According to David Foster Wallace, writing prose—whether fiction or nonfiction—is “scary.” That’s because “both feel like they’re executed on tightropes, over abysses.” Fiction’s abyss, he suggests, is the need to invent something out of nothing, while nonfiction’s abyss is selecting details out of “total noise.” Either way, the writer’s challenge is to build some kind of structure, as minimal as a tightrope or complex and sturdy as a bridge, over a chasm of nothingness or across cacophony. That is, to build a world and provide readers a portal into that world.

In this class, we’ll consider a variety of strategies for building worlds in prose. We’ll also explore these and related questions: Must fictional/nonfictional worlds be constructed from tangible physical places and solid objects? Or can a world be constructed from expectations (spoken or unspoken), from the interior landscape of a given character, and from memory? Are there significant and discernible generational and/or cultural differences in how characters perceive their worlds? Do ghosts, magic, and the supernatural have any place in nonfiction and realist fiction or are these prose forms limited to facts (whatever those are)? How much contextualizing is necessary in telling a compelling story in any prose genre? In what ways does the structure of a work of prose have an impact on the world being conveyed?

Reading will range from classic and contemporary books that challenge the boundaries between memoir and fiction (such as Slaughter-House Five by Kurt Vonnegut and The Mobius Book by Catherine Lacey) to memoirs dealing with unconventional and even magical and/or ghost-filled environments (such as Ingrid Rojas Contreras’s The Man Who Could Move Clouds, Lilly Dancyger’s Negative Space, Guinevere Turner’s When the World Didn’t End, Brian Turner’s My Life as a Foreign Country) to novels with elements of the supernatural that have connections to real-world events (Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman, Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet). In addition we may read works that link to historical events such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home ,and/or Natasha Tretheway’s Memorial Drive). Students will propose one additional book (or collection of short prose) to read and present to the class.