Description
Charles Simic calls them “memory fragments,” while other writers describe “micro essays,” “flash nonfiction,” or simply “shorts.” Brief nonfiction is, like flash fiction and poetry, complete in itself, or it may be a prologue or other part of a larger structure.
In this workshop, we’ll read samples from “Short Takes: Brief Encounters With Contemporary Nonfiction” and other anthologies and from the online journal, Brevity. We’ll look at strategies such as varying voice and point of view to create writing that captures entire worlds in concise form. Discussion will also focus on how brief nonfiction differs from longer forms as well as from poetry. Shorts and poems both rely on detail, dense imagery, and what Brevity’s editor Dinty W. Moore calls the heat necessary to compel readers. The heat might arise from surprise or revelation, as well as vivid images or inventive use of language.
We’ll write from prompts to generate our own brief essays, memoirs, portraits, or travelogues. Using a handout of guidelines, we’ll respond to one another’s initial drafts and discuss ways to condense and revise at home. All writers are welcome, whether in the middle of a work in progress or simply wanting to explore writing “in miniature.”
About Joanne B. Mulcahy
Joanne B. Mulcahy spent 30 years teaching creative nonfiction at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, where she also created and directed the Writing Culture Summer Institute. She has taught in Alaskan and Oregonian prisons and in libraries and other community settings. Mulcahy’s cross-cultural experience includes work with women’s groups in Northern Ireland and teaching at the Universidad Latina de América in Morelia, Mexico. Her essays and interviews appear in Creative Nonfiction, Hyperallergic, Nexos, The Pennsylvania Gazette, The Women’s Review of Books, and The Writer’s Chronicle. Anthologies featuring her work include The Stories that Shape Us: Contemporary Women Write About the West and These United States.
She has received nine artists residencies, the New Letters essay prize, and grants from the British Council, the Barbara Deming Fund for Women, Fulbright-García Robles, Oregon’s Literary Arts, and the Oregon and Alaska Humanities councils. Her books include Birth and Rebirth on an Alaskan Island, Remedios: The Healing Life of Eva Castellanoz, and Writing Abroad: A Guide for Travelers (with Peter Chilson), which won the Peace Corps Worldwide 2017 Best Travel Book Award. Marion Greenwood: Portrait and Self-Portrait—A Biography is forthcoming in 2025.
