FORM AND THEORY OF THE CREATIVE NONFICTION BOOK OWC 202 CAROLINE GOODWIN Stanford University Online Writer’s Studio Spring, 2012

Course Description:

In this course, students will first review the concept of the ‘persona’ necessary for successful creative nonfiction: what Vivian Gornick describes as ‘the narrator that is me and not me.’ With this basic idea in mind, we will read several forms of creative nonfiction that can be used to produce a book-length manuscript: personal essay, lyric essay, memoir and reportage. Then, turning to contemporary works that illustrate many of the core principals, techniques, and problems of nonfiction writing, students will read Foreign Correspondence by Geraldine Brooks, The Bill from my Father by Bernard Cooper, Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje and pertinent selections from The Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction. This is primarily a literature and reading course, but students will have the option of completing weekly creative writing assignments, many derived from the texts. Imitation and creative responses to the literature at hand will be a common strategy. Since creative nonfiction contains such a variety of styles and forms, students will have room to research and explore the particular form they are most interested in writing. During this course, students will be expected to complete the first chapter of their book, but it will not be workshopped.

Required Reading:

The Situation and the Story by Vivan Gornick, ISBN: 0-37416733-8 The Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction edited by Lex Williford and Michael Martone, ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-3174-6 Foreign Correspondence by Geraldine Brooks, ISBN: 0-385-48373-2 The Bill from my Father by Bernard Cooper, ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-4963-8 Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje, ISBN: 0-679-74669-2

Grading:

Forum presence: 33%, this factors in your ability and willingness to contribute to a constructive online classroom, and working as a part of an interactive group rather than as an isolated individual.

Responses to Readings: 33%, this measures the intensity, thoughtfulness, and specificity of your approach to the readings, including your ability to cite specific passages from the readings and relate them to craft topics or questions of process in creative writing.

Feedback for Colleagues: 33%, this covers your responses to your fellow writers’ posts, which are graded on their care, constructiveness, and thoughtfulness, not their length.

Weekly Schedule:

MONDAY MORNING: Each new week officially starts on Monday. Every Monday morning, I will send out an email to the class introducing the topic for the week, letting you know a little bit more about the craft point we will be focusing on, the reading we will be doing together, and directing you to the new Forum threads, including your Discussion Points about the week's readings and your weekly writing exercises. (NOTE: Because many of you may have busy work schedules, the weekend might be your preferred time to work. Because of this, I will always post up the assignments and Forum threads the prior Friday so you can get a head start if you want.)

TUESDAY: 5pm (Pacific Time): First responses to reading discussion questions due. You may continue weighing in and participating in the discussion throughout the week, but this is when you should post your initial thoughts on the prompts.

WEDNESDAY, 5pm (PST) Writing exercise due (though the earlier you post, the more time you'll have to receive feedback). I respond to them in the order in which they come in. You should respond to the members of your small feedback group by the end of the weekend, before the next week begins.

THURSDAY: I will hold weekly office hours in the chatroom for our classroom on Thursdays (exact time to be determined). Here we can talk more informally, discussing any general questions as well as specific issues you might be having with your exercises or stories. You can get immediate feedback on your concerns from me and from your classmates. You're not required to come to office hours every week, and feel free to drop in for shorter periods of time within that hour. During Week One, I’ll get feedback from the class on what time of day would be most convenient for everyone. We’ll kick Chat off in Week Two. THROUGHOUT THE WEEK: Respond to posts, participate in discussions.

WEEKEND: IF you want, use the weekend to get a jumpstart on reading assigned chapters and drafting your writing exercise. I won't be in the classroom over the weekend but you're welcome to start posting for the next week whenever you're ready. The classroom is always open!

Brief Syllabus of Weeks 1-10:

Week 1: Introductions Why do we read? Why do we write? What is it about creative nonfiction that we find so attractive? What is our vision? Who are our contemporaries, and what can we learn from their work? What do we, as nonfiction writers, bring to the page and how do we begin to fashion a narrator out of our own raw material? What makes a piece of creative nonfiction ‘sparkle?’ How do we see our own voices developing through our art?

Week 2: Developing the Persona How do different nonfiction writers sound different on the page? What sense do we get of the variety of speaking voices, characters, angles of vision, rhythms of language, and individual people who speak to us through our genre? This week, we will consider these questions and how we might begin to think about our own literary personae, necessarily separate entities from our living selves.

Week 3: The Personal Essay I Michel de Montaigne, the great innovator and patron saint of personal essayists, wrote: “Every man has within himself the entire human condition.” This week we will read and respond to several personal essays, with an eye towards the structure and distinguishing characteristics of this classic literary form.

Week 4: The Personal Essay II A continuation of last week’s investigation into the personal essay’s history, development and form.

Week 5: The Lyric Essay The lyric essay is exciting partly because of the flexibility and freedom it affords the writer. In addition, the lyric essay is enjoying some recent popularity in literary journals. This week we will read and discuss several of them. What distinguishes a lyric from a personal essay?

Week 6: The Memoir I We certainly live in the age of the memoir, and it’s an important component of creative nonfiction, although by no means the only one. How does a memoir differ from an essay collection? Why might a writer choose to work in one subgenre instead of the other? What constraints might the memoir bring to the writer, and how can we work with them?

Week 7: The Memoir II A continuation of last week’s investigation into the memoir.

Week 8: Reportage What about the writers like Barry Lopez, who include such beautiful descriptions of the natural world and keep our attention while illuminating landscapes and scientific phenomena? This week we’ll concentrate on the type of nonfiction that brings information to the page in a compelling way.

Week 9: The Truth behind the Facts This week will be dedicated to what we each might consider the truth in the context of our creative nonfiction. What do we really want to write about? Isn’t it, at the end of the day, our individual rendering of the emotional truth at hand that we are working toward? Aren’t we each writing about what it means to be human? What does it mean? Many different answers to these questions will apply!

Week 10: Vision and Re-Vision. Looking Ahead. Refining critical sensibilities. Loving our work—then making it work. Tricks and tactics for finding more time, finding new eyes, and making it fresh. Develop ideas for future projects.

How All This Works:

Each week begins with an introductory talk about form and/or theory that you’ll find in the Schedule section. I will be assigning approximately fifty – a hundred pages of reading in the books that I’ve asked you to get for this class, to illustrate and illuminate our discussions. You’ll find the page numbers listed under This Week’s Reading. Under Topics for Discussion I will pose a couple of questions based on the readings to help you think through the week’s central ideas. Under Writing Assignments, you’ll find the week’s creative writing exercise. Our group conversation begins when you post your comments and exercises in the Discussion Forum. The Forum is a bulletin board where all the action happens. Here, we’ll have ongoing conversations about the books we read together, and different topics about the writing life. This is where you’ll post your work, and where our discussions will take place.

Weekly Writing Exercises:

Your assignments for this class will remain consistent for most of this term. (1) In Discussion Points, I will ask you to respond to the weekly readings. Here, we will focus our conversation on questions about creative nonfiction form and theory. (2) Your REQUIRED writing assignment every week will be exactly the same: Make a claim about a specific element of craft you identify in this week’s reading, and support that claim with evidence from the text. 250 words minimum, 750 words max. You will also be assigned two OPTIONAL assignments that are creative in nature. Imitating or emulating the primary texts we are reading encourages you to keep writing, and to consider the development of your own manuscript while thinking critically about published nonfiction.

Word Limits:

I ask that you try to respect the word limits I set every week. Again, we are looking for quality, not quantity. I wish I had time to read everyone’s work completely and give thorough feedback on everything, but this is primarily a ‘reading-as-a-writer’ course and I’m sure you understand the constraints on my time as well.

Reading Groups:

Becoming a good reader is an important part in your development as a writer. Learning how to discuss the core principals, techniques and problems in a piece of creative nonfiction will help you explore them in your own. Starting in Week 3, we will form small groups. The purpose of the groups is to foster intensive community, and to begin to allow research into your particular area of creative nonfiction. For example, some of you may be interested in writing an essay collection, others a memoir, and others a more information-based or journalistic type of creative nonfiction. In your reading groups, you will have the chance to delve more specifically into the particular form that you feel is most compelling. To keep things fresh, and so that you receive feedback from a variety of students, we will periodically rearrange the groups. However, please note that groups are public. While you are always obligated to comment on the work of your group members, you may additionally respond to students outside your group. So if you develop a strong rapport with a particular student, you may continue to read/comment each other’s work once the small groups are rearranged.

Protocol for a Productive Conversation:

Often, in our genre of creative nonfiction, we may feel as though we are sending chunks of our very souls into the universe whenever we post online, even if we are not posting our original manuscripts for workshop YET. In addition, we are not sitting across from one another in a classroom, so the nuance of a phrase or the tone of the speaker may get lost in the Forum. In order to keep us focussed on our art, I would ask that we use the Forum as a place for serious attention to one another. In other words, in person I myself can be very funny. This might not work so well online, however, because I can’t see how my joke is received. The temptation is then to use emoticons or ‘winks’ or ‘hahahaha’ in order to make sure I’m understood. It’s easy for this to become a habit, and before I know it my Forum posts are full of emoticons or nudges and winks. So, I need to ask that we each slow down and think through every response that we post. If you are feeling discouraged and you need an infusion of humor, or it’s time to blow off some steam about the spouse, I would ask that you form a group outside the Forum. I want everyone to feel free to express themselves, but in creative nonfiction it can be very easy for our online classroom to become more of a ‘support group’ than a collection of serious artists, intent on exploring form and theory. I hope this makes good sense. If, at any time, you have any concerns at all, please do feel free to email me privately. I will do my best to resolve any problems that you see with professional courtesy. We are all in this together, and I want us to have a wonderful time making art!

My Commentary:

I will comment on each of your weekly required writing exercises about craft (writing assignments). I post these responses in the Forum where anyone can read them. This is because, in a live course, we would be reading and responding to one another’s creative writing as a group. Although we aren’t sharing the same physical space, you should think of Forum and the discussion threads as a place to interact with each other. I will also read your comments to one another, and your optional creative writing exercises if you choose to complete them, and pipe in when I have something to add. These discussions will be as lively as you make them. Again, the intention is to think carefully about the literature in front of us, and to always be looking for inspiration for our own projects.

My Online Presence:

I’ll be online and actively responding to new posts in the classroom every weekday. If there’s a holiday or I have some conflicting obligation, I will let you know ahead of time. I also check my email at least once a day and respond as promptly as I can. The beauty of an online class is that we can all do our work when our schedules permit; we don't have to be working simultaneously. So log on when it's convenient for you, morning or night, daily or every few days. I will hold a one hour chat session, a kind of live office hour, once a week on Thursdays. Participation is encouraged but not mandatory.

A Final Important Note:

Although many students take online courses with the absolute best intentions of doing every last assignment, "real life"—family, illness, professional deadlines—often has a way of making that impossible. Sometimes, the frustration this causes prompts students to drop completely out of the class. Hold on! If you have to skip a couple exercises, this is also okay. As long as you're getting most of the work done and commenting on your classmates' submissions, you'll be fine. Please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any concerns about your standing. If you foresee some bumps in the road, let me know. We’ll work together to find the best possible solution for you.

This is your class. I’m the guide, yes, but the quality of our discussions will depend upon your engagement, insightfulness, and good humor. This course will be as good as you (and you and you and you and you and you….) give. So, please participate fully and generously. Read all the work with a keen eye and a sense of possibility. And please, let me know if there’s anything I can do to make this a better experience for you. I welcome suggestions. If there’s something you want to discuss, let me know. If there’s an assignment that you think would work in this class, tell me. If you find something that you’re very excited about sharing with the group, please do so! We are here to develop as writers, something I believe we do throughout the course of our lives. There is always a new topic to explore, and because creative nonfiction affords us so much possibility, it’s important that we remain open and inspired.