Craft Seminar: Investigative Literature with Anna Clark
Craft Seminar: Investigative Literature with Anna Clark
1 Session: Sunday, September 28
1:00-3:00pm ET
Anna Clark
Anna Clark wrote or edited three books, including The Poisoned City: Flint's Water and the American Tragedy, which won the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism and the Rachel Carson environmental book award. She's been a Fulbright fellow in creative writing and a Knight-Wallace fellow in journalism. She is an investigative reporter at ProPublica and she teaches nonfiction in Alma College's MFA program in creative writing.
Goodness and happiness are difficult to write about in more than a glancing way, as if writers believe they are not real or multidimensional enough to be the stuff of stories. This craft seminar will explore what is possible when we take the light as seriously as the dark.
While this session is prose-centered, we will explore techniques of writers across genre, as well as practitioners of the solutions journalism movement. Moral force, kindness, delight, problem-solving, and play—we will consider strategies for writing about how they are felt and observed, and also how they function in community (that is, in story, or plot). We will practice some of those strategies ourselves, in prompts. We will discuss how to handle perception, conflict, tension, and truth while working in the major key. Along the way, we will watch for how to avoid glibness, superficiality, or falling into the traps of hero narratives. Participants will receive a reading list to accompany them on their own writerly adventures.
Workshop Highlights:
Explore ways of finding the story-rich nuance in goodness and happiness
Recognize the traps of superficiality -- and how to avoid them
Practice techniques for squarely facing experiences of kindness, delight and moral force with the intentionality they deserve
This class has 3 full scholarships available. To apply, please fill out this form by DATE TK.
Anna Clark is a journalist living in Detroit. She is the author of The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy (Metropolitan Books, 2018), which was named one of the year’s best books by the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, Kirkus Reviews, Audible, Amazon, the New York Public Library, and others. It won the Hillman Prize in Book Journalism and the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award. It was also a finalist for the NYPL Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism, and was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. She is a reporter for ProPublica, and her writing has appeared in Elle, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, Next City, and other publications. She was a correspondent for the Columbia Journalism Review for nearly five years.
The Poisoned City is also a Michigan Notable Book, and won a State History Award and the Gross Award for Literature. Clark also edited A Detroit Anthology, another Michigan Notable Book, and she is the author of Michigan Literary Luminaries: From Elmore Leonard to Robert Hayden. She was a founding board member and applications director for Write A House through the time that it rehabilitated three vacant homes in Detroit and gave them away to writers, for free. She has also been a writer-in-residence in Detroit high schools through InsideOut Literary Arts for four years, and a longtime co-leader of an improv theater workshop at a men’s prison in Macomb County, Michigan. She co-curates the Motor Signal Reading Series.
When asked about what drew her to the story of Flint's water crisis, Clark said, "Part of what I think has been so discomfiting about the Flint crisis is that it’s threatened our sense of what the common good is. What is the purpose of a city at all? Why do we have a public sector? What are the limits of running these places like a business? What the Flint crisis has shown is how far we can chip away at that undergirding philosophy of the common good before it starts to cause mortal harm to people."
Clark was a Fulbright Fellow creative writing in Nairobi, Kenya, and she received the Excellence in Environmental Journalism award from the Great Lakes Environmental Law Council. Her writing was a “notable” pick in Best American Sports Writing 2012; a “best commentary” finalist from the Mirror Awards; and a first-place winner from SPJ-Detroit in online investigative reporting. She also serves as a contributing editor at Waxwing Literary Journal, where she especially likes to review literature in translation.
A graduate of the University of Michigan’s Residential College, she also holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, where she focused on fiction. She lives and works in Detroit.