In this workshop, we’ll play with facts. We’ll experiment with writing processes that make productive use of the dynamic between intuition and intention. In both theory and practice, we’ll explore the idea that playing with language, forms, and ideas can stir what’s unconscious into consciousness. Creative nonfiction—all nonfiction, really—explores truths about the world through the lens of a writer’s subjective experience. With that in mind, we’ll spend our time crafting elements of reality through the strategic and intuitive use of storytelling techniques. By playing with facts, we’ll aim to meet audience where they live and take them (and ourselves) somewhere new.

Throughout the semester, we’ll adapt Matthew Salesses’s Craft in the Real World as a guide for writing nonfiction. We’ll workshop sentences, paragraphs, and longer pieces that combine exposition and narrative. At each stage, students will gather facts and use formal experiments to play with them. Students will choose or adapt writing prompts from Salesses’s book to lead in-class writing sessions. Finally, we’ll read short works by writers who examine or model the interplay of fact and play and the dynamic between intuition and intention—including Siri Hustvedt, Ariel Francisco, Questlove, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Christopher Isherwood, Kazim Ali, and Lulu Miller.