Fort Collins Book Fest - The Possibilities of Nonfiction Writing

The essay—the most flexible, shapeshifting genre—has much to offer writers. This workshop with National Book Award Finalist Deborah Taffa is designed to explore the dynamic possibilities of creative nonfiction. How do we weave public histories into individual stories? What is the impact of emotional truth versus factual truth? How do we distinguish memoir from autobiography? The lyric essay from the traditional essay? And how do we use the form to enrich any type of material? We’ll look at a range of essays—from the historic to the modern—and seek to understand what defines these works in all their permutations. Explore how various writers have navigated its possibilities and discuss ways to experiment with the typologies to create new directions for our own work.