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Event
NYWW's THE ART OF FACT: Writing Literary Journalism, with Robert Anasi
The Art of Fact: Writing Literary Journalism
Literary journalism is nonfiction prose that goes beyond who, what, where and when journalism to give events a substance and presence that transcends traditional reporting. This melding of immersion with the aims and techniques of fiction has roots in antiquity (Xenophon, Thucydides) and includes icons such as Defoe, Dickens and George Orwell. Contemporary practitioners include Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, John McPhee, and Sebastian Junger and examples appears in periodicals such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harpers, as well as sites across the Web. By the end of this course, you will have learned basic techniques for reporting and writing such journalism and completed several drafts of a feature-length article.
The course is entirely ONLINE. It goes live Monday evening, Feb 25, 2019. Six individual modules go live on consecutive Mondays. The course concludes on April 7, 2019.
Instructor
To date, I've published two books, The Gloves: A Boxing Chronicle and The Last Bohemia: Scenes from the Life of Williamsburg, Brooklyn (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). My journalism, interviews, and criticism have appeared in the New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, New York Observer, Los Angeles Times, LA Review of Books, Pacific Standard, Salon, and Publishers Weekly, among many others. My non-fiction story First Stripe was published in The Bittersweet Science (University of Chicago Press). I'm a regular reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement and I've received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Schaeffer Foundation, and the U.C. Irvine Chancellors Club. I recently finished a book on exploring the lost cities of the Andean Amazon and I'm currently researching both a family history and a book-TV project about a legendary police informant in the contemporary underworld of the American West.
In an age of increasing specialization, I remain a generalist, which, while certainly not the most lucrative career decision, has led me to interesting places that include maximum security prisons, the North Shore of Oahu, unexplored tracts of the Andean cloud forests and now the darker corners of law enforcement in South Central, East LA, and Tijuana. As a writer, I try to tell stories about marginalized people and communities that go beyond headlines and stereotypes, no matter if my subjects are boxers, snitches, bohemians, campesinos in the Peruvian highlands or the now-vanished blue-collar Irish Catholic neighborhood in which I was raised. In every case, this work relies on long immersion, both through research and sharing the daily lives of my subjects. I often wish there was a faster path to empathy, understanding and seasoned prose but, as a friend once said, If it was easy, everybody would do it.
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LocationNew York Writers Workshop Online (View)
200 Riverside Blvd., Suite 32E
New York, NY 10069
United States
Categories
| Kid Friendly: No |
| Dog Friendly: No |
| Non-Smoking: Yes! |
| Wheelchair Accessible: Yes! |
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