6-Week Nonfiction Master Class
Date & Time
Wednesdays, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Feb. 22 - Mar. 29
Class Size
8 Students
Wednesdays, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Feb. 22 - Mar. 29
8 Students
This workshop will embrace the range of possibilities in nonfiction, from more magazine-oriented profile-writing to first-person essays and hybrids that combine first-person accounts with reporting. The aim is to produce the best literary nonfiction possible by recognizing and deepening each student’s individual style and voice. (We’ll discuss the best platforms for publication as well, as suited to each person’s work.)
We will read and discuss, in depth, students’ works in progress. Students will also be given a short list of recommended readings as background, in advance of the class’s start date, to give us a common language.
This class is open to serious and engaged writers of nonfiction. To that end, each applicant must submit one clip of previously published material, online or print. (You can also include, in addition, a newer, unpublished piece that may better represent your current work.)
Alex Mar is a writer based in her hometown of New York City. Witches of America, her first book, is a New York Times Notable Book for 2015. Her essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Believer, The New York Times Book Review, Elle, Epic, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House, Atlas Obscura, The Oxford American (where she is a contributing editor), and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015. She is also the director of the feature-length documentary American Mystic, currently streaming on Amazon.
"WITCHES OF AMERICA is a seeker’s memoir told through a quilted veil: a collection of strong, journalistic profiles of several fascinating American practitioners of the occult. Through these witches, priests and necromancers, Alex Mar surveys the history and modern practice of various forms of witchcraft in America, while investigating her own longing ‘to be disturbed, shaken into believing.’"
"Written with a beguiling blend of heart and wit, WITCHES OF AMERICA sustains its thrall with something that runs much deeper than intrigue or pageantry. With the depth and scope of her curiosity, Alex Mar compelled me to follow her driving questions—about meaning, faith, and longing for community and wonder—on a breathless, deepening, and constantly surprising quest."
