Intro to Audio Storytelling
In this introductory production course, we’ll explore the craft of narrative audio across genres, including personal essays, profiles, and flash fiction. Through a series of short creative projects, you’ll learn the foundations of interviewing, field recording, scripting, structure, and sound design, while gaining basic technical competency in professional audio editing software. Class sessions will include a blend of discussions, workshops, and hands-on production, preparing you for more advanced work in the medium.
ENGWRT 0710 / FMST 0780 - Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Spring 2024
The Art of the Interview
In this course, we’ll explore the interview as an art form and an essential tool for nonfiction storytelling. We’ll look closely at the practice of veteran interviewers from across fields—public radio, podcasting, oral history, narrative journalism, etc.—and consider how different techniques yield different materials suited to a range of purposes and stories. We’ll consider questions of ethics and power and care as they relate to challenging interview contexts and subjects. And you’ll get a chance to experiment with a range of different approaches to interviewing practice—and with the many forms of art/media/storytelling that you can make from them.
ENGWRT 1360 - Spring 2022
Listening to Narrative Audio
This class will explore the present-day terrain of narrative audio and podcasting against the backdrop of twentieth-century radio greats. Just as a “Readings” course teaches you to “read like a writer,” in this course, you’ll be challenged to listen like an audio producer, attuning yourself to the craft of audio stories, in order to inform and enrich your own creative work. You will produce focused responses to weekly listening assignments, engage in (and occasionally lead) rigorous discussions on craft, and generate some of your own creative work in response to the stories we encounter.
ENGWRT 1490 / FMST 1780 - Spring 2023, Fall 2023
This studio course offers an introduction to audio storytelling across genres. Students receive hands-on instruction in the foundations of narrative audio production, including vocal delivery, writing for the ear, interviewing, editing, and sound design. We experiment with a range of short audio genres—"Moth"-style live storytelling, audio documentary, and audio fiction—through both individual and collaborative projects. Class sessions include a blend of discussion, workshops, and hands-on production activities with professional audio kits and software.
ENGWRT 1450 - Fall 2016, Spring 2018
Audio Storytelling
This studio course explores the craft of the essay across media. Throughout the semester, students read, listen to, view, and discuss a range of essayistic texts in a range of genres—from journalistic photo essays, to personal audio essays, to lyric video essays—and try out these forms for themselves through a series of audiovisual writing projects. Class sessions include a blend of discussion, workshops, and hands-on production activities using photo/audio/video editing software from Adobe Creative Cloud.
ENGWRT 1451 - Spring 2017, Fall 2018
The Multimedia Essay
In this advanced production course, we will explore the craft of audio documentary in a collaborative, hands-on studio setting. You will dedicate yourself to producing a single sound-rich audio story, which you will pitch, research, record, script, edit, and revise, in conversation with your peers. Class discussions include strategies for generating and pitching stories, planning and conducting interviews, scripting and structuring tape, and working with music and sound design. While our primary texts will be your own stories, we will also engage with a variety of forms of audio documentary through focused listening assignments, which will serve as models and inspiration for your work.
ENGWRT 1780 - Spring 2024
STUDIO IN AUDIO DOCUMENTARY
In this exploratory workshop, we consider how words can be combined with and interpreted through sounds and images to create rich multi-sensory narratives. Through a mix of discussion, workshops, and hands-on production activities, students come away with a set of technical and conceptual tools for translating their writing into a range of audiovisual genres, while considering how their encounters with these media might, in turn, inform and enrich their craft as writers in traditional textual forms.
ENGWRT 2310: Graduate Nonfiction Workshop - Spring 2017
Digital Nonfiction Workshop (MFA)
Narrative Audio Workshop (MFA)
This workshop is dedicated to the craft of narrative audio with a focus on reported genres (documentary, reported essay, etc). Each of you will bring a story idea that you want to work on, and we’ll collaborate as an editorial team to help you plan, shape, and develop it. We’ll listen to stories by established audio producers as models for your work and develop skills in field recording, interviewing, scripting and tracking narration, editing and structuring tape, scoring, and sound design—as well as strategies for pitching stories to radio shows and podcasts.
ENGWRT 2110 - Spring 2019, Fall 2021, Fall 2024
Readings in Contemporary Nonfiction: Narrative Audio (MFA)
A twist on the traditional graduate "readings" course, this "listenings" course explores the present-day landscape of narrative podcasting against the backdrop of 20th-century radio greats. Students are exposed to a variety of audio styles and genres, including narrative journalism, personal essays, non-narrated documentaries, radio features, and serial (non)fiction. Through discussion, critical writing, and creative imitation, we'll use these born-audio stories to reimagine the possibilities of our writing—whether it’s for the ear or for the page.
ENGWRT 2390 - Fall 2017, Spring 2020, Fall 2022