ENC3110 – Spring 2027 – Goldring

This course explores the craft, ethics, and research obsessions of creative nonfiction, a genre that ranges from rigorously reported fact to lyric, associative personal essay, with much of its most compelling work landing in between. By examining prose craft as a set of tools for rendering something true about lived experience—time, place, grief, memory, culture, politics, identity, intersectionality, violence, the grotesque, and body horror—students will learn how contemporary essayists shape truth on the page while feeding their “weird” research interests. First, we will read published essays alongside craft essays, analyzing the decisions that shape a piece—where the voice lives, who gets to narrate and at what cost, how time is arranged, how a sentence moves, the cost of rendering real people onto the page, and how a structure contributes to meaning. Then we will write weekly journal entries and drafts, feeding our essays our weird research—the 2 a.m. rabbit holes, archival detours, and obscure obsessions that turn personal story into something stranger and more nuanced than memory alone can manage. Nothing is off-limits for topics, but we will think hard about what we owe the people who appear in and are impacted by our work. Students will workshop original essays, developing a critical vocabulary for discussing craft while cultivating rigorous, generous critique practices. By the end of the semester, students will have completed two polished essays and a writer’s portfolio.
This course fulfills the Upper-Division Writing requirement.