Moments of Truth: Writing Creative Nonfiction

Robert Foster Cherry Professor for Great Teaching | Moments of Truth: Writing Creative Nonfiction | Instructor: Dr. Jennifer Cognard-Black

This course had students chose a work from the Martin’s permanent collection and spend an hour with that artwork. Then students wrote a micro essay of no more than 750 words in conversation with their chosen object.

This process is an act of ekphrasis, which comes from a Greco-Roman exercise in which a writer produces a vivid description of a piece of visual art. Ekphrasis is a combination of ek (see) and phrasis (speak), meaning “to call an inanimate object by its name.” Thus, a Word + Image essay tells the story of a painting, drawing, collage, or print—while telling the writer’s story, too. As Jeanette Winterson has said, “I have to work for art if I want art to work on me.”

The writer could not treat the art as illustrative—as if the object can only reflect the essayist. Rather, the artwork must complicate, extend, or even reverse the expectations suggested by the writer’s text: a reciprocity of storytelling and meaning making.

The essay’s structure is formed by the dialogue between words and image: the agreements, arguments, explorations, and thought experiments the writer sees in the artwork—and that the artwork sees in the writer.

Once essays were written, the Martin hosted the collection of works in a short exhibition, accompanied by the essays next to the works. Students also presented their essays in a live streamed event to commemorate the exhibition and the final works by those students.