WEBINAR | Write Beyond Yourself: Research, Reporting, and the Art of Narrative Nonfiction
October 29 @ 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm America/NewYork
Some stories demand more than what we already know: interviews, research, quotations, and reportage. Learn the skill of turning facts into scenes with inspiration and truth.
For Creative Nonfiction, Narrative Nonfiction, and Memoir
Included in the Season Pass
We are often told to ‘write what we know.’ But what if the story we’re telling, whatever our own role in it, requires us to seek out information, perspectives, and knowledge beyond our own experience? Even as we write beyond ourselves, the question at the heart of the book or essay must drive our inquiry. Why we are telling this story in turn dictates how that story unfolds and is structured and told.
Learn narrative nonfiction writer Michael Copperman’s best techniques for conducting and writing interviews, researching, exploring archives and analyzing keepsakes, quoting from other first sources, and reportage. Through examples of transforming source material into recreated and imagined scenes and text, you’ll discover the combination of skill, patience, and inspiration that powers successful narrative nonfiction.
Proceeds for this course support Short Reads, the free, flash-nonfiction literary magazine, and the writers they publish. Find out more and subscribe to Short Reads here.
In this webinar, you will:
- EXPLORE different kinds of research, reportage, investigation, and interviews
- INTERROGATE the ethics of transforming anecdotes, facts, and data into narrative
- CONSIDER models of transforming research into a story
- LEARN how to begin doing this work for your own writing
This webinar is ideal for beginning and intermediate writers who…
- want to include archival materials and research and/or conduct interviews to enrich their own work
- wish to consider or include knowledge and perspectives beyond their own immediate experience
- want to write compelling, enlightening narrative nonfiction that appeals to audiences, agents, editors, and readers
Closed captioning is available. ✔
All registrants receive the recording. ✔
ABOUT YOUR PRESENTER
MICHAEL COPPERMAN’s memoir TEACHER: Two Years in the Mississippi Delta (University Press of Mississippi 2017), about the rural black public schools of the Mississippi Delta, was a finalist for the 2018 Oregon Book Award in CNF. A funny, generous and thoughtful teacher, he blends specific information with the inspiration to use it, right away.
Michael’s prose has appeared in The Oxford-American, Guernica, The Sun, Creative Nonfiction, Boston Review, Salon, Gulf Coast, Triquarterly, Kenyon Review and Copper Nickel, among many others, and has won awards and garnered fellowships from the Munster Literature Center, Breadloaf Writers Conference, Oregon Literary Arts, and the Oregon Arts Commission. His work is represented by David Dunton of Harvey Klinger.
REFUNDS (less a $10 processing fee) ARE AVAILABLE before the replay is sent out. For a refund, EMAIL us at info@WritingCraft.com. Canceling your Zoom invite will not initiate this process.
There are no refunds after the replay is sent.
Questions? Please email Info@writingcraft.com
