In the introductory class students explore a range of contemporary nonfiction styles and narrative strategies, focusing on elements of craft while learning how to choose a subject, structure a piece, workshop and revise. Attention is paid to developing one’s individual voice and basic skills (some of them involving reportage and research). Nonfiction students may (depending on the instructor) write in a variety of modes – creative nonfiction, essays, memoir, poetic texts, cultural critiques, or hybrid work that can’t easily be categorized. Students will read provocative nonfiction works throughout the semester. No prerequisites.

How do we construct our writerly selves and spaces, at desks, in communities, and facing the abyss of the blank page? This introductory nonfiction workshop aims to practice practice. We’ll study the essential elements of creative nonfiction through the practices and provocations of a diverse set of working writers, styles, and genres: creative nonfiction, essay, memoir, journalism, commentary, and hybrid works. Introductory courses in the Writing program rigorously combine reading and writing. The early writing assignments explore basic skills and craft elements; we develop our voices and narrative structures, then revise. The required reading, critiquing, and workshop assignments will make students better writers and develop the skills necessary for a sustainable writing practice. No prerequisites.

In the introductory class students explore a range of contemporary nonfiction styles and narrative strategies, focusing on elements of craft while learning how to choose a subject, structure a piece, workshop and revise. Attention is paid to developing one’s individual voice and basic skills (some of them involving reportage and research). Nonfiction students may (depending on the instructor) write in a variety of modes – creative nonfiction, essays, memoir, poetic texts, cultural critiques, or hybrid work that can’t easily be categorized. Students will read provocative nonfiction works throughout the semester. No prerequisites.

There are facts and events that seem “true” and indisputable. But in terms of Nonfiction, those facts and events don’t exist, or don’t have any meaning, until the writer interacts with them and arranges them in some narrative order. Fact and alchemy: the process of changing supposed facts into an accessible sequence of narrative. Many impulses lead to such an interaction between the writer and the “facts,” starting with the simple impulse to communicate something about one’s life to another person, moving on to the special experience of becoming a solo (traveling) psyche in an encounter with a part of the world that isn’t home; the need to remember one’s earlier life that serves (in memory) as a sort of home; turn one’s lens to the natural world that is our common, primal “home;” observe and find out something about one’s daily life in the present; tell the story of someone else’s past (via research!), or reflect on other people’s cultural constructions of the world (expressed in writing or other media)... Students in this course will encounter a number of different writerly approaches to the elusive nonfictional “facts,” through the work of such writers as Madame de Sevigne, Osip Mandelstam, Elizabeth Bishop, Alison Bechdel, Mary Austin, Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov. They will get a chance, as well, in course assignments, to try out many of these approaches for themselves.