StoryCraft

TAPS 21
2 Units
WAYS-CE
Instructors: Dan Klein and Michelle Darby

StoryCraft is a hands-on, experiential workshop offering participants the opportunity, structure and guidance to craft compelling personal stories to be shared in front of a live audience. The class will focus on several areas of storytelling: Mining (how do you find your stories and extract the richest details?); Crafting (how do you structure the content and shape the language?); and Performing (how do you share your stories with presence, authenticity and connection?).


Documentary Fictions

Documentary Fictions posterAMSTUD 176B
4 units
WAYS-CE
Instructor: Jonah Willihnganz

More and more of the best American fiction, plays, and even comics are being created out of documentary practices such as in-depth interviewing, oral histories, and reporting. Novels like Dave Eggers’s What is the What, plays like Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight Los Angeles, and narrative journalism like Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, all act as both witnesses and translators of people’s direct experience and push art into social activism in new ways. In this course students will examine the research methods, artistic craft, and ethics of these rich, genre-bending works and then create documentary fictions of their own. Readings will include works by Katherine Boo, G. B. Tran, and Charles Johnson, and author visits will include a master class with Rebecca Skloot. No prior creative writing or journalism experience required.


Sound Stories

Rainbow audio wave with Sound Stories written above

ORALCOMM 129, 4 units
Instructor: Jake Warga

This special seminar is designed for students interested in creating documentary stories for radio, podcast, and other sound media. Students will learn both the core principles of telling strong stories, whatever the medium, and the strategies of telling entertaining, persuasive stories for the ear. Just like film or the novel, sonic stories offer a fascinating mix of constraints and opportunities, and you’ll learn how to invite listeners into an experience or insight that combines theories, facts and feelings into a single space of empathy. This is a hybrid class – equal parts classic seminar and creative workshop – and students will create stories from start to finish and learn skills from pitching and interviewing to writing, editing, and digital production. Students will work in small groups to document places through the stories that inhabit them – from police departments and local shelters to and community centers. Recommended for students interested in creative nonfiction, documentary, film, and even sound art. No prior experience necessary. (Cardinal Course certified by the Haas Center)