Program Courses
Please note that course schedules may be amended due to low enrollment, faculty availability, and/or other factors.
Online Sync Sessions are an integral part of the online learning experience. Additional information about learning concepts and assignments may be discussed and sync sessions offer valuable opportunities for students to interact with their faculty and peers during the term. We encourage all students to attend live, but if they are unable to, sync sessions will be recorded and posted within Canvas to allow for an asynchronous model of success as well.
MCW 490-0 : Special Topics: Experiments in Creative Nonfiction
Description
In this class, we will examine the ways that traditional vehicles of memoir, like confession and past-tense narrative, can be refracted, complicated or enlivened through imagination, collage, juxtaposition, truncation, meditation and research. We will read books or excerpts by inventive authors including Marguerite Duras (The War); Teju Cole (Golden Apple of the Sun); Aisha Sabatini Sloane (Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit); Joy Harjo (Crazy Brave) and Melissa Febos (Girlhood). Every week, we will focus on a single author and particular technique of craft, and students will write a short annotation and creative response to the reading. These exercises will be designed to help renew your curiosity for your own work and will culminate in two new essays by the end of the term that will be workshopped by the class. This course will provide you with usable tools to increase the vitality of your writing. Because many of our texts live in the space between genres, it could also be of interest to writers of fiction and poetry.
(This course is an elective, but may also be taken as a nonfiction workshop with the advance approval of the instructor and the student’s academic advisor.)