Please note that this is an online workshop conducted via Zoom. Participants will be provided information on how to join the online sessions.
Putting the “I” back into “fiction”
“Full disclosure, this is my favorite workshop to teach, and I believe you may be surprised by the genre-bending potential of creative nonfiction.” – Adele Williams
What even is creative nonfiction?! Essay? Memoir? Lyrical storytelling? And, what is the creative bit? In this six-week workshop we will read varying styles of creative nonfiction focusing on perspective and form. Additionally and most importantly, you will generate your own works of creative nonfiction employing various forms and styles, all within this inclusive and often hybridized genre.
You may have heard either of these pieces of advice: “write what you know” and “write the unfamiliar,” but when it comes to nonfiction, both of those impulses are necessary. Through readings, discussion and writing prompts we will explore how to, as Lee Gutkind says about creative nonfiction, “employ techniques like scene, dialogue, and description, while allowing personal point of view and voice (reflection) rather than maintaining the sham of objectivity.” All in all, simultaneously telling our own stories while engaging politics, history, and/or poetics, to name a few, in order to deepen perspective.
This workshop is open to all writers, and no creative nonfiction experience is necessary. You need only to be prepared to read and generate work weekly in addition to providing thoughtful peer feedback.