E 311C Intermediate Creative Writing: Nonfiction

Overview of Course

The most compelling nonfiction subjects are located somewhere, beholden to places and spaces it takes all our senses to describe. How do personal and lyric essayists, memoirists? How do we, as individuals, negotiate cultural norms, expectations, rituals, and practices? How does culture shape us as individuals? To what degree do we absorb or resist our cultural influences? And how do we, as individual actors and witnesses to our world, shape the culture in which we live? The turn to travel writers and their reflections on travel may help us to delve more deeply into our own understanding of ourselves and others in this world. We will write, critique and revise new writing as we consider the work of authors whose stories, immersions and inquiries are bound to public and private landscapes and whose works attempt to describe, explore, question and honor the hard-to-pin-down aspects of place and space. This is significant for the tie we will spend in multiple places in which we will encounter “difference” in multiple iterations. All writing is self-reflective and critical and no genre highlights that more than the hybridized form we call creative non-fiction. To meld “raw facts” with techniques of fiction writing is to re-present truth and experience. We will focus on voice as a dominant theme and developing it through point of view, style, form, research. You will keep a travel journal in which you will record your explorations through each port – intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually.