We’re published, screened, exhibited and experienced. We go out of print, are lost, recuperated, reissued, reconsidered. What becomes of Black women’s radical writing in film, performance, on the page, once one sense of being alive, through body and work, is left behind? How do new forms of being take shape, at whose hand, through what spirit? As inheritors of maternal lifeways, working within and stewarding forth various lineages of Black feminist creative practice, we are inspired by writer and scholar L.H. Stallings’ concept of afterlife-writing, which “asks that we consider history and archive as unable to hold and preserve evidence of Black women’s living, as well as their search for new life.” Erica N. Cardwell, Gabrielle Civil, LaMonda H. Stallings, and Tisa Bryant hold, preserve and explore Black women’s living through interventions in memoir, curation, performance, cinema and criticism, searching for new forms of life.

For women, rage has been pathologized and demonized. On the page, women’s rage is often seen as a failure of intellect or as inferior, unserious craft. This panel will reclaim rage for women as not just an emotion, but as a pointed, useful craft tool. We will discuss how to set free our rage on the page–from the broad thematic level down to diction and syntax choices, and why it’s important to do so. Panelists will converse about their own work and others’ to highlight theories and themes (from trauma to shame to pettiness), and how to add rage to our writer toolboxes. We already have our justified rage–now let’s use it.

Our panelists have published essays or books on guns and U.S. gun culture explored through the lenses of research, memory, and contemplation. We’ll discuss what drew us to write about guns and informed our approaches, and how the politicization of guns challenges writers embracing literary nonfiction’s tradition of contemplation and inquiry.

We’ll invite audience members to join us in discussing these and related matters:

• What impact can literary nonfiction have on sloganeering, lying, and “thoughts-and- prayers” responses to gun violence?

• With more men than women (and Republicans than Democrats) owning guns, does the writer’s gender matter?

• If a gun appears in the beginning of an essay, must it--or the essayist--go off by the end?

• Can this exploratory, multi-faceted approach to writing about guns apply to other social issues?

• What forms or narrative strategies distinguish politically-informed essays from editorials?

• What is the intersection of craft and social justice?

Demystify and discover what happens after you submit to River Teeth and Fourth Genre, two of the best and longest-running nonfiction journals in the country. Graduate students tell all, sharing their experiences with reading processes, copyediting, proofing, promotion and social media, organizing readers, working with consulting editors, sending rejections, web management, and more. Additionally, panelists will discuss the unique structures of each journal, challenges they have experienced, their insights on the future of nonfiction journals, and suggestions on creating richer communities within and across literary magazines.

As educators, we know that including creative nonfiction writing in higher education classes is an incredibly effective teaching tool, promoting complex understandings of craft, content, and critique. Yet, we also have felt the dread of that familiar declaration: I’m not creative. I’m just taking this class for the credit.

Often, these students have an untapped wells of creativity, hidden under layers of self doubt, or past discouragement. What tools can we give these students to begin chipping away at that doubt? What foundations can we lay to help them take that first step towards creativity?

In this session, panelists will explore multimodal nonfiction and the ways it can be deployed in the classroom –from Composition to Digital Media–to engage with students at the intersection of education and expression.

Flash creative nonfiction defies the conformity that the colonial tradition of prose demands. The brevity, accessibility, and fluidity of lyric flash are qualities that both charm readers and challenge Euro-patriarchal forms, language, and content. Lyric flash nonfiction reinvents storytelling and narrative structures in part by drawing from poetic approaches to break Western literary genre boundaries. This panel will incorporate diverse perspectives and possibilities to interrogate the interplay between poetry and short-form nonfiction. The modes and media of lyric flash creative nonfiction, including textual, visual, and oral elements, create vibrant interstitial writing and reading spaces where BIPOC, Queer, Neurodivergent, Disabled, and other selves can break the line into lyric expression.

Writing about those who have come before, whether they are distant ancestors, close friends, or historical figures, can be daunting, especially when research uncovers secrets and brings to light that which some prefer to hide. In digging up histories personal and public, writers of nonfiction interrogate our own motives and stories, sometimes raising more questions than answers. Is it an act of social justice to refashion a narrative from our own subject position when it veers from the dominant narrative? How do writers of various “flyover” regions, including the Midwest, express their places and selves to a wider audience? And what, exactly, do we owe the dead and their stories (reverence? Revulsion? Monty Python-esque humor?) Using insights from journalism, essay and memoir writing, and hybrid forms, this panel will offer an exploration of successful research methods, and how the writers used what they found to write their way toward answers.

If Brian Doyle can move from hummingbirds to a father making pancakes on the page, what can happen when this sort of openness to possibility moves often the page? This conversation will explore the powerful relationships not only between the writing of original creative nonfiction, but also its craft in the space between us as writers, readers, critics, and teachers in literary culture and community. Join those for whom the collaborative discussions off the page are as important as the craft-informed lyric leaping on the page, leading to new innovations in how we theorize, create, and teach nonfiction and thereby encouraging the genre to move in multiple directions at once. Panelists will share how ongoing discussions of craft and lyric strategies shape their individual writing, their interactions with other writers and readers, and the broader field of creative nonfiction.

Join us for a hands-on introduction to experimental forms in creative nonfiction. You’ll be invited to rethink your narrative structures through tactile, visual, and auditory exercises. You’ll collaborate and exchange work not to critique, but to amplify, support, and witness each other. Experiments in memory will also challenge our notions of narrative authority and reliability. If you find yourself confined by traditional forms and workshop styles, this lab is for you. Bring three copies of a work in progress to experiment with in this lab. We’ll provide additional tools to help you see your work and its possibilities through a new lens. Memories, dreams, and imagination come into play to bring your works to life and uncover another layer of truth.

Wherever we come from, whatever the material content of our work, what most queer essayists will have in common is a future formed by the collision of our queer making and the brute force of the current reactionary political climate. Essays and hybrid essay forms, with their propensity to question, pursue meaning, and embrace the process of change, are uniquely suited to the architecture and content of ever-changing queer identities, particularly those that embrace theorist José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of queerness as a state of perpetual becoming. While queer nonfiction has long provided a safe space for narratives of trauma, the essay also offers us a realm within which to question, evolve, and invent the futures of body, home, and genre. Our panelists will speak to using essay and essay/hybrid forms as radical tools to envision ecological futures, ungovernable bodies, rejected oppressions, re-conceptualized citizenship, and dreams of a queer-positive city.

As the United States continues to control and extinguish diverse bodies, how do we continue to dialogue, archive, and write alongside our lived, embodied experiences? How do we revise and re-envision ourselves towards liberation? This panel of LGBTQIA+, BIPOC, and disabled writers will explore ways into, out of, and alongside essaying the body.

The “video essay” is a murky genre. Easy to publish, hard to make, it is a form often referenced on lists of possible nonfictions but also one rarely considered in depth. Many readers have seen the five-minute version, but have they seen a place-based video essay halt visitors in front of a gallery wall, or witnessed a neo-benshi essay performance live? What can today’s video essays teach us about the role of collaboration, the attentions of contemporary readers, and the literary potential of the smaller screen? 15 years after Blackbird first began publishing video essays, this event will feature five writers performing video work to feature the opportunities of video-plus-essay at the full extension of the genre’s range.

This panel will examine essays that explore the intersections between form and family. Instead of that flawed paper-doll image of the family of four with two kids, these panelists will explore better shapes for representing family stories, ones that can encompass the nuances and complexities of our particular experiences. Through discussion of hermit crab essays, a photo-less photo essay, to visually dynamic digital essays, these panelists will help to redefine and reshape ways that family narratives can be told.

The hermit crab essay comes off about as avant-garde these days as a deconstructed bowl of oatmeal. Except when it doesn’t. We’ve all felt the catharsis of a cleverly commandeered form, the electric shock that can arc between image and text, the punch of a properly exploded narrative. Join our interactive panel of hermit crabbers, video game essayists, graphic memoirists, flash enthusiasts and lyric nonfictioneers as we discuss, perform, play, examine, and explore together the literary possibilities that lie beyond the edge of mere experimentation.

Poetic forms like zuihitsu and haibun have long embraced the paragraph as part of form, and poets have come around to embracing the prose forms in other ways too. But how are nonfiction writers adapting the structures of poetic forms such as the sonnet and ghazal for nonfiction? In this panel we will talk about what happens when you transform a poetic structure into prose. What are the benefits of utilizing poetic forms for the essay? What are the limitations of doing so? Five poets who are also nonfiction writers will share examples of poetic forms and structures within nonfiction and discuss the tips, tricks, challenges, and joys of blending genres.

Memoirs-in-essays are one of the hottest categories of nonfiction today. But structuring a book-length collection of linked personal essays presents unique opportunities and challenges. What is it, exactly, that makes this kind of essay collection work? Which techniques best support meaningful breaks from traditional narrative structures and linear chronology? Does form follow content or does content dictate form? This panel brings together a diverse group of acclaimed writers to discuss how collections of linked essays find coherence through accretion, by accident, and in associative leaps.

Substack has rapidly become a major platform for writers—nonfiction writers in particular—offering the promise of direct connection to readers, financial independence, and the tools to build a personal brand. Yet, beneath these opportunities lie tension. Despite it being a tech company claiming neutrality, Substack also operates like a publisher, curating content through algorithms and monetizing what rises to the top. Writers face ethical dilemmas about visibility, control, and engagement, especially when the platform creates a “walled garden” and tries to keep users and readers within its own ecosystem. This panel will explore the ambivalence writers feel about relying on a tech platform that simultaneously liberates and constrains their work, raising questions about the future of nonfiction writing in a world often dominated by digital gatekeepers.

The nonfiction writer as interdisciplinarian is an identity that makes good sense: What we do, after all, as true-storytellers, memoirists, and essayists, is look at what we know, what we think, what we remember, and how we feel—that is, all of our lived experience—through a multiplicity of lenses. Tools of the trade.

To have expertise in another art form not only enriches, deepens, and sharpens our work as writers (and vice versa!) but offers another way in. We want to explore exactly how this happens, why it does, show what that looks like, and look closely at how the different art forms (photography, drawing, music, dance) the members of this panel practice devotedly inform and enlarge their writing practice. (We also have a secret agenda: to encourage the serious pursuit of other forms of art-making as a lifelong companion piece to the work of writing.)

This panel explores the reverberations of imperial and national politics--from revolutions to colonizations, religious persecution to immigration--in and through the family. Expanding the intergenerational to encompass epigenetic inheritances and legacies of exploitation and dispossession, our panelists will share how nonfiction writers experiment with form and speculation to write into spaces of loss and amnesia, bringing the politics of memory, biology, body, and belonging onto the page even when all the historical facts are unknown. Readings and conversation will cover how histories of war and displacement, also religion, race, gender, and indigeneity, intersect. Whether the US’s longest war ever in Afghanistan from 2001-2021, the US’s involvement in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, or the US’s foundation upon the colonization of First Nations, war is the origin-event, the invisible everyday, the phantasmic future for lives within US borders and across the entire globe.

“It's all in my head,” Chappell Roan sings, “but I want nonfiction.” How do writers who rely on both invention and real life for material decide which genre is best suited for which project? Are the lines between them hard and fast or are they sometimes blurred? This panel of writers of both fiction and nonfiction will discuss writing in both genres—how they decide which form is right for the story they’re writing, how their approaches to the two genres both overlap and differ, and how their work in one genre impacts their work in the other—both in terms of craft and publishing.

Publishing a first memoir can feel like a miracle, a validation not only of the writing but the life experiences being chronicled. But can such a miracle strike twice? And, if first memoirs tend to contain our most urgent material, the material that we have waited our whole lives to share, what is left of ourselves for a follow-up? In this panel, memoirists with well-received first memoirs discuss the unique constraints and freedoms inherent to writing about themselves again.

This panel highlights how cultivating a regular practice of recording observations, noticing patterns in plants, birds, daylight, and weather can enrich nonfiction writing. Panelists will discuss how the act of taking note can rewire our minds and bodies to be more attentive to the world and our place in it. We will also explore how this practice can be used to confront the climate crisis, species loss, forced migrations of humans and more-than-humans, and other realities of the Anthropocene on the page. We will cycle through four revolutions, one for each season. Spring: how we came to the practice. Summer: how we work - we’ll share scans from our journals. Fall: how we’ve integrated the observations into our creative work; we’ll read short passages. Winter: how we’re inspired; we’ll share wisdom from practitioners we admire. We will end with Q&A.

How can we think about revisiting older work that we may have changed our minds about, or grown out of, or for personal or intellectual or ethical reasons regret? How can we address this work thoughtfully and creatively – beyond writing a straightforward rebuttal?

This panel will discuss different approaches to not (just) revising but reconsidering past work. Panelists will share brief stories from their own experience – how age and maturity have changed their beliefs, how writing in different genres and forms can influence not just the approach to but the meaning of a work, how technology may or may not aid memory, and how our feelings can hinder or spur this kind of rethinking. We’ll then offer a series of questions, challenges, and strategies (in the Brian Eno sense) for participants to engage with. Our session will end with time for further questions and conversation.

American Jewish writing has long been influenced by Holocaust memorialization. For decades, Jewish trauma has been weaponized to justify the Israeli occupation of Palestine and military attacks on Gaza and to censor dissent. As Jewish nonfiction writers, educators, and organizers whose work closely engages the making and weaponization of images, we invite audiences to re-see, to offer alternatives to militarized responses to genocidal histories while allowing space for horror and grief. How does intertextual literature honor or mourn? What does visual evidence offer politically and where does it fail us? How can we as writers grapple with collective inheritances without contributing to further harm? How can learnings from mourning, memory, and images be brought into movement work and everyday practice in manners that promote justice and collective liberation? Each panelist will read a short selection of their own work and frame its context. Moderator will facilitate conversation between panelists for ten minutes, Q&A with audiences for at least five minutes, and summarize the discussion before we close.

Five essayists consider the possibilities, challenges, and joys of the new shapes of contemporary nonfiction, providing answers to such questions as: “Whatcha gon’ do with all that junk/All that junk inside your trunk?”

Eddie Van Halen. Elvis Presley. Cher. Angela Merkel. Ina Garten. Johnny Carson. Mitch McConnell… and the list goes on. These are among the New York Times Review of Books’ list most-anticipated nonfiction books for fall 2024, a list mostly conflating nonfiction with fame. This represents a longer trend both in the US and Canada of sidelining “researched nonfiction.” In what has been described by Ken Whyte of Sutherland House as a “Nonfiction Crisis,” agents are finding it more difficult to place nonfiction, even the reliable reported memoir. Is it election-year fatigue, or tastes changing, or is this revealing the underlying weaknesses of shareholder-driven publishing? Our panel of writers, publishers, editors, and agents—including noted publishing commentator Jane Friedman—will share observations about how writers are positioning themselves, offer advice, and allow plenty of time for audience question and discussion.

Stephane Mallarmé wrote, "Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book."

Playing it safe has never worked for poets, and this panel will show our different approaches to witnessing, experiencing, and pushing back against various issues from the beginning of our work.

Poets have always brought insurgent ideas to the page, utilizing diaries, chronicles, interviews, collage, intertextuality, memoirs, and essays to dig deep into issues and discard certain artistic limitations.

The panelists will vary in their presentations.

There will be readings, extemporaneous talks, performance, and a multimedia showing of comic book frames and pages. Time will be set aside at the end for Q&A to discuss the process as well as the pieces.

Given the tradition of dramatic monologues, persona as a literary device is often associated with theater and poetry, but nonfiction writers benefit from considering the construct of a voice and point of view to reveal certain truths. When successful, personae grow translucent, illuminating the psyches behind the masks. Thus, their role in nonfiction may be invisible, but we should unhide this technique for widening readers’ access to the worlds within and around us. Like painters who consider brushstrokes to be part of the artwork, these panelists will discuss the artifice of narrative points of view, using the reflective lenses of past selves and other angles. Having reckoned individually in their work with how writing highlights certain figures while casting others into shadow, this panel will consider together the personal, social, artistic, and ethical considerations of representing perspectives.

In the constantly-shifting landscape of the publishing world, writers benefit from sharing success stories and best practices for submitting a proposal and manuscript that betters the chances of acceptance by a publisher. This panel of experienced writers, teachers, and editors aims to discuss the following: What are the publishing paths available to writers of different nonfiction styles and modes? In a crowded marketplace, how can writers make their work stand out? What are editors looking for, and at what stage should writers send out their work? The panelists have experience with publishing essay collections, memoirs, and textbooks with publishers of varying sizes, and will share their routes for successful nonfiction book proposals and manuscript pitches that led to eventual publication. As writers strive to publish their work in changing times, this panel will help identify actionable steps to elevate manuscripts and their writers.

Performance works sometimes comprise a type of literature for which there is no written record. At other times, a scripted text—an essay or memoir, for example—exists in a dialectic with the oral or performative delivery. Established nonfiction performance genres include the one-person show or docu-fantasia. When written out, performance “scores” contain not just text but also traces of action, gesture, music, emotion, tone, and extratextual cues. This panel explores how performance accentuates or disintegrates the epistemic foundations of a nonfiction text. Specifically, panelists will discuss the role of performance in understanding authors’ nonfiction projects when rendered as Black performance theory, clown poetics, multimedia works, installation art, or ecological rock opera.

As digital spaces become increasingly enmeshed with the spaces our bodies occupy, nonfiction writers might consider how to use this interwoven texture as an avenue of meaning-making. Video games are a uniquely interactive form of digital media; if writing nonfiction is, in part, an act of interrogation and interpretation of how our lives are situated in the world, then for those of us who find ourselves immersed in video games, simulated realms become another site to examine our stories.

In this multimodal panel, writers will display and discuss brief screen recordings of their gameplay and read excerpts of their work that incorporates those recorded moments. Together, these writers will consider the relationships between play, avatars, game stories, and more, discussing how games have helped them access larger truths about themselves and the world(s) around them.

Writing may be a solitary act, but what happens when multiple voices are joined together into a single essay or project? How can separate sentences or sections written by individuals combine like a mosaic into a larger more complex whole? In this panel, learn about four different collective writing experiments from around the country, including Essay Daily’s “What Happened” project, Literary Cleveland’s citywide “Documenting Cleveland: May 12, 2020” pandemic project, Cincinnati Poet Laureate Yalie Saweda Kamara’s polyvocal writing projects, and the Wick Poetry Center’s innovative “Traveling Stanzas” programs. We will explore ideas of literary collage, collective authorship, de-centered writing, social poetics, and polyvocality as well as the practical joys and challenges of creating a single work out of writing by many people. Additionally, everyone who attends will contribute to a collective essay created live during the session.

In this panel/workshop, we will begin by showcasing an array of “queering the archive” experiments and initiatives from previous solo and collaborative endeavors that challenge the notion that the archive is ever neutral.

Next, we will invite participants to engage creative and critically with selected samples of archival objects from the Gerber Hart Collection, an LGBTQI+ Archive housed in Chicago. Chosen to reflect our panel’s interest in diaries, notebooks, scrapbooks and journals as invitations to creative nonfiction, these items will carry their own cultural narratives, while also opening to mythical meanings and counter readings.

Using an ethos of “queer matchmaking” which “constitutes arranged or incited archival encounters” (Morris and Rawson, 2013), participants will be invited to engage in acts of “radical imagination” (Hartman 2018) and “mystic documentary telepathy” (Howe 2014) towards new possibilities and shapes for pleasuring the text.

This is not a panel at all but rather a conversation around a table…and we have the tea (Carlson 2024). We want to problematise and philosophise the ways in which Indigenous women and Women of Colour’s racial trauma is relegated to a form of performativity. Cambridge Dictionary (CUPA 2024) defines rant as “to speak, write or shout in a loud, uncontrolled, or angry way”. But our anger is not uncontrolled. Our rage is a form of nonfiction, and our ranting and raging a methodology. It is something that we do. It is a way to enable the formation and bonding of community, which challenges institutional colonialist and racist imperialism. As we will show, in its enactment, there is also calmness, and even joy. As Sara Ahmed (2024) writes, “For many of us, activism, fighting for a different world, happens where we already are, at the kitchen table, sustaining and being sustained by others.” Why don’t you pull up a chair?

References:

Bronwyn Carlson, “Mudmir epistemology, ‘gossip’ and decolonizing communication: Come sit at our table!,” plenary given at IAMCR 2024 in Christchurch, July 1, 2024.

Cambridge University Press and Assessment (CUPA), “Rant,” Cambridge University Press and Assessment, retrieved November 14, 2024 from https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/rant

Sara Ahmed, “Setting the Table, Some Reflections on Why Tables Matter,” lecture given in Brussels, May 22, 2024.

Narrative medicine and associated stories of illness, wellness, and recovery can provide a framework for teaching empathy and unlock a shared lived experience with readers. But publishing and disseminating these stories can also come at a significant cost to the authors themselves. Through texts by authors including Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, Rana Awdish, Darius Stewart, and others, and exploration of their own writing and experience, the writer-teacher panelists will share the benefits of writing and reading medical narratives, including increased self-awareness and empathy, community building, visibility and representation, as well as pitfalls, including reader assumptions made from a position of privilege, ignorance, or confusion; unplanned emotional labor (particularly related to intimacy and access); and other challenges in engaging with sensitive material and bodily taboos.

Research can help us bridge the gap between fact and truth, seal up interstices between unreliable memories, align conflicting versions of a resonant event, and fact-check the materiality of our longing or nostalgia. But what if we were to consider research as an avenue for telling what Saidya Hartman describes as “impossible” histories: erased pasts, stories by nature unknowable because they reside within systems of oppression around gender, race, sexuality, colonial exploitation? Perhaps the archive is better framed as the site where questions are formed but not answered, where we encounter what’s missing and cannot be found. By examining what the documents hint at but never confirm, might we re-think what we hope to discover through research, and in the process approach deeper truths? Our panel considers writing from photos, documents, and archives; writing from not knowing; writing from observation; and research as an act of discovery.

How does the crisis of climate breakdown compel the genre of nature writing to adapt? In this panel, award-winning environmental authors dive into the evolving genre, tracing its lineages from Thoreau to Rachel Carson to today's urgent turn. The panel will also discuss the need for the genre to encompass more diverse perspectives—from centering Indigenous knowledge to encouraging more writers of color to enter the writing field in advocacy of our shared ecologies.

When is the revelation of self expected and foregrounded in creative nonfiction? And what do writers reveal about their underlying attitudes about themselves and the self in their writing? How do creative nonfiction writers consciously deploy certain techniques and forms for the purposes of revealing or concealing the writerly self? Or, when does the self erupt unconsciously within a text – whether via signature style, repeating themes/motifs, evasions or traces of research – in ways that the writer didn’t necessarily intend? What relationship do we as writers have to the ways our selves seep into and out of our work?

This panel features writers working across various forms of nonfiction writing, who will discuss methods and modes of writing of/from the self for nonfiction purposes; the panellists will explore the opportunities for representation, appearances and/or eruptions of self when life writing intersects with other forms including poetry, criticism and AI.

This panel invites writers to discuss their experiences with mysticism, spiritualism, and the occult across cultural boundaries. Panelists will share how they incorporate elements of their respective traditions to create nonfiction works that blur the line between seen and unseen worlds. The discussion will consider how spiritual practices and beliefs, even when vastly different, can foster empathy, bridge cultural divides, and enrich the nonfiction narrative. Attendees will gain insight into the universal elements of mysticism and the unique ways different cultures approach the divine. This session highlights nonfiction as a tool for exploring hidden spiritual dimensions and creating dialogue across cultural lines.

What are the two things you often need the most to get through a long day of conferencing? What are two things that fuel and sustain your writing practice? What two things can provide a surprisingly expansive and engaging subject for creative work? That’s right. Snacks and naps. This panel will feature readings about (on some level) snacks and/or naps and will then be followed by, you guessed it, snacks and naps.

Moving past the tired debate on the role of truth in nonfiction, four writers representing different backgrounds and subjects describe their speculative work as opening radical portals on the page that offer both critique and hope. Speculative moves in nonfiction erect spaces that become sites for social transformation. The decision to speculate is both political and aesthetic, often pointing to both failings and futures. These writers suggest how they use the speculative as a tool for change.

Integrating research and deploying speculative techniques might seem like disparate or even antithetical modes of nonfiction writing. However, field work, interviews, and deep dives into human and natural history can complement and even inspire the imaginings, fantasies, and extended metaphors that characterize speculative nonfiction. These five panelists—all multi-genre writers in nonfiction and fiction—will discuss how they pair research and speculative elements to enhance storytelling, form, and meaning in their essays and memoirs.

Every day, perhaps even every minute, we imagine. We imagine the future, we guess what other people are thinking, we create inner scenarios in which we perform as actors, and sometimes we revise the dialogue of conversations we’ve had in order to feel better about ourselves. We dare to imagine the interior lives of others, in the hope of better understanding them. Yes, these are imaginary states, but they are a profound invisible foundation of how we go about our day, doing “actual” things. Imagining has consequences. It’s the Dark Matter of our social universe, the fuel behind our nonfictional lives. How best to convey this pervasive, private condition within the traditions of creative nonfiction? Our five panelists will discuss strategies—in their own work and that of others—for making visible the inventive processes so central to nonfiction literature.

Faced with the devastating effects of climate change, the legacies of colonialism, and the rise of political instability around the globe, what can nonfiction writers do to stave off the destruction of the natural world? Join these panelists in a pop-up town square as they share their strategies, struggles, wins, and losses atop soapboxes. Through their legal and science expertise, community-building efforts, and published work, they have fought for better regulation of deep injection wells in Appalachia; helped Native American communities protect sacred sites from mines, pipelines, and clearcuts; saved wild horses from slaughter pipelines and drawn prominent figures to the cause; traveled with a NASA suborbital campaign to report on ice mass loss around Greenland’s coastline, and called out the impact of science suppression at the federal level in the U.S. They have been on the frontlines, defending the natural world and inspiring others to join the fight.

What if neuroscience could teach writers something new about nonfiction? In this panel, five nonfiction writers will talk about how their own forays into brain science have changed their approach to writing and the reader. With an eye towards helping nonfiction writers make more ethical and informed choices, panelists will detail how the brain responds differently to different subgenres, craft moves, and even subjects. This panel will also discuss neurodivergence and its important role in nonfiction.

The New Southern Gothic in Nonfiction will be a multimodal panel that will use text, sound, and image in order to convey the importance of atmosphere in bringing the Southern Gothic Tradition into the New South. Different ways that the gothic might be interpreted, its effects on conveying mood in narrative, and how this might look and feel on – and off— the page will be shared, discussed, and brought to life. Flannery O’Connor writes in “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction, “[I]f a writer believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious, if he looks upon beings existing in a created order to whose laws we freely respond, then what he sees on the surface will be of interest to him only as he can go through it and experience the mystery itself.” This panel will discuss how a 2024 new southern gothic tradition can complicate, bring experience to life and capture those glimpses in life the nature of which is essentially mystery, essentially grotesque – and to what ends.

Russian novelist and short story writer Aleksander Solzhenitsyn once said, “A great writer is like a second government in his country. That’s why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.” In these fraught times, three writers consider the ways in which their personal stories can work as a call to arms, an interrogation of the health of the body politic highlighting the ways in which the personal is almost always political. In this panel three writers will consider the ways in which the personal essay can work didactically. These writers will consider how their own stories of America engender readers to be better and to do better. They will contend with how writers can effectively use the personal to explore the injustices of the world and the ways in which the personal essay can act as a tool for political interrogation and change.

Colonialism leaves wounds that linger long after borders are redrawn—scars of intergenerational shame and self-blame etched into marginalized communities. French Afro-Caribbean philosopher Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, examines the psychological impact of colonization on the psyches of the oppressed. This trauma perpetuates cycles of internalized oppression, leaving systemic inequities hidden in plain sight.

Mekong Review in partnership with NonFictionLab of RMIT University ran a series of collaborative work between Asian and Australian writers in 2024/25. The experience of collaboration across cultures required a relinquishing of traditional notions around the creative process, such as implied notions of creative competition, the emergence of the unexpected, and received ideas around culture or origin. It also gave rise to newer questions: what is identity politics in the 21st Century? Does the published work reflect this subjectivity? Does it have to? Is it relevant? Finding focus in writing towards the third collaborator—the reader—recalibrates older ideas of form over content into something more empowering in the aesthetics of the created text

Who decides what a crime is? How can nonfiction narratives reshape our ideas about crime, law enforcement, and incarceration? Who gets punished, and how, and what light can our work shed on the future of justice? We will also discuss the ekphrastic nature of crime writing – with content warnings, crime scene imagery, diaries, police reports, mediation specialist reports, victim impact statements, and court transcripts will all be included in the presentation. The audience will be asked to explore and explain their own definitions of “criminal” and how they define it in their own writing.

It’s no secret that the voices of women and female-identified people have been historically silenced. In this panel, we will present some favorites among the wealth of essays from the past and the present that are relatively unknown or almost entirely forgotten, and discuss how they are important to us as women and writers, how we teach the essays, and how they're important in the world.

What can poetic devices and techniques add to the writing of a life? How can poetry expand the boundaries of essay, memoir, biography? The writers on this panel will discuss their latest forays into creative nonfiction, specifically addressing their respective uses of poetry to convey and explore nonfiction subject matter. Together they will debate: the rich capabilities of poetry to capture and/or evoke the embodied encounters of research and everyday experience; the relationships and/or tensions between line and sentence as nonfiction vehicle; and the limits of or boundaries between ‘poem’ and ‘prose’, to explore how poetry can diversify the ways we think about what nonfiction is or could be.

What’s up with creative nonfiction? We’re past the memoir boom; “reality hunger” is no longer the stuff of manifestos; and academic programs in creative nonfiction have gone mainstream. Meanwhile, the protean essay continues to evolve and transform. How far have we come? Where are we going from here? On this panel, leading writers and contributors to the second edition of Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction continue the conversation about creative nonfiction’s hybrid nature, innovative structures, and convention-resisting forms.

We love the places where we are from in all their vibrant, complicated, important, and delightful depths—but who are we writing for? This panel of Midwestern writers will discuss the joys and questions about writing place, particularly when it comes to audience. If we happen to write from a deep love of a region and its people, who are imagining as our readers, and what is “writing place” anyway? How might we transcend the tag of “regional” writing–or do we even want to? Panelists will discuss craft and commitment as they intertwine to write a sometimes-disparaged sometimes-ignored region, asking whether there are other solutions besides moving to Brooklyn.

Contemporary nonfiction is illuminated, everywhere, by the influence of docu-poetics; memoirs bloom from xeroxed erasures, essays take the shape of field recordings, personal narratives are illustrated with family photo collage. How are today’s nonfiction writers wielding visual, documentary strategies to extend the possibilities of a form that often records the writer’s process of investigating, questioning, and representing their own subjectivity? How are these forms of docu-nonfiction featuring the prose writer’s role as witness in both personal and public archives? In this panel, five writers who use visual documentation across nonfiction forms will demonstrate how cameras, scanners, videos and archival materials further the genre’s material impulses while extending its possible registers.

Composed of writers who have been directly or indirectly impacted by the punishment apparatus, including members of Re/Creation and Freedom Agenda, this panel will discuss writing and storytelling issues that are especially relevant for people who’ve experienced incarceration either from within the walls or as loved ones of people with this experience. The panel participants will engage in discussion with each other and the audience on how they’ve used nonfiction writing as a tool for self-discovery, the writing workshop model to achieve collective empowerment, and the writing prompt as an artistic form. Two other focal points will be the challenges of breaking into the publishing industry as impacted writers and building organisms of resistance that utilize modes unique to written linguistic expression.

How do religion and spirituality travel across genres, languages, sexualities, centuries, nations, oceans? How can we use memoir and essays to reclaim ancestral spiritual traditions that we’ve lost or become alienated or excluded from? How can we teach religion writing in classrooms of diverse and sometimes divided students? How can we rewrite the religious stories that a nation tells about itself? How can spiritual language help us understand the planet and imagine its future?

What is the role and responsibility of the artist in times of crisis? Amitav Ghosh called out the “imaginative failure” of literature to address the climate emergency. As writers of nonfiction, what can and should we offer in terms of witness, reflection, truth-telling, motivation, provocation grief-tending and more? What new and old stories do we need to write into an urgent present and toward an unknown future? How do we balance the urgency of the moment with the time for quiet and reflection that art requires?

In this panel, we will draw on insights from our work in journalism, memoir, and essay to grapple with questions that keep us up at night. We approach from different positions of (temporary and shifting) safety and precarity and bring diverse interests in and experiences of race, gender, sports, mental health, land, home, and more to offer a kaleidoscopic exploration.

How can radical experiments in nonfiction open opportunities for “sympoiesis” or making-with more-than-human worlds? In Staying with the Trouble Haraway calls sympoiesis “a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems. It is a word for worlding-with, in company.” In this workshop participants are introduced to writing-with-mould hosted by the Expanded Writers Collective (EWC). Participants will seep into the material substrate--a host text prepared by the EWC and mould processes. In this living online document, we will copy, expand, paste, re-stitch, take morsels of words, and chuck off-cuts back to regenerate and grow the work together. Moulds have no central nervous system but cooperate through expansive and efficient, complex networks of reciprocity. They reproduce through spores that voyage silently through space. What happens when writers cooperate in this way, to turn material over, take some air, give space, sense disintegration and asynchronous presence for yet-to-be-realised regenerative stories?

Textbook? Craft book? Which should you choose? So many considerations go into selecting classroom texts for the nonfiction workshop: are they comprehensive? Inspiring? Affordable? How much supplementation will be required? Five nonfiction writers who are also teachers will share the textbooks and craft books they’ve adopted and discuss the merits and drawbacks of textbooks versus craft books. You’ll leave with book recommendations and a clearer sense of whether a textbook or a craft book will best serve your classroom.

Small, spunky, and once relegated to fringe media, zines are making a comeback as an accessible alternative to modern publishing and internet noise. This interactive panel & discussion will cover how zines bridge personal expression and public discourse, strengthening and building community bonds along the way with their tangible, interactive nature. Bringing together diverse zinester perspectives—writers, educators, community activists, mixed media artists, booksellers—we’ll discuss the power of zines to amplify marginalized voices and create inclusive spaces. Discussing themes of queer and disabled identities, matters of faith & doubt, and the benefits of creating zines for new & experienced writers alike, the panel is guaranteed to inspire you to publish zines and rage against machines.