Nonfiction Workshop: Reading and Writing Personal Essays

Catalog description

This course will be divided into three units, each of which will involve reading published essays and writing our own. In the first unit, People You Know, students will write personal narratives involving people in their lives. Students will also read, as models, published examples of such works; for example, Phillip Lopate’s portrait of his family in the essay “Willy.” In the second unit, Place, we will read and write essays about authors’ relationships to particular places—less travelogues than investigations of the dynamic between the person and the place; examples of published essays studied in this unit will include “Stranger in the Village,” by James Baldwin, and Annie Dillard’s essay, “Aces and Eights.” For the third unit, The Personal in the Critical/Journalistic, studied works will combine personal reflection with consideration of an outside subject, such as a favorite movie or an event like 9/11—the interaction of the personal and the outside subject yields a third element, an insight that would not be possible without the first two elements; for example, Jonathan Lethem’s personal essay about the movie The Searchers. Sports Storytelling WRIT 3004 Jeffrey McDaniel Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits In this course, we will explore the intersection of sports and literary writing and journalism. We will read a mixture of books and essays by writers such as Mitchell S. Jackson, John McPhee, Nick Hornby and a sports poetry anthology edited by Natalie Diaz. There will be weekly critical responses. Writing assignments will include: an interview/portrait of an athlete, a first-person sports essay, a sports short story, and a sports poem. For conference work, each student will write an in-depth story about a local sports issue on the high-school or collegiate level. This in-depth story will require research. Students will be expected to interview the main…