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A Master Class: Nonfiction and The Perfect Paradox of Pacing with Rachel Louise Snyder

$75.00 · December 2

Through discussion and scene-length readings, participants will explore craft decisions that determine how to address time and pacing in memoir.

Start Date

December 2

Day(s) of the Week

Wednesday

Class Times

7:00pm – 9:00pm CT

Sessions

1

Location

Zoom (online)

Instructor

Price

$75

In stock

Description

A life lived moves in unexpected waves, seeming to speed up and slow down by forces outside our control: a birth might feel it takes forever to arrive, whereas death can seem to arrive in a sudden and cruel instant. Writing such moments, though, are often matters of time and pacing. What experiences demand we slow down, pay attention, consider more thoroughly? When should a writer allow a moment to unfold for a reader in the fullness of an experience, versus increasing the narrative pace? Such considerations are ultimately explorations of tension between the inner and outer world. 

How time is controlled on the page will be the focus of this master class. Through discussion and scene-length readings, participants will explore craft decisions that determine how to address time and pacing in memoir.

About Rachel Louise Snyder

Rachel Louise Snyder is the author of Fugitive Denim: A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade, the novel What We’ve Lost is Nothing, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us and the memoir Women We Buried, Women We Burned (May ’23), a best book of the year from Kirkus and Audible, among others. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times magazine, the Washington Post and on NPR, and she was a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow. No Visible Bruises was awarded the 2018 Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, the 2020 Book Tube Prize, the 2020 New York Public Library’s Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism and the Sidney Hillman Book Award for social justice. It won Best Book in Translation in Taiwan in 2021 and has been translated into Russian, Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, Turkish, Spanish, Polish, Romanian, Hungarian, Estonian and others. It received starred reviews from Kirkus, Book Riot, and Publisher’s Weekly, and was named one of the best books of 2019 by the Los Angeles Times, Esquire, Amazon, Kirkus, the Library Journal, the Economist, and BookPage; the New York Times included it in their “Top Ten” books of 2019.  No Visible Bruises was also a finalist for the Kirkus Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the LA Times Book Award, and the Silver Gavel Award. 

Over the past two decades, Snyder has traveled to sixty countries, covering stories of human rights, gender-based violence, natural disasters, displacement and war. She lived, for six years, in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and two years in London before relocating to Washington, DC in 2009. Originally from Chicago, Snyder holds a  B.A. from North Central College and an M.F.A. from Emerson College. She was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2020-2021. Originally from Chicago, she has lived in Pittsburgh, Boston, and  London. She is currently a professor in creative writing in the MFA program at  American University and a contributing writer to the New York Times opinion section.