Meeting: Th 9:25am-11:15am
Instructor: Heidi Stalla
This is a chance for you to spend a semester working through the art of turning life into fiction. Throughout the course we focus on reading examples of life-writing that play with the line between real lives, historical events, and fiction. As the focus is on reading the works, writing exercises in the beginning are light and playful, designed to help you brainstorm for your own creative experiments during the latter half of the semester. Course texts include examples of historical fiction, historiographical metafiction, autobiography, imaginative biography and object-biography. My goal is for you to develop a framework to discuss literary works that are based on recognizable current, autobiographical, or historical events, while also developing skills as a writer. Where possible, we invite the authors of some of our selections to speak to the class about their work. The class features a combination of “messy” informal writing-to-learn practices and exercises, as well as two polished formal assignments. The midterm assignment takes the form of a review essay in which you use the work of one or two chosen authors to explore the genre, demonstrating an understanding of both the power and the potential pitfalls of using literary techniques to get at “history in the raw”. The second formal assignment builds on this approach; part of the process includes your own short work of creative nonfiction that helps you think through some of the theoretical challenges of the form.