Joint Day & WEC Fall 2002
Wednesday Evening: 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.
Associate Professor Cass Dalglish Office
Memorial 224
Wednesday: by appointment
Thursday: 4:45 to 5:45 p.m.
WEC Fridays: 4:30 to 5:30 p.m.
WEC/MAL Saturdays: by appointment
Phone: 612-330-1009 dalglish@augsburg.edu
Scenario
This is a course for students who are serious about their writing. This means students who will write on a regular basis, who want to work on their prose style, and who are willing to examine their own work and the work of others for elements that invigorate (rather than fatigue) a text. It is for students who plan to be ready--at least by the end of the term--to test their writing on the market. We will apply both readers' and writers' readings to our own work and to work composed and published by nonfiction authors such as Annie Dillard, Virginia Woolf, Bernard Cooper, Patricia Hampl, Bharati Mukerjee, Scott Russell Sanders, James Baldwin, N. Scott Momaday, E.B. White, and many more. We will write a number of articles during the term; several revised until they achieve a "polished" state. We will analyze the market for creative nonfiction, seeking a reasonable "on-campus" home for one piece early in the term and, by the end of the term, submitting at least one article for publication in a professional journal, magazine, or review. We will also keep "writing books." These not-quite-journals are places for writing play, pages where you are entitled to take private writing risks. We will also keep idea lists, outlines, research, and interview notes, and the writing prompts at the ends of the chapters in our text. I will ask writers to open these pages in class and share them. You are always free to keep a piece of writing private until you are ready to move it into the public domain, but if you do have a piece you want to keep private, you will be expected to offer some other work. Once our Blackboard section is up and running, you'll be asked to place one entry a week on the discussion board.
Most of all, we will begin to see, hear, smell, taste and touch our world, savoring the sensations we feel, and sharing those new realities (in palatable morsels) with our readers.
What We'll Read
Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola.
The Anthology of Nonfiction bundled with Tell It Slant
The two-book course pack has been made available to us six months in advance of publication by McGraw Hill. The publisher and authors are interested in how we use the text and anthology and have asked that we send occasional reports on our use of the texts.
Individual readings from journals like Creative Nonfiction and Fourth Genre and magazines like Atlantic, New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Harper's print and online versions
Handouts in class
What We'll Accomplish
Cultivate the habit of writing
Write four essays/articles, revising three until they're polished, sending one to an on-campus publication, submitting one to an off-campus journal
Try out mixed media and hypertext writing using StorySpace.
Create query/submission letters for on-campus and off-campus submissions
Produce one market analysis for the off-campus submission
Attend three public readings
Grades
Grades will depend on all of the above -- plus participation in class discussions and workshop sessions. Work done in electronic writing book assignments and public workbooks will be considered in grading.
This is an advanced workshop class and no incomplete grades will be granted. Absences and late submissions will affect grades. Workshop groups will only discuss pieces that have been distributed to the group by the writer 5 days before that writer's scheduled workshop. Anyone who misses the deadline will forfeit a turn in workshop until the next round.
Place/People/Pace
We will use our own lives, our personal histories, the experiences we have lived in our families and in our communities to enlighten our readers through personal essays. We will also do literary documentary writing, writing about science or the arts, creating pieces with research, interview, and immersion or saturation reporting at their core. Creative nonfiction forms are permeable; they leak into one another. The creative nonfiction writer often mixes models and mixes passion with information as well. The nonpermeable in the creative nonfiction form is the contract with the reader. The memoir reflects a world recalled through the heart and soul of the writer. Literary journalism follows Lee Gutkind's rule: "Nonfiction ... must not only ring true, it must be true." It will be our job to make sure the reader knows what kind of work we are offering.
A Permeable Calendar
By the end of our first meeting, we will have worked our way through much of chapter one and two, and during the next four weeks we will complete chapters three, four, five, six and ten, and a good selection of pieces from the anthology. Writers will complete a personal piece, offer it to workshop, revise it and then,
during the week of October 7, have a writing conference on that piece with ACTC Visiting Writer Elizabeth Andrew. During the rest of the term, writers will have some freedom in selecting and combining forms, which may require writers to exercise the freedom to read additional articles in our text, on the web, and on the magazine rack to get the most out of the world. In other words, read the assigned pieces and then feel free to read whatever else you need to make your writing work. Don't hold back. The material is all yours.
Class Design During the first two weeks we'll work together as a single group throughout the evening. On September 25, we will begin workshop sessions during the second half of class.
Cass Dalglish, Ph.D.