Open Creative Nonfiction

SUMMARY
This course will tackle life writing and memoir—a slippery, genre-bending, creative venture based on lived experience, your collection of events and facts.

Participants will start writing at a particular location of importance to them and revisit that site over coming weeks—whether it’s from a different point of view or a different place in time.  We will cobble those “scenes” together into a longer piece for the capstone of the course.

At the same time, we will examine some of memoir’s urgent problems—memory, truth, trauma, language, and sensationalism.  Short examples of life writing will supplement our discussion.

THEME: COMPLICATED LOCATIONS

To anchor our course, participants will first identify a place to tackle, from different vantage points, over a six-week period.  This place should be specific enough that you have a personal connection to it, rich enough that you could approach it anew each week, and local enough to visit frequently.

The writer will return to the same place and create new material each week, in this way adhering to a constant over time. One goal is to uncover something new about the self, the situation, the time, or some one else--by exploring the various facets of a space.  After several written encounters with the place, the final assignment will be to create a patchwork, 360-degree view of this location and your relation to it.

We will also explore the ways in which memoir is deeply problematic. Identities shift over time, memoir-worthy occasions are usually limited to the traumatic, and its explosion has contributed to a confessional culture with merits and disadvantages.   We will read brief, article-length conversion stories, geographical approaches, and disability narratives to inform our understanding of this liberating yet vexing genre.

 
TERMS

Except for your creative nonfiction works, all other content you produce in this course will be licensed under a Creative Commons Share Alike (CC SA) license. This includes critiques of your peers' work, responses to interviews and other works, discussions, and writing exercises.

One of the central challenges of writing memoir is the pressure of the audience, the tug-and-pull of “coming clean.”  As such, although you will not be required to license your creative nonfiction works openly, you will be expected to share your work publicly via a shared google doc.

We highly encourage all of you to consider licensing one or more of your creative nonfiction drafts under one of the Creative Commons licenses, so that others around the world may see how you incorporated your peers' critiques into your work, or otherwise altered/improved your work.  Such a license would contribute to the longevity and sustainability of P2PU.

 
CLASS STRUCTURE

This class will meet online [via Tokbox or Skype] once a week. Class assignments will be due earlier in the week (Tues) and will be discussed later in the week (Thur).

Participants will submit their work via a shared Googledoc, and as a class we will all comment on each others’ pieces within the document.  In our Thursday discussion, we will focus on 2-3 pieces (we will rotate who is workshopped) and briefly discuss the article(s) recommended.

To sum it up, the writing exercise will be due each Tuesday, and the reading component due each Thursday, along with your comments on your colleagues pieces.