All of us have true stories worth telling. The challenge, though, comes with how best to share our tales. Creative nonfiction (CNF) has become one of the fastest-growing genres in the contemporary literary scene, and offers a variety of forms for the writer’s use. In this eight week class, we’ll examine popular CNF forms—memoir, personal essay, nature/travel essay, literary journalism, the lyric essay, and more—and figure out where these sub-genres converge and diverge. We’ll also discuss the foundational concepts of engaging first-person writing central to CNF craft: establishing a compelling main narrative, creating strong characters, rendering vivid descriptions, and building satisfying plots. Most importantly, we’ll investigate the process of connecting our personal experiences to larger truths about our world. All participants will have the opportunity to workshop their own writing, as well as participate in generative writing prompts and class-wide discussions pertinent to CNF in today’s literary landscape.
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CREATIVE NONFICTION 2018-108
About the instructor
JOSHUA DEWAIN FOSTER is a prose writer from rural Idaho. His work has been selected for the Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Nonfiction, a Wallace Stegner Fiction Fellowship from Stanford University, a grant from the Idaho Commission of the Arts, and a Notable Work mention in Best American Essays 2015. His stories and essays have appeared in the magazines Tin House, Fugue, and South Loop Review, among others. He serves as the Online Fiction Editor for Gulf Coast, and has edited for the journals DIAGRAM and Terrain.org. Josh is a PhD candidate at the UH Creative Writing Program, where he received an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor/Michael and Nina Zilkha Fellowship, and is finishing an autobiographical novel about addiction, family, snowboarding, driving, and the contemporary American West. His archival digital novel ME … IN REVERSE is free to read online.
By registering for an Inprint Writers Workshop you are agreeing to Inprint’s registration policies. Remember to sign up for the waiting list if the workshop you would like to take is full. To see the full Winter 2018 workshop schedule click here.
