The Craft of Nonfiction with Molly Hennigan

Course Summary

In this course we will explore the history of family narratives, national and personal histories, and grapple with our own relationships with ‘writing the self’. We will interrogate different non-fiction labels: from memoir to biography, life-writing to essays, discovering which ones we feel most comfortable with and why. From week one we will begin developing an early sketch for a personal narrative and by the end of the course we will aim to leave with a solid first draft of a complete piece along with some tools to edit future writing.

Across the eight weeks we will have the opportunity to explore different writers including Sara Baume, Joan Didion, Suad Aldarra, Mary Gaitskill, Vivian Gornick, Natalia Ginzburg, Moyra Davey and more. All readings will be provided in advance. We will also make time to workshop our drafts in-progress.

For the first four weeks we will focus on the readings and writing prompts. The second half of the course will see us workshopping our writing and refining our own editing approach.

Course Outline

Participants will focus on developing their own piece of creative nonfiction having interrogated different subsections of the form. We will work with multiple writing prompts. Participants will explore the work of some writers (listed above), will workshop writing with the group, and also develop editing skills and techniques for future use.

Session breakdown:

Week 1-4:

Focus on writing prompts, developing confidence and knowledge, building rapport with fellow participants (and me), reading and discussing.

Week 5-8:

More of a focus on workshop approach here as we will have built a base of knowledge, a foundational draft of our own and will have settled into our dynamic as a group. Before beginning the workshopping we will set out terms and ethics of how best to approach this. Alongside this we will focus on editing our work, polishing our drafts and we will still touch on some short reading extracts during the second half of the course as we see fit.

Course Outcomes

Participants will leave the course with a workshopped and complete first draft of a piece of creative nonfiction. They will also have a series of editing tools to take forward into their future writing. I’m hoping they will also leave with a sense of confidence in their individual voice as writers and a keen understanding of the difference (when it comes to creative nonfiction) between a bald account of a difficult experience and a well-crafted essay.

Participants will be producing one strong piece of non-fiction across the eight weeks with an upper word count limit of approx. 5000 words. There is no requirement for each participant to reach this word count but it is often a standard outer limit when submitting to journals etc., so we’ll aim to cap it here. The focus will ultimately be on completing one essay/piece of nonfiction, whatever ‘complete’ comes to mean to each participant. We will devote a decent amount of class time to writing prompts so a portion of this writing can happen in class (conscious of home/work/ life balance and the fact that these two hours might be the bones of what some participants can afford to devote to writing per week.) Follow up prompts that can be used outside of class to further the writing will be short and specific, and hopefully easy to respond to in the snatches of time participants might find during the week outside of class. Same approach with the readings – they won’t be too long.

Molly Hennigan is an Irish writer and editor. Her work has been published in The Stinging Fly, Banshee, Tolka and The Pig’s Back. Her first book The Celestial Realm was shortlisted for the An Post Irish Book Awards Newcomer of the Year and the Royal Irish Academy’s Michel Déon Prize. Molly is the non-fiction editor for Banshee and is the current Arts Council Writer in Residence at the University of Galway.

Booked out? To be added to the waiting list for this course, please email info@irishwriterscentre.ie.