In this class, we’ll focus on writing about, from, around, and through our lives. The term autofiction is a catch-all for this kind of work, and gives us a way of referring to fiction that emerges from or engages with the writer’s own lived life, often straddling the line between fiction and non-fiction, novel and memoir.

Over our four-week course we will examine writing by contemporary writers closely associated with the term of autofiction, such as Karl Ove Knausgaard, Rachel Cusk, Pola Oloixarac, Sheila Heti, and Scott McClanahan, as well as writers not usually associated with the so-called genre, but whose work is often inextricably bound up with their lived lives, such as Thomas Bernhard, Gerald Murnane, W.G. Sebald, Witold Gombrowicz, John Berryman, and others. We’ll workshop our projects and do some generative writing in class, as well.