Starts Next Week: Speculative Nonfiction Workshop

In this intensive 6-week workshop, students will explore how to bend the boundaries of nonfiction and incorporate speculation into essay and memoir.

Happy Friday, writers! Don’t forget to pop over to the Narratively Academy Chat to share your #WeeklyWin.

Also, we have a brand-new class starting next week, with just 3 seats left.

So much of our life experience, or rather how we reflect back on it, centers on the “what if.” What if we’d left earlier, spoken louder, moved here or there, known our parents before they had us, known our lovers before we loved them, known our adult selves as children? These are the scenarios our minds often flip through—however impossible they are in reality.

Incorporating speculation into essay and memoir is a craft decision that allows writers to remain grounded in fact while exploring the “what ifs” of lived experience. Sometimes, this is the key to unlocking those emotional truths we aspire to find in our work that perhaps evade us when reflecting solely on observable events. For example, consider a story from childhood and how often the version held as true is itself inherited—passed down and so inevitably skewed, and then absorbed into personal memory. Should we simply ignore the gap between what “actually” happened and how it was told to us? Or, perhaps we might find that the emotional truth of the story, its core so to speak, lies in that gap. Of course, we also need to question what it means to engage with speculation and speculative elements in nonfiction not just effectively, but ethically.

In this six-week nonfiction workshop led by author and editor Haley Swanson, writers will engage with memoirs, poems, and essays that play with the “what if” of things. Readings will include selections from Jo Ann Beard’s Festival Days, Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, and Laura Kasischke’s “Bike Ride with Older Boys,” among others.

We’ll explore how these writers speculate on what could’ve been—in relation to events, time, and past selves. We’ll also look at how this strengthens their narrative conceits and how we can implement similar tools in our own essays.

Then, we’ll engage on this level with each other’s work. Each writer will workshop one essay they either feel needs to incorporate speculation or is currently asking these challenging questions.

Class starts this coming Tuesday, April 7. If you’d like to join, be sure to grab a seat and sign up now!

PS: Interested in this class but can’t afford the full cost? You can easily apply for a sliding scale scholarship here.