When we go around the room to introduce ourselves at the beginning of my creative nonfiction workshop each spring, I find that students come from just about everywhere in the university – except creative writing. Almost without exception, they’re students who needed an upper level writing course to graduate, saw “creative” in the title and figured that should be easy, and found the Tuesday/Thursday mid-day time slot appealing. They come from biology, criminal justice, accounting, and every other corner of the disciplines, generally without any idea of what creative nonfiction might even be.
I think this is an ideal population for creative nonfiction. These students might not know anything about the sub-genres of creative writing or the history of the essay, but they sure know a lot about all kinds of other things: off-roading in the Pine Barrens, the care of saltwater fish, the particular frogs that live near our campus lake, the correct technique for a dead lift. Because these students often have difficulty beginning writing or seeing themselves as writers, my opening assignment for the course asks students to identify and begin to write about the specific and often odd things they know.
We begin with an in-class writing exercise:
- List 5-7 things about which you’re knowledgeable – things you could teach to someone else, or things you know a lot about. These don’t have to be related to school. (If students seem to be having difficulty with this, we’ll sometimes pause and talk; hearing others’ ideas can remind hesitant students that they do, in fact, have expertise.)
- Star items that interest you, then select one of your starred items.
- For the topic you’ve selected, list at least 10 specific words or phrases that only people with this expertise would know – the names of tools, words you’d use to give directions, jargon specific to people in this field or place.
- Use that language to describe – as slowly as you can – a specific process relevant to your topic.
Students then have the option to develop this exercise into a complete essay. I’ve found that this prompt works well when students develop it into either a “the first time I ____” that introduces readers to the activity or a very granular description of a process or activity. Given this prompt, I’ve had students write really excellent essays on pole vaulting, learning to parachute out of a C-130, and caring for injured seals at the Marine Mammal Stranding Center.
There’s an underlying ethical argument for starting with expertise like this. I’ve found that college – perhaps especially for first-generation college students or others who don’t see themselves reflected in the kind of mainstream idea of what a college student looks like – often strips students of their sense of credibility and expertise. College so often teaches students what they don’t know and what they’re bad at. This exercise is designed to give students an opportunity to see themselves as experts and to articulate that expertise through writing.
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Nancy Reddy is the author of Double Jinx (Milkweed Editions, 2015), a 2014 winner of the National Poetry Series, and Acadiana (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Pleiades, Blackbird, The Iowa Review, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere. The recipient of a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, she teaches writing at Stockton University in southern New Jersey.