Last week, we talked about turning oneself into a character in creative nonfiction. This week, our focus is on creating compelling characters of other people. My students read a roundtable consideration on this craft issue that was published in a long-ago issue of Fourth Genre. One of the participants, Donald Morrill, talks about how characters…

Friends, with the kind help of Silas Hansen, we’re going to provide the links to the readings and writing activities for the creative nonfiction workshop. Here’s a start, with more to come as the weeks roll along. As always, thanks for reading. Reading: “Chop Suey” by Ira Sukrungruang | Writing Exercise, Week 1 Reading: “The Sloth”…

Our conversation in workshop today centered on Phillip Lopate’s craft article, “Writing Personal Essays: On the Necessity of Turning Oneself Into a Character,” which appears in Writing Creative Nonfiction, edited by Carolyn Forche and Philip Gerard. Lopate points out the importance of the essayist becoming a round character in his or her essay, dramatizing the…

In light of my uncle’s death and a trip to Illinois to see to family matters there, I asked for a volunteer from my MFA CNF workshop to do a guest blog post this week. Michael Larson has kindly obliged, and in just a moment, I’ll paste in his entry. Before I do, though, let…

Welcome to  what will be a series of ten posts from my MFA workshop in Creative Nonfiction at The Ohio State University. I did this same thing last quarter for my fiction workshop; now it’s time to step out from behind the scrim of fiction to the full exposure of nonfiction, where facts count but…

Our ten weeks together in the MFA fiction workshop have come to an end, and the time has seemed to pass so quickly. When I was a kid, I thought time sometimes crept by so slowly. Now, of course, not so much. As a kid, I was good at making my inner thoughts known to…

Friends, we’re almost to the end of our workshop time together. The final post will come next week. Tonight’s post comes a tad earlier than usual, and will perhaps be a bit shorter, since I’m traveling to Chicago tomorrow for the Associated Writing Programs annual conference. So. . .let’s get at it. Part of our…

Part of our conversation yesterday focused on the choice one student had made to tell a story from a collective consciousness, the voice of the “we.” Perhaps the most well-known example of this strategy in short fiction is the Faulkner story, “A Rose for Emily,” which begins by establishing the perspective of the Mississippi town…

American rocker, John Mellencamp, calls Bloomington, Indiana, home. Bloomington is what we’d call a hop, skip, and a jump from where I grew up just over the state line in the agricultural land of southeastern Illinois. “No, I cannot forget from where it is I come from,” Mellancamp sings in his 1985 song, “Small Town,”…

We’ve been talking quite a bit about how a story gets resonance from the proper pairing of characters and the pressure of plot that causes something surprising and yet inevitable to rise at the end. As we all know, it’s one thing to say this is what has to happen in order for a story…