Creative Nonfiction Writing SIG

Creative Nonfiction Writing

Shared Interest Group

Meets the second Tuesday of the month at 

9:30 a.m. Eastern

Free and open exclusively to OLLI at BCC members

Do you love to write and want to have a writers’ group to share and critique your work? If you do, consider joining our Creative Nonfiction SIG which meets monthly via Zoom. The format of our meetings will be flexible but will focus on each member sharing their work and receiving mindful critique from other group members.  At each meeting we will pick a leader for the next meeting. That leader will assign a prompt for the next meeting’s writings or writers may choose their own subject.

What is creative nonfiction? It can be essay, memoir, personal narrative, travel writing, food writing, chronicle, fact-based essays, or biography. The commonality is that the writer uses literary techniques to tell the facts allowing the reader to understand the situations described in a fuller, more emotional way. As one writer — Melanie McGrath, whose book Silvertown, an account of her grandmother's life, describes her writing — the known facts of her stories are "the canvas on to which I have embroidered. Some of the facts have slipped through the holes—we no longer know them nor have any means of verifying them—and in these cases I have reimagined scenes or reconstructed events in a way I believe reflects the essence of the scene or the event in the minds and hearts of the people who lived through it. ... To my mind this literary tinkering does not alter the more profound truth of the story.”

For more information, please contact Lana Bennett.