Due to public health concerns surrounding COVID-19, this workshop has been postponed. If you are still interested in the course, please email us at iowawritershouse@gmail.com for more information.
ABOUT THE WORKSHOP
So you’ve stumbled upon a true story, one you’re itching to write. Maybe it’s a scientific breakthrough you read about in the papers. Maybe it’s a complex immigration saga you overheard at the diner. Maybe it’s your own sister’s rise to culinary stardom or your brother’s quiet battle with cancer. Whatever the case, the best true stories rely on true characters. “For a story to come alive,” writes author Philip Gerard in Creative Nonfiction: Researching and Crafting Stories of Real Life, “the people in it must come alive. They must be more than names on a page.”
The key word here is “characters.” Too often we think of the word in regard to fiction alone, but the difference between a character and a subject is only how we write about them: how fully we narrative their lives, how vividly we detail their personalities, how closely we map their psychic makeups. Consider Christopher McCandless, the protagonist in Jon Krakauer’s classic Into The Wild. Or Boobie Miles, the star of Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights. Are these not characters, too?
“The special requirement of nonfiction” Gerard continues, “is that we must learn what is inside them through what we can reasonably learn from the outside.”
In this short weekend course, we’ll deconstruct several prime examples of character in nonfiction before taking a swing or two ourselves. In addition to discussing the art of the interview, students will develop character profiles and workshop the results with their peers. Depending on class size, students will also have the opportunity to meet one-on-one with the instructor.
ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR
Carson Vaughan is a freelance journalist and author from central Nebraska with an emphasis on the Great Plains. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker (online), The Atlantic, Travel + Leisure, The Guardian, The Paris Review Daily, Outside, Pacific Standard, VICE, In These Times, Runner’s World, and more. Most recently, he was awarded the 2018 John M. Collier Award for Forest History Journalism from the Forest History Society for his Weather Channel feature, “Uprooting FDR’s ‘Great Wall of Trees.’” He was also the recipient of a 2018 Individual Artist Fellowship from the Nebraska Arts Council.
Vaughan’s first book, Zoo Nebraska: The Dismantling of an American Dream, was published via Little A in April 2019. According to the Los Angeles Review of books, “The bizarre subject material, fodder for schlock in the hands of a lesser writer, is rendered in blisteringly researched, ardently literary prose. As the careful plotting propels readers through the two-decade collapse of one man’s dream, it’s easy to forget that this is nonfiction, and difficult to comprehend the feat of reportage that it required.”
Vaughan currently lives in Chicago with his wife Mel and his golden doodle, Costello.
INSTRUCTOR INSPIRATION STATEMENT
As a writer and reporter, I prefer to think of empathy as an asymptote, “a line which approaches nearer and nearer to a given curve,” according to the OED, “but does not meet it within a finite distance.” Empathy is crucial to all good writing, but it’s perpetually a work in progress. As journalists and nonfiction writers, we may never wholly understand or relate to our subjects, but we can—and should—move closer all the time. Sometimes that means asking difficult questions. Sometimes that means asking them twice, or three times, or four. Whatever the case, I agree with Hemingway’s philosophy, despite his faults: “The writer’s job is not to judge, but to seek to understand.”
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