Writing Co-Lab

The genre of speculative nonfiction provides space to investigate truths through fabulism, folklore, imagined lives, hauntedness, and other slanted lenses. By speculating, we can bend time and space to get at a truth closer to our own subjective experience. In this generative class, we’ll discuss the expansive possibilities and definitions of the genre, learn specific craft techniques, and play with the freedom it offers (particularly for those of us from marginalized communities) to challenge and renegotiate society’s definitions of reality.

We will read excerpts from Carmen Maria Machado, Maxine Hong Kingston, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, August Owens Grimm, Shannon Gibney, Elissa Washuta, and Gwendolyn Paradice, among others. Sessions include brief craft lectures, reading and discussion, and in-class writing time. While students will have the opportunity to read their writing aloud and receive brief constructive feedback, this class does not follow a traditional workshop format. Our focus is in learning, creating, and speculating. 

About the Instructor

Jami Nakamura Lin is the author of the illustrated speculative memoir The Night Parade (Mariner Books/HarperCollins), a Vulture/New York Magazine Top Ten Memoir of 2023. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the New York Times, Sewanee Review, Passages North and other publications. A Periplus mentor, she has received support from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission, Illinois Arts Council, Yaddo, Macdowell, Sustainable Arts Foundation, and We Need Diverse Books. Her work interrogates mental illness, motherhood, mythology, and memory.