The Australian Association of Writing Programs

Workshop details

This workshop will run in asychrononous mode, online at this site. Participants are asked to complete the readings, and then engage by putting forward questions and ideas, raising issues, and engaging in discussion. The facilitator, Associate Professor Donna Lee Brien, will be online at various points during the week to direct the conversation, answer questions where appropriate, and raise other questions. 

Readings

• 2 essays for Ethics workshop; plus posted draft from Dominique Hecq
• 'Being honest about lying: defining the limits of auto/biographical writing'

Rationale
Creative nonfiction and other forms of more literary nonfiction narratives remain popular in the marketplace of both book sales and ideas. Despite a sustained interest in the ethical issues around writing narratives that are ‘based on true stories’, however, much of the discussion around this matter has fallen into a repetitive and non-productive rut. This begins when a published or screened work, usually a memoir or work of investigative, biographical journalism, is exposed to contain some obvious untruth. Outraged media commentary fans a firestorm of literary scandal, which often increases book sales and then dies out. While these conflagrations could prompt significant investigation around both the complexity of attempting to represent reality in writing as well as what contemporary readers’ demands for authenticity reveals about them, too often discussion stalls at the same stage of backward-looking moral superiority. 
 
Aim 
Through an investigation of literary scandals around works based on true stories, participants will come to a practical understanding of the problems, limits, opportunities and rewards of writing and publishing in this popular area. While developing a more nuanced understanding of these scandals and the problems that underpin them, participants will build a working ‘tool-box’ of examples and models to use when faced with similar ethical and practical dilemmas.
 
Process
This workshop will use a case study approach, focusing on a series of works chosen by workshop participants, to illuminate some of the practical and ethical challenges writers face when they draw on the power of real stories to create cultural product.
Participants will be asked to contribute their own ‘favourite’ non-fiction literary scandals to a workshop pool, which the workshop group will dissect, discuss and debate, building in the process a bibliography of useful scholarship. Participants will produce case studies around selected scandals, in the process developing a working knowledge of how to handle these sometimes complex but always fascinating situations.