Workshop: Nonfiction

Registration is now closed.

The Art of Fact

Nonfiction Writing with Kerri Arsenault

Note: This course is for intermediate and advanced writers only with substantive work done already on a longform nonfiction project. This course is not for beginners nor for writers wanting to generate new material for project they have just begun.

To be a better writer, you must be a better reader. In this workshop, we will focus on the art of using facts and evidence to create literature, relying heavily on a close reading of assigned texts. Rather than spend our time workshopping each other’s texts, we will spend most of our time reading and discussing already published texts that will inform and expand your writing, with some time devoted to in-class writing exercises. The instructor will also meet with each writer one-on-one for 30 minutes.

This course is designed to cultivate engaging, appropriate, constructive, respectful, professional, trusting, open-hearted, instructive, and enjoyable conversations, all in pursuit of crafting artful narratives. This course, at its heart, is about listening: to each other, to the readings, to possibilities, to curiosity. Participants will be generous in conversation, and all actively contribute to the discussions. Rather than prescribe solutions for each other, the group will instead ask questions to generate conversation.

The workshop will also pay particular attention to:

  • Evidence gathering;

  • The vault of senses;

  • Point-of-view and framing;

  • Writing about people, places, and objects;

  • The use of memory and imagination;

  • The abuse of clichés

  • Deploying the tenets of literary storytelling, such as: scenes, imagery, structure, language, transition, metaphor, voice, tone, rhythm, plot.

SUBMIT

After registering, participants in the nonfiction workshop are asked to submit:

  • a one-paragraph summary of your project;

  • goals for this project;

  • goals for this class;

  • 2500 words (and no more than 10 pages) from your project, double-spaced. (Note: preferably this will be the first ten pages of the project and not your very first draft. It does not matter if something gets cut off on page 11, please just submit 10 pages only.)

  • A reading list that is companionable to your project.

Please send your submission by 9:00 a.m. on February 23. Please email the manuscripts as attachments to director@mainewriters.org with the subject line: “ARSENAULT SNOWBOUND MSS.”  *Word files are preferred, but you may also send a PDF.

Credit: Erik Madigan Heck

Kerri Arsenault is a book critic, teacher, contributing editor at Orion magazine, associate of the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard, and the author of the best-selling book, Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains, which won the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists and the Maine Literary Award for nonfiction. Mill Town was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Leonard Prize. Kerri’s work has appeared in Freeman’s, the Boston Globe, Down East, the Paris Review, the New York Review of Books, and the Washington Post. She has also served on the National Book Critics Circle board for four years.

Snowbound Writers RetreatGibson Fay-LeBlanc2022