Bearing Witness: Writing Nonfiction When You Aren't the Main Character

Class Description

When do you have the right to tell a story that isn’t your own? How can a nonfiction writer cope with the ethical complications of writing about people other than ourselves? What do you do about all that missing information? What if you weren’t even there to see everything you need to write a scene? How can you trust anyone’s memory? Can we write about others without appropriating them? How can we justly handle another’s story when, inevitably, our decisions to tell it (and to tell it in certain ways) also raise hard questions about ourselves? Whether you are a minor character in a narrative, an observer, a journalist or researcher actively pursuing the story, or an essayist working with current events or cultural icons, you face some challenging ethical terrain with every aesthetic decision, even the tiny ones. In this class, we’ll discuss the very fraught work of bearing witness in a range of ways. Topics to be explored include narrative strategies, reconstructed scenes, composite scenes, characterization, point of view, negative capability, and empathy.

We will not workshop existing work. There will be intermittent mini-lectures, but we will spend more time reading, discussing, and doing in-class writing and exercises. We will also discuss some of the writing students produce in class and work to help each other develop strategies that suit the situation of each individual piece of writing.

This class would be most appropriate for those who already have some foundational knowledge of the conventions of nonfiction.

Part of GrubStreet's Special Topics in the Nonfiction, a group of classes dedicated to exploring different craft elements of creative nonfiction. For more class offerings, click here.