ALAN Workshop-Non-fiction Writers
ALAN Workshop-Nonfiction Writers
Elizabeth Partridge, Chris Crowe, Eleanor Ramrath Garner
Elizabeth Partridge-
Book about Dorothea Lange. Partridge's father was Lange's assistant. Has also written about Woody Guthrie. "And the things you fear shall truly come upon you."-Woody Guthrie feared the disease that took his mother, and he eventually developed Huntington's disease himself. Partridge likes to pair Woody Guthrie songs with Dorethea Lange slides. It gives students a real feel for the era.
Eleanor's Story: An American Girl in Hitler's Germany.
Children of war are a human rights tragedy-there is an urgency for children to know their stories and to relate the stories in the news to their lives. World War II was comprised of staggering statistics. Students need help understanding the human horror of war (Battle for Berlin). How does war impact children physically and psychologically. When individual survival stories are told, we begin to understand in ways that a history book alone cannot depict.
In the context of story we make connections about humanity. History comes alive through the telling of our stories. History isn't just cold facts. Memoirs are timeless documents--compelling because history happens to real people. "Made me feel as though I was right there with you."
Memoirs often bring us a different kind of hero or heroine. They know their own values and stick with them. Good memoirs have sympathetic characters, ones we can share with.
Crowe wrote the novel first because he didn't want others to NOT know the Emmett Till story. He did a lot of research because he wanted to make sure that he told the story correctly. He wanted the fiction work to be represented fairly...not necessarily nicely...but fairly.
The problem with historical fiction is that it is fiction. When a story is fiction, the opportunity to say "It wasn't really that bad" is present. He decided to write a non-fiction book about the Emmit Till case because he wanted people to see that it really was that bad.
Writing non-fiction is hard. You have to decide on a narrative style. In this case, Crowe felt that a linear approach did not work. He decided to start with the end, creating a historical context for the 1950s. Brown vs the Board of Education was a 1955 implementation order. Emmit Till went to MS in that kind of a climate.
Crowe wanted to convey to the reader what kind of person Emmit Till was. Crowe felt like we needed a clearer impression of his life--not just his death. Wanted to show him as a regular fourteen year old kid.
Writing non-fiction is hard work. Crowe spent two days combing newspapers for two facts. It's a more personal story. He had to locate the information and acquire photographs, which some times meant digging through the photos himself because people didn't know what they actually had.
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Last Updated April 11, 2011
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