CW912 Writing the Self: Nonfiction Writing Workshop
Convenor Jodie Kim
Literary nonfiction continues to command remarkable visibility and acclaim, with memoir, the essay, and hybrid forms reaching broad readerships and drawing serious critical attention. Notable works include Yiyun Li鈥檚 Pulitzer Prize-winning Things in Nature Merely Grow (2025), a memoir of grief that pushes the boundaries of what can be truthfully said about loss and the self; Gloria Anzald煤a鈥檚 Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), a seminal hybrid of poetry, essay, and theory that writes across English and Spanish to ask who is granted voice and who is spoken over; and Marie Calloway鈥檚 What purpose did I serve in your life? (2013), a cult classic of self-exposure that raises difficult questions about responsibility and the writing of other people.
This module will both teach students the craft of good literary nonfiction, exploring the formal, narrative, and ethical questions these texts raise, and put these texts into dialogue with critical and theoretical writings exploring the stakes in writing about the self, identity, and subjectivity. We will explore political questions of power, community, speech, responsibility, and identity-formation, questions vital for writers to engage with as they explore the creative content, form, and voice of their own writing. On whose behalf are they writing? Who are they writing for? What subjectivity can they access and mine when writing from their own lives, given the challenge to notions of the self and truth-telling about that self throughout history and in these current times? Exploration of these questions, alongside detailed attention to technical questions, will help students develop a rigorous approach to an important literary form.