ENG 201 - Intro to Creative Nonfiction

The essayist Joan Didion famously wrote, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” It is this process of exploration that makes the personal essay a vehicle for thought, an artifact of its culture, and a tool for empathy. In this workshop-based course, students will write and share personal essays, representing experience and insight by careful attention to the material world. We will read a variety of published work, analyzing craft elements such as point of view, structure, syntax, and voice. Special attention will be paid to the tangible and the tactile-domestic spaces, furniture, clothing, food, flora and fauna-to ground our emotional and intellectual explorations.

Satifies the Literary Studies, Creative Writing, and Rhetoric requirement.