Literary Nonfiction Workshop II: Other People's Stories

Undergraduate / Graduate

Many are read to as children, some even learn to read before they show any interest in speaking, but most-regardless of language, background or nationality-will first experience stories by overhearing them. Most children's first literature, in fact, will come from grandparents, cousins and close friends retelling bits and pieces of their everyday lives. Later, when these children grow up to be writers, they will ask themselves questions about the mechanics and ethics of how to retell these stories that both are and are not our own. From Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago," to Brian Doyle's "Thirsty for the Joy," from John Hershey's "Hiroshima" and Art Spiegelman's "Mouse" to Rebecca Skloot's "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks," the world of nonfiction writing is rife with second, third, and fourth hand stories in which the essayist must learn to negotiate the researched history of people and places, with the malleability of secondhand memory. How do we believably and respectfully tell others' stories? How do we learn to find them? How do we draw these stories out, jot them down? How do we know when to make them our own and when to leave them in the liminal space of another's inaccessible and inscrutable experience? This course is designed to tackle these specific questions through workshops, writing prompts and guided discussions of assigned texts.