Manuscript Critique for Creative Nonfiction

Lindsey Crittenden

Lindsey Crittenden is the author of The Water Will Hold You: A Skeptic Learns to Pray and The View From Below: Stories. Her personal essays and articles – on topics such as prayer, visiting a group of lifers at San Quentin, and bringing a man into your kitchen too soon-- have appeared in The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, Image, Real Simple, Bon Appétit, and Best American Spiritual Writing. Her fiction has been awarded national prizes and fellowships and appeared in literary magazines. Lindsey loves the elasticity of creative nonfiction as a genre and the opportunities it offers to writers developing memoir and other nonfiction narratives. She enjoys working closely with students both online and on-site, and has taught for more than 10 years at UC Berkeley Extension. She lives in San Francisco.

Creative Nonfiction Manuscript Critique

This course is designed to provide students with an opportunity to revise and strengthen an existing work of up to 30,000 words, either memoir or other narrative nonfiction. We’ll start by reviewing your goals and questions as we come up with a plan to address the manuscript’s structure, overall focus and scope, and (if applicable) working with researched material. My particular interests include narrative stance, manipulation of scene and summary, and development of character, so we’ll address those as relevant. We’ll also explore ways to refine the strengths of each writer’s particular style and voice, and we’ll look at traditions and models from this exciting, enormous, and elastic genre.

Questions? Call Taylor Olsen at 206.281.2988, or email her at admin@glenonline.org.