. We will examine samples of journalistic criticism drawn from a wide range of publications, both "high brow" ( e.g. The New Yorker) and more popular ( e.g. Entertainment weekly). Students will criticize the critics, first by discussisng the goals and strategies of the different kinds of criticism they read and then by writing assignments that imitate, explore, challenge, and improvise on those strategies. Students will write every week, focusing on specific aspects of making critical assessments of the arts ( painting, theater, film, music, performance art, etc.) and writing those assessments in a style suited to publication in newspapers, magazines, and other popular venues. Each week, we will use one class session to discuss the students' own work.

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