In reading creative nonfiction and pieces that fall within its related categories, including memoir, autobiography, poetry, and lyric essay, we will encounter texts in which writers engage differently with the “self,” negotiating between fact and fiction, truth and craft, and the complexities of identity, using the medium of writing as a means of discovering and sharing their efforts. Each category suggests that in addition to engaging with a “real life” event, “true story,” or topic of interest, either directly or indirectly related to the writer’s life, the approach involves invention, creativity, and artifice. There are many exciting and worthwhile ways of attempting to gain degrees of accountability and intimacy with our readers (and ourselves). A self-portrait by Rembrandt will seem more autobiographical or personal to some, while Monet’s water-lilies might seem more intimate and revealing to others. Both painters, in their own way, make a “creative non-fiction.”

In this course, we will be looking at texts with a range of approaches– some writers investigate the question of self by sharing childhood stories, or interviewing family members. Some writers engage in more prosaic, philosophical examinations of aspects of identity like race. Others choose not to write explicitly about themselves but select generative topics of interest though which revelations are made. Some writers we get to know because they tell us about their lives, and others we get to know by patterns of insight, styles of observation, and other aesthetic choices that accrue across pages, creating subtext and context. In either case, greater intimacy with the writer is found than would be in a textbook or research article; the writer herself, and/or the manner of the telling, are part of the story being told. Together we will think through what it means and how it’s possible to write accurately and ethically about life, using the poems, stories, and each other as guides. Every week writers will have the chance to share and workshop their own pieces, as well as generate new material. Some authors we’ll be reading include Robin Coste Lewis, Rachel Zucker, Jane Lazarre, Joyce Carol Oates, Claudia Rankine, and Brian Blanchfield.