In this eight-week class, we’ll spend four weeks doing close readings of passages by acclaimed nonfiction authors who write about themselves and family members while tackling larger topics such as equity, justice, inclusion, inequality, a communal identity, and so forth. We’ll name the particular craft tools these authors use in their self-portraits. And the instructor will share prompts to help participants describe themselves to the reader during in-class writing exercises. Then we’ll spend four weeks workshopping one another's writing.
Among the authors we are likely to study are James Baldwin, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Hua Hsu, Ted Conover, Janet Malcolm, and Carmen Maria Machado. We’ll also discuss Vivian Gornick’s classic book about writing, called The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative. In this course, we’ll try to help each other find what Gornick’s calls “the wisdom that counts,” and get that onto the page.
Gornick defines plot or events as the “situation,” and the wisdom earned along the way as the “story.” In advance of the class, you may want to consider these questions: What is your situation? What events will you recount? How can your work be outward-facing, or tackle larger subjects, even as you include a personal throughline? What part of a large and complex self will you share? How can you fashion a coherent persona, with digressions eliminated, sculpted into only the relevant self, i.e. the part of the self that is essential to the narrative? How does this self intersect with the primary situation, or the events being described, and how can you share those parts of the self on the page that help propel the narrative forward? What is the wisdom you have acquired and how will you share the story of your own evolution?
