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CNF 122 W — Creative Nonfiction Workshop: Finding the Universal in the Particular

Quarter: Winter
Instructor(s): Rachel Howard
Duration: 10 weeks
Location: Online
Date(s): Jan 14—Mar 18
Class Recording Available: Yes
Class Meeting Day: Tuesdays
 
Class Meeting Time: 12:00—1:00 pm (PT)
Tuition: $1000
   
Refund Deadline: Jan 16
 
Unit(s): 2
   
Enrollment Limit: 19
  
Status: Closed
 
Quarter: Winter
Day: Tuesdays
Duration: 10 weeks
Time: 12:00—1:00 pm (PT)
Date(s): Jan 14—Mar 18
Unit(s): 2
Location: Online
 
Tuition: $1000
 
Refund Deadline: Jan 16
 
Instructor(s): Rachel Howard
 
Enrollment Limit: 19
 
Recording Available: Yes
 
Status: Closed
 
Memoir, essay, or first-person reportage—all creative nonfiction is rooted in a daily habit of noticing the “beloved particulars,” then digging inward to discover how those particulars can evoke what we might risk calling “the universal”—an archetypal experience that almost any reader can relate to. In this highly exploratory course, we will play with nonfiction forms ranging from the lyric to the narrative. Voice, point of view, structure, form—all of the essential, recurring terms of the writing life will be introduced as we discuss works by such writers as Richard Rodriguez, Grace Paley, Joan Didion, and Amy Tan. We will complete and post short weekly assignments for feedback, and each student will also draft and workshop a longer piece of writing. We will practice really seeing, being open and receptive (“sneaking under the fence of interpretation,” as Deborah Eisenberg called it), and dropping defenses, especially those we hide from ourselves, to find truths that can show us the transcendent in the particular. After all, as Flannery O’Connor wrote, “Wouldn’t it be better for you to discover a meaning in what you write than to impose one? Nothing you write will lack meaning because the meaning is in you.”

RACHEL HOWARD
Author

Rachel Howard is the author of a memoir about her father’s unsolved murder, The Lost Night, and a novel, The Risk of Us. Her personal essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Draft series, The Los Angeles Review of Books, StoryQuarterly, and O, The Oprah Magazine. She is the recipient of a 2024 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and is working on a new memoir. Howard received an MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson College.

Textbooks for this course:

(Required) Alice LaPlante, The Making of a Story: A Norton Guide to Creative Writing (ISBN 978-0393337082)
(Required) Judith Kitchen, editor, Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary Nonfiction (ISBN 978-0393326000)