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I am so excited to have this piece up on Electric Literature today! In my three years interviewing writers for my Non-Fiction by Non-Men series on Fiction Advocate, I have learned many helpful things from these badass women, and I hope you all will, too.

The post “I Talked to 39 Women Who Write Nonfiction, and Here’s What I’ve Learned” on Electric Lit! appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

Are you an adult who wants to take a creative writing class this summer? Then you should consider signing up for one of the two classes I am teaching for GrubStreet starting in June: Non-Fiction by Non-Men, taught at the GrubStreet Headquarters in Boston on Monday nights from 6pm-9pm, or Intro to Creative Nonfiction: Online, which you can take from anywhere! Keep reading for more information.

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Non-Fiction by Non-Men
Mondays, June 4 – August 6, 6pm-9pm

• New class!!!
• 10-week course.
• Open to all writers.
• Scholarships available!

We don’t know about you, but if we read another essay about shooting elephants or drinking war buddies under the table at a Barcelona bar or hanging out by a famous Concord pond, we’re going to throw ourselves into the Charles. If you’re looking to learn about nonfiction writers outside the range of those typically taught in English class, take this ten-week course to study and learn from some of the greatest contemporary women and non-binary folks writing nonfiction, with a special emphasis on women of color and LGBTQ individuals. In each class, we will study both the works of these writers and look at interviews with each of them discussing their craft, taken from the site Fiction Advocate’s interview series Non-Fiction by Non-Men. The reading list will include but is not limited to: Margo Jefferson, Michelle Kuo, Jennifer Finney Boylan, Edwidge Danticat, Suki Kim, Nina MacLaughlin, Samantha Irby, Eula Biss, Daisy Hernández, and Scaachi Koul. In addition to reading and studying works by these writers, for each class you will be expected to respond to writing prompts inspired by the works we have read. You will leave this course with the beginnings of several new pieces of your own nonfiction writing, a broadened knowledge of the range of individuals writing contemporary nonfiction, and an understanding of useful techniques and strategies for conducting interviews. Plus, you will have the chance to be a guest interviewer in the Non-Fiction by Non-Men series and publish an interview of your own on Fiction Advocate.

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Intro to Creative Nonfiction: Online
ONLINE, June 12 – July 17

• My first ONLINE course with GrubStreet!
• 6-week course.
• Open to all writers.
• Scholarships available!
• Did I mention it is ONLINE so you can take it from ANYWHERE?!

What defines creative nonfiction? Writers can’t even agree on the name: “Few seem willing to embrace the term,” writes essayist and memoirist Dinty W. Moore, “though by this point, almost everyone uses it.” And yet, the fundamentals of creative nonfiction are as old as Montaigne, and the genre has thrived in recent decades—from the tell-all memoirs of Mary Karr to the online personal essay boom. More readers are feeling “reality hunger,” it seems, craving stories based in fact. Intro to Creative Nonfiction Online will introduce you to this inventive form, with the flexibility of scheduling your own weekly attendance.

In this six-week course, we’ll explore what creative nonfiction is, what it isn’t, and what it might be, examining a mix of published nonfiction works—personal essays, memoirs, criticism, lyric essays, narrative journalism, flash nonfiction, autobiographical comics, nonfiction poetry, and hybrid genre work—to better understand the array of styles and approaches writers bring to true stories they tell. Focusing on voice, details, perspective and language, we’ll analyze work that fits neatly within nonfiction norms as well as boundary-pushing work that lives on the fringe, and apply this craft awareness to our own writing. Authors may include, but are not limited to: Hilton Als, Eula Biss, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Brian Doyle, Roxane Gay, Leslie Jamison, Margo Jefferson, Maxine Hong Kingston, Maggie Nelson, and Mary Roach.

During the six weeks of class, students will respond to six short prompts inspired by our reading each week. This class is classified as a survey, which means the focus is on introducing students to new topics and forms of writing. Though student work will be discussed, the emphasis is not on formal, instructor-driven critique, but on learning, class discussion, and writing exercises. While there are no live meetings to attend, students will be expected to complete weekly readings and exercises by a specified day each week and to contribute to online class discussions. At the end of the class, students will have the opportunity to submit one revised piece to the instructor for feedback, and recommendations on next steps. Please expect to devote 4-6 hours/week to this class, in which you’ll gain a strong foundational knowledge of creative nonfiction, along with a sense of its possibilities and where such work is being published. This class is ideal for novice writers or more experienced writers looking to delve into this ever-evolving and flourishing genre.

*Note that while our handy dandy “Schedule” tab states a 6-7pm class time, there are actually no live meetings for this class! Assignments and deadlines will be given by your instructor. Students will have access to the online class portal starting at 5pm on the first day of class. Instructions for logging onto the online portal will be emailed to registered students before 5pm the first day of class.

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Let me know if you have any questions!

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Eula Biss is the author of On Immunity: An Inoculation, which was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2014 by the New York Times Book Review, and Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism in 2010 and was the winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. Biss’s first book, The Balloonists, was published by Hanging Loose Press in 2002. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, an National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, and a Jaffe Writers’ Award. Her essays have appeared in The Believer, Harper’s, and The New York Times Magazine, among others. Biss holds a B.A. in nonfiction writing from Hampshire College and an M.F.A. in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. She teaches at Northwestern University and lives with her family in Evanston, Illinois.

The post Non-Fiction by Non-Men: Eula Biss appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

Kea Krause is a brilliantly talented writer, a genius editor, and definitely one of the best people I know. Her writing is smart and poetic in every subject she takes on––from Great White Sharks to family alcoholism.

I feel so lucky to know her as both a writer and as a friend, and today I am super excited to brag on her behalf: Kea’s essay “What’s Left Behind”––about the largest contaminated body of water in the United States, a flooded copper mine in Butte, Montana––was published in The Believer last fall (read an excerpt here). Her essay was subsequently picked up by the Best American series, and today is the big day––the Best American series 2016 is out now on your favorite local bookstore’s bookshelves!

So go out and buy The Best American Science Writing 2016 right now and read Kea’s essay! Oh, I’m sorry, you’re not really into science writing? That’s okay, because Kea’s essay is also featured in The Best American Travel Writing 2016. No big deal.

Here is Kea in The Best American Science Writing 2016…

… and here she is in The Best American Travel Writing 2016!

Congratulations, Kea! So proud of you!

The post Writers You Should Know: Kea Krause appeared first on E.B. Bartels.

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In the sixth of her series of interviews with women who write nonfiction, E.B. Bartels speaks with bestselling memoirist and opinion writer Jennifer Finney Boylan.

Jennifer Finney Boylan’s memoir, She’s Not There: a Life in Two Genders(Broadway/Doubleday 2003) was the first bestselling work by a transgender American. A novelist, memoirist, short story writer, and an advocate for civil rights, she is the author of thirteen books. Boylan also has been a contributor to the op/ed page of The New York Times since 2007; in 2013 she became Contributing Opinion Writer for the page. She serves as the national co-chair of the Board of Directors of GLAAD, the media advocacy group for LGBT people worldwide, and serves on the Board of Trustees of the Kinsey Institute for Research on Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. Boylan is the inaugural Anna Quindlen Writer in Residence at Barnard College of Columbia University.

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Not only did Fiction Advocate publish the September edition of Non-Fiction by Non-Men today, featuring my interview with Jennifer Finney Boylan (more on that later), but I also heard Mary Karr speak about her new book The Art of Memoir at the Brattle Theatre, sponsored by the Harvard Book Store and GrubStreet!

Mary Karr at the Brattle on September 14, 2015.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from Ms. Karr’s talk:

Every memoir is a survival story by dint of the fact the person who wrote it is still alive.

Reading memoir makes me feel less alone.

Don DeLillo said fiction starts with meaning and then you manufacture events. With memoir, you start with events and look for meaning.

Memoir lives or dies based on voice.

You need an inner life the size of Lake Superior to write a book.

The art of memoir is how we bullshit ourselves.

The well-bred American WASP can ignore reality better than any heroin addict.

How do I choose what memories to cut? That’s easy. You cut anything that’s boring.

Things that I thought would be whole chapters ended up being two sentences, and things that I thought would be two sentences ended up being whole chapters.

For the sake of truth, if someone disagrees with my memory I feel compelled to mention that, but not to represent her point of view. My sister can write her own damn book.

I became an overnight success after writing for twenty years.

Anybody who writes anything is narcissistic. Any artist is narcissistic. If you can spend eight hours alone with your own mind, that is the definition of narcissism.

Social media narcissism is shallow and in the moment. A book, a memoir, should last forever. It’s like the difference between a Tic-Tac and a steak.

A book is a bomb that doesn’t go off until a reader reads it.

Yeah, it was a great night. Every time I hear her speak (the first time I did was back at a Columbia Writing Program Nonfiction Dialogue in April 2013), I feel much better about writing and life. Ms. Karr is pretty much perfect.

Well, except for this:

Major book-signing fail.

Whoops.

But, hey, it’s hard to maintain eye contact and keep up small-talk with a stuttering fangirl reader, while also signing a book. If I’ve learned one thing from reading and listening to Mary Karr, it’s that all humans make mistakes, and that’s what makes us interesting and worth writing about. We’re likeable especially when we’re unlikeable.

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In October 2014, E.B. Bartels ‘10 graduated from Columbia University’s School of the Arts with an MFA in creative nonfiction writing. Now she spends most of her time trying to explain to people the difference between “creative nonfiction” and “journalism” without much success. This frustrates her, but not as much as the fact that she is nowhere near the point she thought she would be with her manuscript by now back when she was an idealistic, optimistic, and idiotic MFA student. Writing is slow and hard, huh. Plus she is extraordinarily good at finding other things to do instead of writing, such as bathing her pet tortoise, Terrence, or vacuuming her apartment, or responding to all her emails with lightning-fast speed, or writing alternative class notes for Wellesley Underground. She should probably get back to working on that manuscript.

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On Wellesley Underground’s new series: “At Wellesley, we often talk about our successes or our ideal standards of success, but this does not leave us much space to talk about failure or redefining success outside of the career norms that society expects. Resilience in failure is an important trait for overcoming challenges in life, but until we can talk about failure, we won’t be able to figure out how we are resilient. To help facilitate this much-needed conversation about failures in career, relationships, family, and beyond, Wellesley Underground is introducing a new series – Alternative Class Notes.”

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