This is a course in composing and talking about creative nonfiction. The assignments are designed to help you learn to function like working writers: you will compose your works and, at the same time, study other writers and familiarize yourselves with specific subgenres and certain elements of nonfiction (truth, voice, memory, composing processes, etc.). In other words, this course focuses on creative nonfiction from two interrelated views: the practitioner’s art and the critic’s perspective. As your course book claims, it encourages you to learn the “craft the way most successful writers have learned theirs: by reading what other writers have written, by picking up tips and ideas from writers about the way they write, and by applying specific strategies culled from the readings to their own writing” (Root and Steinberg xvii).