How do we craft narrative from the material of another person’s life? We will look at the oral history interview as an act of spontaneous literature — one that contains both the individual story, and the larger history. Students will learn the art of listening, the ethics of interpretation, and approach the writing process as translation of experience. We will borrow from documentary practices across different media (film, visual storytelling, audio storytelling), allowing them to inspire our efforts to find the literary forms that respond to the lived histories that are shared with us.
