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Wynne Readings To Showcase Experimentation, Immersion Journalism

Nov. 28, 2016
SHSU Media Contact: Jennifer Gauntt

The Sam Houston State University Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing, editing and publishing will highlight the work of 10 graduate students from the fall creative nonfiction workshop during its Wynne Home Readings on Tuesday (Nov. 29) and Wednesday (Nov. 30).

Both presentations will begin at 5 p.m. at the Wynne Home Arts Center on 11^th Street and are free and open to the public.

“For many years now, I’ve had the good fortune to be able to teach my graduate workshops at the Wynne Home,” said Scott Kaukonen, director of the MFA program and associate professor of English at SHSU. “In the past, these have always been fiction workshops and they’ve been held in the spring, but this fall I’ve been teaching the creative nonfiction workshop there, and so it’s been a nice change of pace.”

The students wrote and submitted to the workshop three essays, including a memoir, a work of immersion journalism and a work that experimented in some way with the form.

“The latter assignment has been, in many ways, the most interesting,” Kaukonen said. “When most people think of creative nonfiction, they think of the personal essay, which is how most of us encountered the genre in high school and college (‘tell me what you did on your summer vacation’), and those essays most often take the form of a straightforward telling about an event and then a reflection upon its significance to the narrator.

“But with this latter assignment, we’ve read essays in the form of a lab report, a dictionary, an annotated letter of recommendation, and an assessment survey, as well as an essay that made use of prose, poetry, images, and typography,” Kaukonen said. “It isn’t that the subject matter of those essays is any less compelling or trivial in any way, but that the writers are finding inventive ways to approach familiar themes.”

As for the immersion journalism assignment, students were required to set out into the world and write essays in the “new journalism” tradition of Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, George Plimpton, and Denis Johnson.

“The subject for each student was something in the world, but it was filtered through their own perspectives and experiences,” Kaukonen said. “So one of the students spent time on a local ranch with a ranching family, and another returned to third grade for a day, and another wrote about sex trafficking.”

Participating students include Laura Brackin, Elizabeth Evans, Jeremy Gentry, Mike Hilbig, Julian Kindred, Jim Lopez, Jen Parker, John Roane, Bridget Schabron, and Jenny Seay.

“It’s always a great opportunity to shift from the critical mode of workshop, where we’re looking at an essay’s draft and poking it and kicking it and trying to make it better, to this mode of celebrating—acknowledging the quality of work being done and the progress being made,” Kaukonen said. “No one ever said this was easy, but it’s always a pleasure to see what has been accomplished.”

For more information about the Wynne Home Readings, the MFA program, or other upcoming readings, contact Kaukonen at kaukonen@shsu.edu or 936.294.1407.

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