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Why does one Toronto professor leave money in random places throughout the streets of Athens? How does an everyday trip to an Eaton’s department store empower a Vancouver man to come to terms with the death of his best friend? What do the police want to question one young woman about when she wakes up outside a military dormitory on her nineteenth birthday? Why does a nattily dressed stranger on his bicycle suddenly shout out to no one in particular the word “Yes!”?* 

CWRI 273 is a study of writing creative non-fiction. Through a reading of representative works of Canadian creative non-fiction (drawn from Luanne Armstrong and Zoë Landale’s Slice Me Some Truth anthology) and an examination of one of the best known manuals on writing creative non-fiction (Lee Gutkind’s You Can’t Make This Stuff Up), students will learn creative non-fiction techniques such as balancing objective and subjective truth, performing research and immersion, developing compelling scenes, composing effective “hooks,” generating believable dialogue, and more. We will study a diversity of Canadian creative non-fiction writers, including Fiona Timwei Lam, Shelley A. Leedahl, Myrna Kostash, Wayne Grady, Evelyn Lau, Mark Kingwell, and others. As a final project, students will compose their own work of creative non-fiction for publication in a collected class anthology.

*We will answer these and other questions when we study Susan Glickman’s “Found Money,” Stephen Osborne’s “The Man Who Stole Christmas,” Ayelet Tsabari’s “You and What Army,” and Jane Silcott’s “Natty Man”!