Sample Residency Presentations in  Creative Nonfiction

Stonecoast offers a uniquely rich residency curriculum of classes, panels, lectures, presentations and discussions, presented by Stonecoast faculty along with selected alumni, current students, and visiting writers. Presentations relate to all aspects of creative writing, from expert publishing advice to detailed explorations of the writing craft. from literary analysis to punctuation, from writing about race and class to balancing writing and family. Some presentations are cross-genre in nature, while others are specific to one genre. Here are some recent presentations focusing on issues in creative nonfiction.

Literary Journalism: How You Can Use Fiction Techniques To Make A Buck

Tanya Barrientos

Many think literary journalism began in the 1970s with Tom Wolfe and the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, but the truth is that exceptional non-fiction writers have been using literary techniques at least since the days of Charles Dickens, Stephen Crane and Jack London. We will take a quick look at the practitioners of literary journalism of the past, and then focus closely on a seminal magazine piece written by one of the modern masters: “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold” by Gay Talese (bring a copy to class). We will talk about form, reporting techniques, ethics, and how you can do it too.

Required Reading:

Gay Talese, “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold” – found at http://www.randomhouse.com/kvpa/talese/essays/sinatra.html

Bring a copy of this to class

Mark Kramer and Wendy Call editors, Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writer’s Guide

Please read pages 97-121 (Part IV).

Making Use of History: From the Practical to the Provocative

Leila Philip

In this class we will look at how a working knowledge of historical methods can open up treasure troves of material for nonfiction writers. Whether we write memoir, lyric essays, biography, book-length nonfiction narrative, personal essays or combinations of all of these, the discipline of history can help us re-envision, re-consider and generally re-think the possibilities and parameters of nonfiction narrative forms. Our discussion will be both practical and theoretical as we consider such questions as:   What is the relationship between story and storyteller?  How do we mediate the needs of narrative when rendering historical events?  And how best can we research social, economic, and political history without losing track of our story altogether?  We will also engage in a spirited dialogue about narrative and historical representation by making use of the required readings.

Required Reading:

Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

Flannery O’Connor, “The Nature and the Aim of Fiction” (in Mystery and Manners, Occasional Prose edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald)

Pushing the Envelope with Form: Innovative Techniques in Creative Nonfiction

William Patrick

How does form affect content in creative nonfiction, and in what ways can we utilize structure to surprise and attract readers?  In this interactive craft seminar, we will generate quick first drafts and employ them as starting points for discussion. Using some ideas and suggestions from Philip Gerard, Carol Bly and Lee Gutkind, who represent a fairly broad spectrum of analysis in their approaches to the genre, we will first examine some of the expected ways in which creative nonfiction works. Finally, referring to essays in a required text, as well as to a course package of diverse samples that I will supply for the seminar, we will look at ways to push the envelope with innovative forms.

Required Reading:

John Loughery, The Eloquent Essay

On Andy Goldsworthy’s River & Tides, Beauty, and Paradox

Barbara Hurd

What do we mean when we say a work is beautiful? Is beauty even something to aim for in our writing? Can we? Should we? And if so, how? This class will begin with a showing of a brief excerpt from Andy Goldsworthy’s documentary Rivers & Tides. We’ll use his work with outdoor sculpture and some poems to talk about the impulse toward beauty and paradox in our writing and the place of subtlety, imperfection, even melancholy.

Required Readings:

Mary Oliver, “Gravel” (from The Leaf and The Cloud)

Louise Gluck, “October” (from Averno)

Louise Gluck, “Field Flowers” and “The Wild Iris” (from The Wild Iris)

Facing the Beauty:  Divining Your Book’s True Shape Through the Chaos of  Drafting

Debra Marquart

A developing book project is like a free-floating constellation full of orbiting planets, meteor showers, spare moons, and all manner of flotsam, jetsam, and interesting space junk that has wandered into your book’s gravitational field throughout the process of researching.  While drafting, one wonders what to leave behind, what to keep, where to put everything, and whether or not all this accumulating detail will amount to any kind of meaning for a reader.  The idea for the book was beautiful when you first imagined it, almost fully formed in your mind.  Now, as each line and paragraph develops—so steeped in the particular and the anecdotal—the process can get messy, making it hard, if not impossible, to glance up from the close work and divine the book’s true shape.  At this point, some writers find it helpful to identify a higher theoretical structure appropriate to the book’s content (e.g., aesthetic, linguistic, mythic, postcolonial, feminist) as a sobering lens to re-illuminate the material and re-inform the process.  In this session, we’ll talk about strategies for conceptualizing the book’s prevailing themes and theoretical intentions while in the middle of the often ugly process of drafting.

Required Readings:

Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Or, Cosmos and History

(Chapter 1: “Archetypes and Repetition,” pp. 3-48)

Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

(Chapter 9: “The Circle of the Novel,” pp. 178-203)

Carole Maso, Break Every Rule: Essays on Language, Longing, & Moments of Desire.

(“Rupture, Verge, and Precipice / Precipice, Verge, and Hurt Not,” pp. 161-191)

Related Links:

Creative Nonfiction at Stonecoast

Creative Nonfiction Faculty

Visiting Creative Nonfiction Writers

Sample Creative Nonfiction Residency Presentations

Alumni Profile