Sunday, March 18 through Friday, March 23, the Columbia College Chicago Fiction Writing Department presents its 16th Annual Story Week Festival of Writers: Surviving the American Dream

Dreaming America

Welcome to this 16th edition of the Story Week Festival of Writers. We are so happy that you have come to experience some of the best, most diverse voices at work today in fiction, film, theater, art, music, and publishing. We look forward to having you join in the dialogue during this jam-packed week of events and know that you will find the week’s activities engaging, stimulating, and thoroughly enjoyable.

We have chosen a theme for this year’s festival—“Surviving the American Dream”—that we trust will provoke some serious questioning and prompt new thinking about the future of our country, as well as the future of creative work. The definition of the American Dream goes back, at least to the Declaration of Independence, which puts forth the idea that all people are created equal—and here I am very aware that I am substituting “people” for “men”—and are endowed with “certain inalienable rights,” among them “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” A noble premise upon which to build a nation. But as we are immersed in the rhetoric of an election year, it seems especially appropriate to ask questions about what the American Dream entails for our nation today.

What, exactly, is the American Dream? What does it mean? And has that meaning changed in the present age? Is the freedom to pursue individual goals, including achieving wealth and security by dint of one’s own talents and hard work, still coincident with the notion of equality of opportunity, or has the tension between freedom and equality become more than our nation can bear? Is the pursuit of happiness truly available to all, regardless of background, or do racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, educational, or other differences render that dream unattainable for too many people? Is our country moving ever closer to realizing the dream of our nation’s fathers, or are we seeing more and more bifurcation between rich and poor, the haves and have-nots, the long-time-ago immigrants and recent immigrants—those who have already taken advantage of great opportunities and those who find the opportunity door shut in their faces? In short, does the American Dream still manifest itself daily as a realistic goal, setting a standard of hope and opportunity toward which all citizens can strive? Or is it an outmoded myth, with no real meaning in our modern world?

These questions, and many like them, may or may not find their way directly into the readings, panels, performances, and conversations of the twenty events scheduled this week. But they will be in the background of all of these presentations, as they must be during our national election debate. We cannot afford to stop asking them. If we avoid the discussion, we will be doomed to more conflicts in our society, more arguments over who truly has access to opportunity and who doesn’t, more polarization along economic, religious, racial, gender, and political lines. Instead of a healthy tension between freedom and equality, characterized by free and open debate leading to realistic and workable outcomes, we will continue to hear shouting matches, see deadlocks in Congress, and experience a diminishing of the pursuit of Happiness.

What place do writers occupy in this dynamic? What do writers have to do with the American Dream—or any other dream, for that matter?

Writers are inevitably dreamers. They spend long hours lost in dreaming their way into characters and through dramatic interactions toward stories that prompt us to suspend our disbelief and enter that dream as we read. And whether those dreams deal directly with social issues or are simply powerful tales of personal or interpersonal struggles, they help us see something about our world and ourselves in a new way. Even in the most difficult stories, where the writer shows us human failings or human brutality, great writing will draw us away from the world in order to enable us to see it more clearly. In the process of seeing clearly, we are able to envision something better, a new image of the world, a new path to the Dream. Imagination opens us up to a renewed sense of possibility, offering us an opportunity to feel and think and experience and act from a perspective that we hadn’t considered before we entered that story. And therein lies hope.

We are pleased once again this year to bring you writers, and thinkers who will draw you into the dream in order to help you loosen the bands of hidebound or time-worn or habitual ways of experiencing the world and relating to others. From developing undergraduate and graduate fiction and playwriting students, to already accomplished faculty and alumni of Columbia College Chicago, to renowned visitors like John Sayles, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Heidi Durrow, Christine Sneed, Young Jean Lee, Samuel Park, Donna Seaman, and many other artists, performers, and publishing professionals, we will have a rich opportunity to hear wonderfully diverse voices and enter story after story, dream after dream—then to share our experiences with them and with each other, debating their visions and clarifying our own.

We will hear discussions of craft that will help us as writers and artists to better our own ability to create our dream visions. We will hear presentations from experts about the evolving present and future of publishing that may help those dream visions reach the public. We will experience stories told through plays, films, image and text, and music. And we will hear some of our city’s best writers and publishers pay tribute to great dreamers from the Chicago tradition.

Along the way, we will learn a great deal about the craft of writing and the power of story. But we may well also emerge with a firmer comprehension of the forces at work in our nation and be inspired to take our own place in helping to shape the world in which we live. And, too, we may have moved some way toward clarifying our understanding of the American Dream, surviving the myth and rebuilding faith in our ability to make it a real, living promise again in our own age.

We welcome you and hope you enjoy voyaging into dreams of the fiction writers, playwrights, filmmakers, photographers, artists, agents, editors, publishers, performers, and others who make up this 16th Story Week Festival of Writers. All of us involved with the festival and with the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago offer our thanks to you for coming and for joining the dialogue. We hope that the quality of the presentations and the liveliness of the ensuing conversations will prompt you to return many times and to bring your friends!

Randall Albers
Chair, Fiction Writing Department
Founding Producer, Story Week Festival of Writers 

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