Welcome!

This OER is a living resource, collected by the University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program.

These syllabi and materials show the current expertise and interests of the writers and teachers from our extended family of alums and faculty: readings, workshop and assignment styles, exercises, and pedagogical love languages. Many of the materials housed in edition one of this collection are from TAs of the program.

Our ecosystem includes the tastes and influences of these writers, as well as faculty and peers at the program—and the vital energy of recent cohorts of new teachers seeking to disrupt and expand, to nourish and move meaningfully beyond a limiting canon and outdated approaches. Exploring beyond traditionally hierarchical workshop styles, leaving behind a historically white, cis-male canon, and allowing for classes that respond to the current moment.

We want students and teachers to have a resource to locate course materials that accurately represent the genre and include works by BIPOC, non-American, disabled, LGBTQIA+, gender nonconforming, and other marginalized writers.

Looking forward, we hope to have a large quantity of former instructors’ teaching materials: detailed exercises, sample syllabi, handouts, reading lists, links to online craft resources. This home will sort, categorize, and make these materials available and searchable by categories of concern like the year they were created, the sub-genre of course topic, the name of the instructor, names of authors, types of exercises, categories of reading lists, etc. so instructors can seek specific resources to meet their course needs.

Co-author of this book, 30-year professor and 20-year instructor of the NWP’s Teaching Nonfiction Writing course, Dr. Bonnie Sunstein shares: “If it’s something that you’ve written, you’re supposed to be terrified of someone else taking it—to call plagiarism—but from the time I first started teaching, the idea that teachers share stuff—material—was just a given.”

Sharing, a hallmark of teaching, was a hallmark of Bonnie’s course. Collective problem-solving among cohorts of teachers in training—, gathering throughout the semester to troubleshoot classrooms, assignments and the genre of Nonfiction. A signature of Bonnie’s Teaching Nonfiction Course was the Sunday afternoon syllabus sharing session on the day before classes started. Everyone in the class would come to her house to finish their tinkering, to workshop, to donate their combined expertise, as friends and colleagues, to each other’s practice in those nervous hours before the first day.

To look back, the Nonfiction Program was the first in the country 50 years ago. Its graduates go on to hold a large number of jobs teaching Nonfiction writing and related courses. The program’s required course “Teaching Nonfiction Writing” is one of the only pedagogical courses exclusive to Nonfiction Writing in the country.

Understanding this, the archive seeks to make institutional knowledge accessible not only to graduate students in our program, but to creative writing classrooms beyond: to NWP alumni, to creative writing teachers in high school classrooms, in universities abroad, low-residency writing initiatives, and other instructors seeking guidance as they fashion a course in nonfiction, craft a unit for a larger writing program, or oversee individual writers in tutorial as they work toward publishable essays.

Despite differences in backgrounds, many creative writing teachers are adjuncts so they don’t have institutional support beyond the course they are teaching, and no community of colleagues. They are often independent writers. Resources of this particular kind are startlingly difficult to find in the genre, and we want to open the community knowledge cultivated here over the past 50 years (as the genre has developed, and continues to change) as a resource beyond this program.

Teaching is a long, invisible collaboration. This resource will function in two dynamic ways: to illustrate how the NWP’s courses have been taught in decades past, and to sustain a common space to consciously adapt curriculum in years to come. We hope to save teachers time in curriculum planning, streamline course building, and enable our TAs to share resources as they craft their undergraduate curricula in Nonfiction. This archive offers to anyone who wants it, an analysis of our history. But also of the history of how we define nonfiction and how the genre has developed.

With warm wishes for your teaching,

Bonnie Sunstein

Jessie Kraemer