This workshop meets 3 Sundays over the course of the summer.
Literary Journalism begins in fascination—with an unfamiliar subculture, another human being, a place, an experience. Literary journalists have traveled through the Deep South in search of early blues recordings, spent years interviewing survivors of the Chernobyl disaster, become immersed in the lives of the disregarded in a Mumbai slum. They have embedded with refugees and migrants, camped out with Civil War re-enactors, and pieced together the story of Hurricane Katrina and concluded that survivors built a kind of paradise in hell. While the writer’s own curiosity is the way into a subject, their explorations of a world beyond can sometimes lead to a deeper understanding of the interior world of the self. And while literary journalism attempts to document truthfully worlds within and worlds without, it uses techniques drawn from fiction and poetry to convey these truths. For three Sunday afternoons, we’ll meet to discuss the work of practicing literary journalists and build our own longform pieces by breaking down the process into manageable parts.