ENC3310 Spring 2025 - Alexander

This is an introductory course in the craft of creative nonfiction, a slippery genre that includes a miscellany of forms concerned with the presentation—and interrogation—of truth, fact, experience, and memory itself. The genre is nonfiction, and so it tries to be true—with the recognition that truth is various and not always objective, and that it exists within a contract established between the writer and the reader. At the same time, the genre is creative in that it uses many of the techniques of fiction, such as scenes, dialogue, characters, setting, sensory detail, narrative, plot, story, point of view, conflict, rising tension, climax, denouement, anecdote, etc; and it is literary in that it is concerned with the artistry of language and some complexity of reflection on the human condition. We will read and discuss published works, placing contemporary writers in dialogue with those past, and will read craft essays and hold active class discussions to develop a robust vocabulary with which to describe and analyze the works we read. Students will also write their own pieces of creative nonfiction, at least one of which will be workshopped (read, critiqued, and discussed) by the class, then significantly revised by the end of the term.