Seth Fischer is one of our most popular instructors, and his Nonfiction I workshop starts a week from tomorrow! Click here to learn more. We asked him some questions about the class so that writers new to WWLA can get a sense of his style. Tell your friends who might be interested and/or sign up today! To enroll, email us at [email protected].
If I were a student new to nonfiction, what could I look forward to learning in your class?
On my first day of class, one of the first things I say is “We’re here to tell true stories. You will not be required to write a single thesis statement.” It’s one of my favorite teaching moments, because students come alive when I say it. I can almost see a lifetime of painful writing assignments flashing before their eyes, and then, when they realize that this is not what the course will be made up of, they smile, their shoulders relax, and they finally grab some hummus or a glass of wine. I encourage these new writers to think about their nonfiction not in terms of talking points or argumentation, but in terms of character and scene and sometimes plot. And I teach that this can be a very powerful way of looking at life.
Joan Didion writes: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” Note that she does not write to prove what she already knows. If nothing else, I hope my students leave the class knowing that writing is more powerful as a tool of exploration than it is as a tool of persuasion.
What is one of your favorite in-class or homework assignments?
Writing nonfiction can be hard, because in most of it, at least, you need to learn to see yourself as a character. In one of the first classes, I have students split up into pairs and interview each other with a list of very specific and unexpected questions, like telling the story of a scar or describing the history of their middle names. (Obviously, students are not required to answer questions they don’t feel comfortable answering.) This works miracles in helping people see themselves from the outside, but more importantly, it somehow helps everyone become fast friends. If there is one non-writing related thing that I hope everyone gets out of this class, it’s a community. Sometimes, years after a class, I’ll hear that my students are still meeting up with each other to write, to read each other’s work, or just to get drinks. This makes me so so happy.
If you had to suggest one book for a student to read before taking your workshop, what would it be and why?
It wouldn’t even be a whole book! It’d be a single essay: “The Love of My Life” by Cheryl Strayed. In terms of its content, it is so emotionally compelling, but I’ve read lots of essays from people with emotionally compelling stories that haven’t led to the same sort of visceral reading experience. The question I ask my students to ask is: “Why is this working?” The short answer is that it has to do with the way she uses scene and summary and reflection, the way she paces these things beautifully, and the way she uses details to keep us reading and to make us feel like we’re there. For the long answer, you’ll have to take the class …
Seth Fischer is a current contributor and former editor at The Rumpus, and his work has also appeared in Best Sex Writing, Buzzfeed, PANK, Guernica, and other journals and anthologies. His essay “Notes from a Unicorn” was selected as a notable essay in The Best American Essays 2O13, and he was a Jentel Artist Residency fellow. He is also a professional developmental editor of novels and memoirs that have received excellent reviews from Kirkus, ForeWord, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles, where he also teaches.
