Prose Workshop: The Shape of Things to Come: How Playing with Form Can Invigorate Creative Nonfiction Work
Week 5 | Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall Prose Room | Ages 18+
The word “essay” comes from the French essayer: to try. In this workshop we’ll move beyond traditional narrative and expository forms to try a more experimental approach: playing with form. We’ll look at some of the many forms creative nonfiction can take, including lyric, segmented, braided, and hermit crab essays. And we’ll write from a variety of prompts to sketch essays and short memoirs in these forms. At the end of the week we’ll try some creative and unexpected ways of revising what we’ve written. This generative workshop will benefit beginners as well as advanced practitioners. Come prepared to try, to risk, to dare – and to play. (ages 18+)
Class Times
Randon Billings Noble is an essayist. Her collection Be with Me Always was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2019 and her anthology of lyric essays, A Harp in the Stars, was published by Nebraska in 2021. Other work has appeared in the Modern Love column of The New York Times, The Rumpus, Brevity, and Creative Nonfiction. Currently she is the founding editor of the online literary magazine After the Art and teaches in West Virginia Wesleyan’s Low-Residency MFA Program and Goucher's MFA in Nonfiction Program. You can read more at her website, www.randonbillingsnoble.com.
