Fiction vs. Nonfiction: Separating Fact from Fiction (Online)
Taught by Joe Pfister
Joe Pfister is a writer, teacher, and Tecmo Super Bowl enthusiast living in Brooklyn. His fiction has appeared in such publications as PANK, Juked, and New World Writing. He is a graduate of the MFA Writing program at Sarah Lawrence College and currently serves as fiction editor for The Boiler Journal.
This is a live, online class via Zoom and will not be recorded.
How do we tell fact from fiction in a world of sound bites and deep fakes? How do we define the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, memoir and autofiction, the true and mostly true?
In this two-hour class, we will delve into the thorny and endlessly complicated topic by reading and discussing the work of Nam Le, Rick Moody, and Cheryl Strayed. We will examine how they use literary techniques to craft compelling narratives that blur the line between reality and imagination—and challenge the existence of such a line altogether.
