Department of English

"Creative Nonfiction" is a workshop-style course. Each week you will be challenged, through directed reading and writing assignments, to experiment with multiple approaches to specific themes.
We will address technical issues in prose writing, such as narrative and thematic tension, manipulation of transitions, and point-of-view. Throughout the semester, we will question and discuss the ethics of writing nonfiction.
During the semester you will read a sampling of essays by contemporary writers and receive topical and structural guidelines to help focus your own writing.
You will write every week.
In addition to you creative work, you will post weekly comments on assigned readings to the class listserv. During the first several weeks of class these posts will be responses to specific questions; later in the semester you will be asked to compose your own questions and to respond to those of others.
In my class your participation, oral and virtual, is as important as your writing. You will be asked to duplicate your own work for class critique and to give thoughtful, constructive feedback on the work of your fellow student writers.