Writing at UMM
Creative Nonfiction
Open letters to people or entities unlikely to respond can be found at the McSweeney's website or at Weekend America.
Some essays by Sherman Alexie can be found at his website.
course description
This course focuses on understanding and practicing the rhetorical and stylistic choices available to writers of creative nonfiction. Our discussions of readings and our workshops of class members' essays will examine and explore options for story and theme, action, information, characterization, dialogue, structure, pacing, narrative persona, voice and tone, language and style.
About half our class time will be spent discussing published nonfiction texts and general issues related to them, and doing some in-class writing exercises; the other half will be spent discussing class members' essays-in-progress in a workshop format.
readings
We'll approach our readings not as literary critics but as fellow writers. We'll talk about content, of course, but we'll emphasize craft; that is, we'll be focusing not only on what is written but on how it's written. We'll examine the choices these published writers have made and assess where and why those choices work—or, in some cases, where and why they don't. Although you will not be writing formal response papers or keeping a journal on these readings, you will need to bring notes on them, whether written in the margins of the book or on a separate sheet of paper.
essays
You'll write and revise two longer (7-10 pages) and five shorter (2-5 pages) essays; these essays may be personal, historical, sociological, contemplative, informative, speculative, or pretty much anything else, as long as they're nonfictional. Final versions of essays, along with drafts produced along the way, will be due in a portfolio at the end of the semester.
workshops
We'll workshop several student essays per week. Workshops run on deadlines; if you miss yours, you embarrass yourself, inconvenience everyone in the class, and make the teacher cranky.
Each of us will write up feedback for every essay we workshop: a full single-spaced typed page of comments on each essay under discussion, in which you address as specifically as possible what worked for you—and, sometimes, what didn't—and why. You'll bring two copies of your comments: one for the writer and one for me. These responses are meant to be informal, but still thoughtful and coherent. Keep in mind that it's more helpful to focus on two or three features of the essay that caught your attention than to try to talk about everything in a scattershot way. Your comments will not necessarily focus on specific changes you think the writer should make; think of them less as suggestions for revision than as starting points for discussion.
In order to kick-start discussion and democratize participation, every essay will have two discussion leaders. In addition to writing up the usual page of notes, discussion leaders will choose a passage or issue with which to lead off discussion.
texts
We'll read six books:
Best American Essays 2007
Rachel Manija Brown, All the Fishes Come Home to Roost
Anne Lamott, Bird By Bird
James McBride, The Color of Water
Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography
Robert Sullivan, Meadowlands
last updated: Thursday, 27-Mar-2008 17:44:52 CDT