Cullman Center Institute for Teachers: Slow Looking: A Nonfiction Writing Workshop with Graciela Mochkofsky

Event Details

This is a week-long seminar from July 14 - July 18, 2014.

Graciela Mochkofsky, Instructor  

In this workshop, participants will exercise their observational skills in order to write descriptive nonfiction. To sharpen our senses, we will study examples of great descriptive writing from authors such as Ryszard Kapuściński, John McPhee, Janet Malcolm, Emmanuel Carrère, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Joseph Mitchell, Gitta Sereny, and Elif Batuman. Participants will go out into New York to do their own observing and recording, and then write descriptions of increasing complexity, starting with a single object, moving on to a person, a situation, and finally a scene with multiple protagonists. On the workshop’s last day, each participant will present a short descriptive piece to the group.


Graciela Mochkofsky, an Argentinian journalist, is the author of six books, including Tío Boris, Un héroe olvidado de la Guerra Civil Española—a narrative essay on her great uncle who fought in the Spanish Civil War—and Pecado Original: Clarín, los Kirchner y la lucha por el poder, an investigation of the Kirchner government’s war against the media group Clarín. Her book La Revelación tells the story of a Peruvian Catholic community that converted to ultra-Orthodox Judaism and emigrated as a group to the Jewish settlements in the West Bank. In 2010, she and the journalist Gabriel Pasquini founded the online cultural and political magazine El Puercoespin.  She is currently a fellow at the Cullman Center (class of 2013-14). 

 

The deadline to apply to the 2014 summer seminars has passed.

  • Audience: Teachers