Description
This class is part of our monthly genre series, Otherworldly October! Check out our other genre series classes for the month here and here.
This wide-ranging class dips our toes into some of the many hybrid, genre-blurring forms available to nonfiction writers today. We’ll investigate a variety of structures (including hermit crabs and braided researched essays), experiment with incorporating visual imagery into our work (no art skills necessary!), and dive into the expansive possibilities of speculative nonfiction. We’ll ask: how can stepping outside the bounds create new radical possibilities for our work? What opportunities do such forms provide for those of us whose voices are traditionally marginalized? How can experimenting with form bring joy and curiosity back into our writing?
This four-week course, taught by Jami Nakamura Lin, the author of the illustrated speculative memoir The Night Parade (Mariner/HarperCollins), is generative in nature. Sessions include hefty craft lectures, readings/discussion, in-class writing exercises, and optional sharing. Students will leave the class with a set of draft exercises that can be expanded into longer pieces, and knowledge of craft techniques that can be used in further work.
While students will have the opportunity to read their writing aloud and receive brief constructive feedback, this class does not follow a traditional workshop format. Our focus is in learning, creating, and speculating.
Week 1: Portals and Possibilities: This week is an overview of how we can use blurred, hybrid, and speculative forms as a portal to (re)invent our work.
Week 2: Possibilities of Structure: This week, we’ll investigate how structure and form can be experimented with in both essay-length and full-length manuscripts.
Week 3: Possibilities of Image: This week, we’ll look at texts that incorporate images in various forms: essays that use texts to create shapes on the page, pieces that incorporate visual imagery (illustrations, photographs, found documents) in different ways, and excerpts of graphic memoirs.
Week 4: Possibilities of Speculation: This week, we’ll learn about speculative nonfiction, a genre that can investigate truths through fabulism, folklore, imagined lives, hauntedness, and other slanted lenses.
