Instructor: Irena Smith
Maximum Enrollment: 8
Class Term: 05/13/2025 - 06/10/2025
Tuition/Fees
SCN Member: $165
Non-Member: $205
Class synopsis
Strong creative nonfiction is built on the vivid, specific details that make your personal experience come alive on the page. Whether you’re writing a memoir, personal essay, or blog post, this five-unit course will help you develop the observational and storytelling skills needed to bring clarity, texture, and emotional depth to your work. Through short readings, guided exercises, and feedback, you’ll learn to ground your voice in the rich reality of people, places, and things—starting with your own life.Class description
In this hands-on course, you’ll learn how to enrich your personal writing by focusing on the vivid details of people, places, and things drawn from your own experience. Through short readings, in-class prompts, and weekly writing assignments, we’ll explore key techniques used in memoir, essays, and blog-style nonfiction. Class sessions will include discussion, guided exercises, and supportive peer feedback. By the end, you’ll have a stronger understanding of the key principles underlying creative nonfiction and new set of tools to bring your authentic voice to the page.
Class goals
Identify the defining features of creative nonfiction genres such as memoir, personal essay, and blog writing., Use vivid, specific detail to bring real people, places, and objects to life on the page., Apply craft techniques like scene, sensory description, and voice to shape compelling personal narratives.
Class communication method
I will deliver instructional materials for the course by email. Students will be asked to submit their work and review other students' work on Google docs.Class outline
People, Places, Things: How to Ground Your Creative Nonfiction in Essential Details” will be a five-unit course running from Tuesday, May 13 through Tuesday, June 10 from 4:30 – 6 pm Central Time. Each class meeting will be 90 minutes long and will entail a combination of lecture, instructional material, discussion, and feedback on student writing.
WEEK 1: What is Creative Nonfiction?
We’ll begin by unpacking the genre: What counts as creative nonfiction, and what makes it “creative”? We’ll explore key forms like memoir, essay, and blog writing, and look at how writers shape true stories with voice, structure, and emotional insight. We’ll also discuss how to find promising material from your own life, and how to balance honesty with craft.
Reading: Excerpt from Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story
Assignment:
Write a short (300–500 word) personal reflection describing a moment from your life that has stuck with you.
WEEK 2: People
In this unit, we’ll focus on how to write about the people who shape your story—family members, friends, strangers, and even yourself. We will discuss techniques for character development, using dialogue, gesture, and memory to create multidimensional portraits. We’ll also talk about ethical considerations when writing about real people.
Discussion of previous week’s writing assignment.
Reading: Sarah Vowell, “Shooting Dad”
Assignment: Write a character sketch (300–500 words) of someone you know well. Focus on gesture, speech, or a specific memory that captures something essential about them. Try including a bit of dialogue or a small scene.
WEEK 3: Places
Every story happens somewhere. This unit dives into the importance of setting, from rooms to cities to landscapes. You’ll practice grounding your narrative in sensory detail and capturing the mood or meaning of a place. We’ll explore how location can reveal character, create atmosphere, and influence the emotional arc of your writing.
Discussion of previous week’s writing assignment.
Reading: Monique Truong, “American Like Me.”
Assignment: Describe a place from your life (home, school, vacation spot, neighborhood, etc.) in 300–500 words. Use sensory detail—what did it smell like? Sound like? How did it make you feel?
WEEK 4: Things
Focus: Using objects to spark memory, meaning, metaphor, and connections.
Discussion of the previous week’s writing assignment.
Reading: Excerpts from Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Sloane Crosley’s Grief Is for People
Assignment: Choose a meaningful object from your life and write a short personal piece (300–500 words) that uses it to tell a larger story. Ask: Why does this thing matter? What memory does it hold?
WEEK 5: Putting It All Together
Focus: Revision, synthesis, and next steps.
Discussion of the previous week’s writing assignment and next steps. We will discuss possibilities for ways students can continue their writing practice, whether through a blog such as Substack, a memoir, or personal essays.
Class time commitment
3 hours per week: 90 minutes of class time, plus reading (assigned reading materials, other students' writing), plus writing assignments.Instructor bio
Irena Smith is the author of the recently released memoir The Golden Ticket: A Life in College Admissions Essays, which received SCN’s Gilda Prize in 2023. She emigrated to the United States from the former Soviet Union with her parents when she was nine years old, and in spite of her fierce insistence that she would never, ever learn to speak English, she went on to receive a PhD in Comparative Literature and taught humanities courses at UCLA and Stanford before transitioning to college admissions and writing. Her work has been published in Art in the Time of Unbearable Crisis, Mutha, and Literary Mama, and she has presented at the Pebble Beach Authors and Ideas Festival and TEDx Palo Alto. She also writes two weekly Substacks— Personal Statements and The Curmudgeon’s Guide to College Admissions. Her second memoir, Troika: Three Generations, Three Days, and a Very American Road Trip, will be published on April 7, 2026 by She Writes Press.