CNF 11 WB — Creative Nonfiction: Crafting a Narrative Voice
Summer
Date(s)
Jun 22—Aug 28
10 weeks
Drop By
Jun 25
3 Units
Fees
$795
Limit
17
Closed
“The first thing I remember tasting and then wanting to taste again,” M.F.K. Fisher writes, “is the
grayish-pink fuzz my grandmother skimmed from a spitting kettle of strawberry jam.” This evocative sentence takes us to the very heart of the nonfiction project. Telling a story goes beyond entertainment; narrative is how we catalogue and process our thoughts, experiences, and memories. It’s how we taste those experiences again.
In this course, appropriate for writers of all levels, we will explore the way that crafting the specifics and particulars of an experience can lead organically to the most pressing questions: How do we communicate our real stories in a way that interests potential readers? How do we tell the truth when our sense of the truth is always changing? By looking consciously and carefully at the styles of master craftsmen of the nonfiction voice, we will begin to answer these questions. We will develop our own distinct narrative style, and find the lens through which our stories will be told and our experiences translated into art. Exercises will illuminate key techniques such as plot, scene development, dialogue, and description. Our reading will range from Montaigne to Lorine Niedecker, Walter Benjamin, and David Foster Wallace. In addition to weekly writing, each student will complete an essay or excerpt from a longer creative nonfiction work to be workshopped in a lively and attentive community of peers.
In this course, appropriate for writers of all levels, we will explore the way that crafting the specifics and particulars of an experience can lead organically to the most pressing questions: How do we communicate our real stories in a way that interests potential readers? How do we tell the truth when our sense of the truth is always changing? By looking consciously and carefully at the styles of master craftsmen of the nonfiction voice, we will begin to answer these questions. We will develop our own distinct narrative style, and find the lens through which our stories will be told and our experiences translated into art. Exercises will illuminate key techniques such as plot, scene development, dialogue, and description. Our reading will range from Montaigne to Lorine Niedecker, Walter Benjamin, and David Foster Wallace. In addition to weekly writing, each student will complete an essay or excerpt from a longer creative nonfiction work to be workshopped in a lively and attentive community of peers.
This is an online course. For more information about the Online Writing Program, visit continuingstudies.stanford.edu/onlinewriting.
Erica Ehrenberg, Former Stegner Fellow, Stanford
Erica Ehrenberg’s work has appeared in several journals and magazines, including The New Republic, Guernica, The New England Review, CURA, Slate, jubilat, Octopus, The Saint Ann’s Review, and Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets: Poems About Horses. She has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and Stanford. In 2011–2012, she was a writer-in- residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace program. She teaches poetry, the graphic novel, creative nonfiction, and essay writing at Fordham University. Ehrenberg received an MFA from NYU.Textbooks for this course:
(Required) Phillip Lopate (Editor), The Art of the Personal Essay, 1st Edition (ISBN 038542339X)