They hurt so good. A single gesture from your crush can spark an untamable wildfire of awe, curiosity, lust, confusion, denial, hope, resentment, embarrassment, and/or despair inside you. This literature seminar celebrates the dramatic frivolity of crushes while exploring the ways crushing relates to artmaking and identity formation. Because crushes are often associated with adolescence, especially one involving a fluffy pen and diary, they are not taken seriously. But such obsession can inspire great works of art. Crushes often unknowingly serve as muses, their mere existence imbuing the quotidian with eros; we will examine how some writers challenge or mimic the traditional artist-muse power imbalance. We will also consider the queer conflation of desire and identification, encapsulated by the evergreen question, “Do I want to be with them or be them?” Finally, we will expand our discussion to celebrity crushes, fan fiction, and the ethics of writing about real people. As a class we will read Tommy Pico’s IRL, Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, Hanif Abdurraqib’s essays on Whitney Houston and Carly Rae Jepsen, Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick, Dodie Bellamy’s the buddhist, various translations of Sappho 31, Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet, Andrea Long Chu’s “On Liking Women,” and Richard Siken’s “You Are Jeff” from Crush. Students will practice writing with specificity (because what is a crush if not all in the details) and braiding personal experience with research.