Edward McPherson

Joan Didion writes, "A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image." This craft class will focus on the notion of place in creative nonfiction. We will ask: what happens when the background moves to the foreground and begins to do the work of character, story, and theme? How does a writer navigate the current between a physical landscape and an emotional one? We'll look at strategies for locating our work in a specific landscape—evoking not just setting, but loading it with context, feeling, desire, and language. And of course this semester we might ask with new urgency how ideas of place and space appear to us after our long time of quarantine. We will read writers such as Hilton Als, Joan Didion, Teju Cole, Louise Erdrich, Natalia Ginzburg, James Baldwin, Rebecca Solnit, Gabriel García Márquez, Jamaica Kincaid, Lillian Ross, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Susan Orlean, Garrett Hongo, Colson Whitehead, Valeria Luiselli, Svetlana Alexievich, Vladimir Nabokov, J.A. Baker, André Aciman, Joe Sacco, Aisha Sabatini Sloan, D.J. Waldie, T Fleischmann, Pico Iyer, David Wojnarowicz, Sarah M. Broom, and David Rakoff.

This is an intermediate workshop in the craft of writing “literary journalism”—a vague term, at best. Reportorial writing is as old as the hills, but for the purpose of this class, literary journalism will encompass documentary reporting that favors innovation over mass-production, creativity over predictability. We’re interested in how the story is told. While it has its own forms and tropes, literary journalism might borrow the tools of essay, memoir, fiction, and poetry. It also is a genre in great flux. Part of the goal of this class is to define what, exactly, we think literary journalism is and what it can/should do as a prose form.