DCI Advanced Memoir Workshop

Catalog description

Open to DCI Fellows and Partners only. DCI Advanced Memoir will take as its occasion for your creative and critical development an examination of essays and book excerpts in groundbreaking and traditional memoir forms. These texts broadly innovate within and outside of the formal traditions you studied in DCI Memoir and DCI Intermediate Memoir, finding new and exciting ways to represent personal experience. This section will also serve as the continuing examination and practice of those formal elements. You will write, workshop, present to the class, and revise at least two short essays, one long essay, and working drafts of excerpts from those essays. All workshops will serve as the springboard for our larger class conversation about theme and craft. During the quarter, we will meet in individual conferences. Throughout the quarter, creative work will be assigned in the form of essays, imitations, and revisions. Critical work will be assigned in the form of written analysis, a reading response, starting a class discussion, and writing and discussing critiques of your colleagues' essays. A variety of creative prompts, critical exercises, and assigned readings will foster your understanding and appreciation of creative nonfiction, as well as your growth as a creative writer. Energetic, committed participation is a must.