Intermediate Creative Writing: Intermediate Nonfiction Prose

The literary essay is an “invisible magnetic river,” its accumulated fragments coalescing within an unseen current. Or maybe the form’s a “sticky ball” and its cousin, the lyric essay, a “super sticky power ball,” gathering together this and that. Then again, maybe the essay—to essay—represents a kind of loitering. In this intermediate-level course, we’ll try our hands at a genre that’s hard to pin down but intoxicating to explore. Along the way, we’ll also encounter some of creative nonfiction’s most indelible practitioners, James Baldwin, Angela Pelster, Eula Biss, and Ander Monson among them. Student-writers will produce a series of mini-exercises focused on aspects of writerly craft as well as a full-length piece to be workshopped and revised. Central to everything we do will be Monson’s sense of the essay as the “mind in motion”: we’ll see where ours take us.