Mapping Nonfiction

Inspiring a New Sense of The Terrain

The 10^th Annual AEPL Conference will center on exploring creative nonfiction from its center to its margins—and possibly beyond. The boundaries of nonfiction, as malleable as they are uncertain, enclose overlapping landscapes: essays, memoirs, meditations, literary journalism, expressive academic discourse, personal cultural criticism. Sometimes thought to be coterminous with composition, sometimes thought to be circumscribed by creative writing, nonfiction is simultaneously familiar turf and terra incognita, an invigorating return to writing fundamentals and an exciting and evolving genre. Writers and teachers need the opportunity to map this terrain, explore its boundaries, and wander off well-worn paths into new territory. By conference end, we will come away with a better understanding of the motives for using nonfiction, the flexibility of its forms, the role of voice, the relevance of place, the connections to community, the possibilities of moving beyond boundaries of subject or genre or rhetorical situation; we will be inspired by a new sense of the terrain of nonfiction.

Through interactive activities we will place ourselves in nonfiction’s practices, place its forms in the field of writing, and explore place as a theme for nonfiction. At keynote talks we will hear from well-established writers, teachers, and scholars in nonfiction; in interactive workshops we will engage in hands-on approaches that inspire a better understanding and a more comfortable use of nonfiction, both as writers and also as teachers. Some workshops will integrate the natural terrain of our Rocky Mountains conference site into writing activities. In a writing fair session we will share compositions written on site and observe the range of possibilities in the form through our own experiments with mapping nonfiction.

Keynote Speakers & Organizers

Keynote Speakers

Reg Saner is an essayist and poet whose work has been widely published, anthologized, and awarded. He won the 1997 Wallace Stegner Award from the Center for the American and the State of Colorado Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. His books of poetry include Essay on Air, Climbing into the Roots, This Is the Map, and Red Letters; his essay collections include The Four-Cornered Falcon: Essays on the Interior West and the Natural Scene, a nominee for the John Burroughs Medal in nature writing, and Reaching Keet Seel: Ruin’s Echo & the Anasazi. His essays are cited often in the Notable Essays lists of The Best American Essays. He is an emeritus professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Elizabeth Dodd is Professor of English, and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Kansas State University. She is the author of two books of poetry, Like Memory, Caverns, which won the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award (New York University Press), and Archetypal Light (University of Nevada Press); The Veiled Mirror and the Woman Poet: H.D., Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Bishop, and Louise Gluck (University of Missouri Press); and most recently Prospect: Journeys & Landscapes, a collection of nonfiction essays (University of Utah Press, 2003)). A former member of the Executive Council for The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, she has published articles on Michael S. Harper in Western American Literature and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. Dodd has twice won the Stamey Award for outstanding teaching from KSU's College of Arts and Sciences, and she is a recent recipient of the Kansas Arts Council's Fellowship in Poetry.

Robert Root’s most recent book is the creative nonfiction work, Recovering Ruth: A Biographer’s Tale, and he is a frequent presenter on creative nonfiction and composition at AWP, NCTE, and CCCC. His studies of nonfiction composing include Working at Writing: Columnists and Critics Composing and E. B. White: The Emergence of an Essayist and the writing guide Wordsmithery. With Michael Steinberg he co-edited Those Who Do Can: Teachers Writing, Writers Teaching and The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction. He was a contributor and co-editor of The Island Within Us: Isle Royale Artists-in-Residence 1991-1998, a winner of a National Parks Service Excellence in Media Award. He teaches English at Central Michigan University.

Conference Organizers

Susan A. Schiller, Professor at Central Michigan University since 1990, is a charter member of AEPL. She co-edited The Spiritual Side of Writing, a work that grew out of AEPL workshops and presentations.  More recently, her interests have turned to holistic education.  She is currently at work on a book of contemplative and spiritual literary pieces for use in the composition classroom.

Robert Root is also one of the conference organizers. 

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