Report the facts, create the scene.

There are no available registration dates at this time.

NOTE: This class will be held in a live, online format using the Zoom Platform.
Class meets 11am – 1pm EDT, and again from 4 – 5:30pm EDT

Being a writer has many definitions, connotations, and iterations. Maybe you’ve ‘always written’, whether diaries, journals, field notes, or even the occasional poem. Maybe you’ve been a reporter for a newspaper, radio, television, a podcast, or a documentary; you’re comfortable putting pen to paper, or tapping keys on the computer to put together a piece of ‘writing’. But you feel the need or desire to jumpstart your writing, to make it creative but based in reality, more moving, more dramatic, more ‘you’.  You want to work with real-life experience, put it into a creative literary form, expand your audience, as well as discovering a new ‘voice’ in your work. Explore writing essays lyrically through the nonfiction lens. This workshop will reinforce and deepen your journalism by allowing it to break into creative non-fiction. We will explore the differences, practice writing every day, share critiques of your work and models of creative non-fiction, and draw from a wide variety of readings.

Creative nonfiction has become an increasingly popular genre in the writing world. Growing out of creative biography, autobiography, opinion writing, personal essays, memoir, diaries, personal research, lyrical essays, and alternative experimental forms using narrative structure. In the words of one critic, creative non-fiction is simply “true stories told well.” As a genre today it is filling the shelves of bookstores in various reading formats, and in electronic time-based media.

Schedule:

The workshop will meet 11am – 1pm EDT, and again from 4 – 5:30pm EDT every day. The workshop will consist of short lectures and discussion, assigned and free writing, assigned readings, critiques of your work and notable examples of creative non-fiction and its cross with journalism. And every student will have a one-on-one meeting, scheduled with the instructor outside class time.

Image Credit: Max Bovkun

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Instructor: Mimi Edmunds

Mimi Edmunds has worked in non-fiction storytelling for three decades. She was a broadcast journalist with CBS for 15 years, including eleven at 60 Minutes, and at CBS’s documentary unit. She then worked at PBS and the Discovery Network, and also wrote and produced for PBS’ newsmagazine Arizona Illustrated. Her films have won Emmy nominations and Cable awards. She currently works on independent productions.