Welcome to Literary Journalism, an elective course for Master of Journalism students and a limited number of qualified undergraduates. Some stories from our daily lives are often about powerful emotions and big ideas. They do not easily fit into conventional journalistic forms. For a long time, techniques that novelists used to evoke emotions and explore ideas – to create art in written form – also have been employed by journalists to create a nonfictional Art of Reality, another term for Literary Journalism. We will study classic and contemporary works of English-language Literary Journalism to discover how this occurs.

This is a reading-intensive course – pen-in-hand, writing-in-the-margins, standing-in-the-journalist’s shoes reading – with class discussion aimed at identifying why a piece does or does not “work,” and how we can apply those lessons to our own stories. Please do not take this course unless you have a strong appetite for reading, discussing, and attempting to write from a new perspective.