Embracing Uncertainty: Experiments with Hybrid Storytelling
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live…We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”--Joan Didion, “The White Album”
To live is to, consciously and unconsciously, negotiate uncertainty. Doing this is, variously: inconvenient, discomfiting, explorative, exhilarating, terrifying, and transformative.
A provocative manifesto for writing about oneself, one's experience, one's history: Stand up to your inner authoritarian. Realism is unreliable. Memory is a convincing dreamstate. Alternative facts are not always malignant. Embrace uncertainty: uncover new truths by mixing modes, forms, and genres.
This writing workshop will explore hybrid forms of writing about the self. To do this, we’ll make use of some or all of the following genres and styles: fiction, autofiction, poetry, memoir, comics, journalism, art criticism, autoethnography, fictocriticism, and more. You’ll be encouraged to fuck around with format—sitcom scripts, takeout menus, historical documents, white papers, transcripts, travel guides, how-to manuals, letters, and so on.
We’ll look to examples from writers and artists including Gloria Anzaldúa, Tisa Bryant, William S. Burroughs, Anelise Chen, Joan Didion, Audre Lorde, Carmen Maria Machado, Ander Monson, Maggie Nelson, Lia Purpora, Claudia Rankine, George Saunders, Leanne Shapton, and others.
This is a creative nonfiction writing workshop that asks you to fill in the blanks with fiction; to capsize your reportage in a poem; to tell stories about yourself and your people in the truest way possible: by blurring boundaries to better capture the “shifting phantasmagoria…[of] our actual experience.”
To live is to, consciously and unconsciously, negotiate uncertainty. Doing this is, variously: inconvenient, discomfiting, explorative, exhilarating, terrifying, and transformative.
A provocative manifesto for writing about oneself, one's experience, one's history: Stand up to your inner authoritarian. Realism is unreliable. Memory is a convincing dreamstate. Alternative facts are not always malignant. Embrace uncertainty: uncover new truths by mixing modes, forms, and genres.
This writing workshop will explore hybrid forms of writing about the self. To do this, we’ll make use of some or all of the following genres and styles: fiction, autofiction, poetry, memoir, comics, journalism, art criticism, autoethnography, fictocriticism, and more. You’ll be encouraged to fuck around with format—sitcom scripts, takeout menus, historical documents, white papers, transcripts, travel guides, how-to manuals, letters, and so on.
We’ll look to examples from writers and artists including Gloria Anzaldúa, Tisa Bryant, William S. Burroughs, Anelise Chen, Joan Didion, Audre Lorde, Carmen Maria Machado, Ander Monson, Maggie Nelson, Lia Purpora, Claudia Rankine, George Saunders, Leanne Shapton, and others.
This is a creative nonfiction writing workshop that asks you to fill in the blanks with fiction; to capsize your reportage in a poem; to tell stories about yourself and your people in the truest way possible: by blurring boundaries to better capture the “shifting phantasmagoria…[of] our actual experience.”
