ENC 5317 Spring 2022 Roberts

We will read nonfiction, including pieces by Helen Macdonald, Samantha Irby, William Hazlitt, James Baldwin and others, but this course is primarily a workshop. Everyone writes; everyone reads; everyone acts as an editor for colleagues’ work. You will produce 20-30 pages of prose: stand-alone essays, linked short pieces, or some part of a larger work of narrative nonfiction. Whatever you write, I would hope you will try to publish it. Indeed, we will discuss how you pitch to journals, magazines, online sites, etc., as well as how to write a nonfiction book proposal.

I am not actively anti-memoir, but you’d better have a first-rate story and a new way of telling it. No matter what you write, you should, as we say in journalism, report it out. Base your work on facts, not just feelings. Having said that, your project is up to you. Grades will be based on the quality of your work, including discussion and revision. Rewriting is the real writing.