Advanced Creative Nonfiction

Sean Prentiss is Associate Professor of English at Norwich University, USA. He is author of Finding Abbey: The Search for Edward Abbey and His Hidden Desert Grave (2015), which won the National Outdoor Book Award for Biography/History. He is also author of Crosscut: Poems (2020), and co-editor of The Science of Story: The Brain Behind Creative Nonfiction (Bloomsbury, 2020). Jessica Hendry Nelson is the author of the memoir If Only You People Could Follow Directions (2014) which was selected as a best debut book by the Indies Introduce New Voices program, the Indies Next List by the American Booksellers’ Association, and named a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, USA and teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, USA.

Advanced Creative Nonfiction: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology sets a new standard for teaching creative nonfiction by covering a wide range of craft topics, explicating old and emergent forms, and including a unique anthology ... Each chapter reads as an engaging lecture, a lesson on how to process, and more importantly, how to be a human who writes.

• IntroductionPart 1: Foundations1. The History of Creative Nonfiction2. Veracity and Genre3. Forms and Modes of Creative Nonfiction4. Interplay of Genres, Forms, and Modes5. Elements of Creative NonfictionPart 2: Evolutions6. The Central Question7. Image and Metaphor8. Exploding Scene9. Chronology10. Dialectical Movement11. Setting As Character12. Writer, Narrator, Character13. Lenses14. Reflection, Introspection, and Speculation15. Beginnings and Endings16. Music of ProsePart 3: Integrities17. Truth, Fact, and Memory18. Authority and CredibilityPart 4: Renovations19. Workshops, Peer Reviews, and Writing Groups20. Revision21. PublishingPart 5: Anthology1. Austin Bunn, “Basement Story”2. Amy Butcher, “Women These Days”3. Seo-Young Chu, “A Refuge for Jae-in Doe: Fugues in the Key of English Major”4. Melissa Febos, “Leave Marks”5. Kathy Fish, “Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild”6. Harrison Candelaria Fletcher, “Open Season”7. Ross Gay, “Loitering”8. Och Gonzalez, “What I Do on My Terrace is None of Your Business”9. Peter Grandbois, “Loyalty”10. Major Jackson, “Mighty Pawns”11. Sarah Minor, “A Log Cabin Square”12. Jessica Hendry Nelson, “When You Were a Boy in Maine”13. Sean Prentiss, “Buying a House”14. Jonathan Rovner, “The Funambulists” 15. Vijay Seshadri, “Memoir”16. Vivek Shraya, “Trisha”17. Margot Singer, “Call it Rape” 18. Ira Sukrungruang, “Invisible Partners”19. Jill Talbot, “The Professor of Longing”20. Abigail Thomas, “Nostalgia”21. Ryan Van Meter, “First”22. Elissa Washuta, “Incompressible Flow”23. Christian Wiman, “The Limit”24. Brooke Juliet Wonders, “Self Erasure”25. Xu Xi, “Godspeed”26. Kristen Millares Young, “A Few Thoughts While Shaving”Index