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Teacher Feature: Lizz Schumer

Join Muse teaching artist Lizz Schumer for Creative Nonfiction 2 beginning on Wednesday, October 13, 7-9pm EDT.

This course will help intermediate creative nonfiction writers delve deeper into the craft and magic of the genre through exploring the rich world of nontraditional forms, learning how to choose the right voice and perspective for your narrative, discussing ethical considerations for sharing true stories, and understanding how to better excavate the truth of memory, whether that’s relaying an event that happened four hours or four decades ago. We’ll also endeavor to create a mutually supportive, constructive workshop environment in which we can mold our work into the best version of itself. Anyone who has a story they want to tell but don’t quite know how to share it, or the nugget of an idea that keeps them awake at night will benefit from this journey we’ll take together.

When I first met with my MFA advisor, I was a poet and staunchly so. He grinned at me, his arms folded across his chest as I spouted off my reasons for studying poetry, chief among them that I wanted to take the reader on a journey, to show them something beautiful and strange that changed their worldview forever. He raised his eyebrows, staring hard over the rims of his glasses. “And you don’t want to write nonfiction?” I shook my head so hard, it just about came loose. Less than a year later, I was startled to discover the manuscript I’d been wrestling with was indeed creative nonfiction, emphasis on the “creative.” As a journalist by trade and in my “day job,” I’d been operating under a strict and limiting understanding of what nonfiction could be, believing that the musicality of language, the energizing rhythm of well-paced sentences had no place in prose. But discovering writers like Lidia Yuknavitch, Anne Carson, and Carmen Maria Machado broke open the little box I’d placed myself into. As a writer, as a reader, I’ve never been the same.      Lizz Schumer

Lizz Schumer’s Favorite Writers:

  • Lidia Yuknavitch
  • Kate Zambreno
  • Carmen Maria Machado
  • Sarah Manguso
  • Ashley Ford
  • Rax King
  • John Paul Brammer

Lizz Schumer is a writer, editor, and educator who works primarily in narrative journalism, personal essay, memoir, and hybrid text. She earned her MFA in creative nonfiction from Goddard College and currently works as a senior editor at Good Housekeeping Magazine. She also teaches at New York University School of Professional Studies and coaches writing students one-on-one and in small workshops through the New York Writing Room. Previously, she’s also taught writing courses at Canisius College and Niagara University. Her first book, “Buffalo Steel,” came out in 2013 from Black Rose Writing and her second, “Biography of a Body,” from Unsolicited Press in 2021. Her essays, poems, and hybrid work appear in many places, including The Rumpus, Entropy Mag, Ghost City Review, Minerva Rising, Punchnel’s, Salon, Ploughshares.com, and many others. As a freelance journalist, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, Bon Appetit, VinePair, The Spruce, HuffPost, and many others. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her partner and a beloved pitbull named Jerry.

Read more about Lizz and her work on her website. Find her on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Read about her books here and here and find Schumer’s talk about Biography of a Body here

See a full catalog of our Fall classes, workshops, and seminars and register HERE.

***Tuition assistance and flexibility is available to all who request it, no questions asked. Just select the “I want to talk about tuition assistance” box when checking out!