Writing Autofiction
Mondays: September 29 - October 27
7 - 9 p.m. EST
Led by AUBE REY LESCURE
with guest authors Zinzi Clemmons, Laura van den Berg, Alexander Chee, & Andrew Sean Greer
$400 $340 (until July 20)
Please register with the email to which you’d like to receive class correspondence and readings.
The old adage: Write what you know. But what if what you know is too sticky, too strange, too sacred? What is this form that isn’t autobiography, but carries the realism of lived experience more than most fiction? That’s where autofiction lives. In the murky, rich territory where memory blurs, and fiction steps in not to lie, but to reveal something even truer.
This course is for writers who want to draw from their own lives without being bound to them. Autofiction has offered writers a form that reshapes memory into narrative, blurring the line between lived experience and imagined possibility.
Through a mix of generative exercises, craft discussions, close readings, and conversations with guest authors Alexander Chee, Laura van den Berg, Andrew Sean Greer, and Zinzi Clemmons, we’ll explore the art and ethics of fictionalizing real life. How can setting, point-of-view, and character transform fact into something fuller? What does it mean to invent yourself as a character on the page? And how can writing about what could have happened reveal a deeper emotional truth than what actually did?
Whether you write essays, nonfiction, short stories, or novels, the craft of autofiction can help distill truths that your writing is seeking and flesh out characters and plotlines. We’ll look at published texts and use in-class writing prompts to discover how to write about what you know, how to use the truth to go into imaginary places, and how to effectively construct a fictional world based on the worlds we know.
In this course, you’ll learn:
How autofiction differs from memoir or creative nonfiction, and why it might be your best tool for writing from life.
How to transform lived experience into a rich, layered story that isn’t therapy or confession, but art.
What it means to invent yourself on the page, and the creative freedom that comes with letting truth and fiction dance.
The psychological and narrative risks of turning your life into literature, and how to write your way through them.
Why writing what could have happened can sometimes get you closer to emotional truth than what actually did.
About the Instructors
Aube Rey Lescure
Zinzi Clemmons
Laura van den Berg
Alexander Chee
Andrew Sean Greer
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Aube Rey Lescure is a French-Chinese-American writer. Her debut novel, River East, River West was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2024, the Carol Shields Prize, the Maya Angelou Book Award, and the Stanfords’ Fiction with a Sense of Place Award. It was also longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Granta, Guernica, LitHub, Electric Literature, The Millions, WBUR, The Florida Review Online, Litro, and more. Her essay “At the Bend of the Road” was selected for Best American Essays 2022, and her short fiction was selected as a finalist for BOMB Magazine’s 2021 Fiction Contest She is the Editor-in-Chief of Off Assignment. Two essays she edited are anthologized in Best American Travel Writing 2021, and four others were listed in Best American Essays Notables.
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Zinzi Clemmons is the author of What We Lose, which was named “Debut Novel of the Year” by Vogue, and was a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize, the California Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Leonard Prize. It was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize, and the International Dublin Literary Award. She is a 2017 National Book Award 5 Under 35 Honoree, and she wrote the foreword to a new edition of Jean Toomer’s Cane, published by Penguin Classics in 2019.
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Laura van den Berg is the author of The Third Hotel, finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, one of Time Magazine’s 10 Best Fiction Books of 2020. She is also the author of two story collections, The Isle of Youth and What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, and the novel Find Me. Her stories have appeared in The Paris Review, BOMB, Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, Freeman’s, American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, and One Story, and been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Her criticism and essays have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, O, The Oprah Magazine, BOMB, and Vogue.com. She is currently a Senior Lecturer on Fiction at Harvard University.
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Alexander Chee is the bestselling author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, and the essay collection How To Write An Autobiographical Novel. A contributing editor at The New Republic and an editor at large at VQR, his essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, T Magazine, The Sewanee Review, and the 2016 and 2019 Best American Essays. He was guest-editor for The Best American Essays of 2022. He is a 2021 United States Artists Fellow, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction, and the recipient of a Whiting Award, a NEA Fellowship, an MCCA Fellowship, the Randy Shilts Prize in gay nonfiction, the Paul Engle Prize, the Lambda Editor’s Choice Prize, and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the VCCA, Leidig House, Civitella Ranieri and Amtrak. He is a full professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.
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Andrew Sean Greer is the author of seven works of fiction. He has taught at a number of universities, including Stanford and the Iowa Writers Workshop, been a TODAY show pick, a New York Public Library Cullman Center Fellow, a judge for the National Book Award, and a winner of the California Book Award and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. He is the recipient of a NEA grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His latest novel, Less Is Lost, a follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize winning previous book, Less.
Details
This course will take place on Zoom on Mondays September 29 - October 27 from 7 - 9 p.m. EST. Participants will receive a Zoom link prior to the course as well as a recording of the course afterward.
After you take a course with Off Assignment, you’ll be invited into our private writing community for alumni on Slack. It includes channels for publication opportunities, reading recommendations, meet-ups, and more—not to mention literary companionship that outlasts the course itself.
There is a 10% cancellation fee if you cancel your enrollment more than 1 week before the start of the course. No refund will be given if cancelling within less than a week of the course start date (or after the course has begun).
Please email courses@offassignment.com with any questions.
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Financial Aid
The full price for this course is $400, with early bird pricing at $340 available until July 20.
A limited number of scholarships for this course are available. Please fill out this form by September 6, and we’ll get back to you within a week after the deadline.
Off Assignment’s Masters’ Series courses are unique five-session courses that delve deep into a specific writing topic by harnessing the expertise and craft tactics of a renowned writer in a particular niche, plus four celebrated authors. Participating writers gain a wealth of advanced techniques while benefiting from a cohesive community of disciplined writers.