Writing About War: Seeking Narratives in

This intensive writing seminar explores the special challenges of creating narrative and assessing truth claims in the context of violent conflict. In this course, you will grow as a writer through extensive practice reporting, writing, revising your work, and editing your peers. We will engage with a pressing matter of our age: how to evaluate facts and context and create compelling and precise narratives from the fog of war. A growing swathe of the world, including many countries that are nominally not at war, are currently experiencing pre- or post-conflict conditions. Through discussions, reading, and writing, seminar participants will learn the mechanics of covering conflict and the politics of war- and peace-making. We will read accounts produced in journalism, policy analysis, advocacy, literature, and philosophy. Students will produce original reported narrative writing about conflict, which they may try to place for publication. Students will have to write or revise an original piece almost every week. The skill set cultivated by this class will help anyone write about violent conflict (which includes its prelude and aftermath), whether they plan to do so for a reporting-driven NGO, as a policy analyst, or as a journalist. This course emphasizes good writing and critical thinking; grades will reflect participation, effort, clarity of thought, originality of reporting, and successful narrative craft. Students can draw on their own experiences and contacts – as well as the great wealth of resources in New York City – for story ideas and sources