Speculative Nonfiction

Welcome! Thank you for your interest in Speculative Nonfiction with Joanna Penn Cooper. We are excited to share this course with you.

Please register your email below, and we’ll notify you as soon as the course is ready, plus share a 20% discount code you can use at launch!

More about Speculative Nonfiction with Joanna Penn Cooper:

In this self-guided course, you will explore the elastic quality of the essay form as you delve into the ways metaphor, speculation, and imaginative play can enliven your writing and help you explore your values, fascinations, and imaginings.

In our approach to “speculative nonfiction,” or nonfiction that speculates on the edges of what is known, we will work with strategies for capturing the slippery quality of the individual writer’s passage through time and the sometimes surreal quality of existence. You will experiment with techniques such as unexpected figurative language; associative memory; leaps across time; combining genres and mediums; and the writing of daydreams, fantasies, dreams, and imaginings. You will explore what these techniques allow you to access, as you map the territories of inner worlds and the possibilities of the world we share.

Our interest will be not in misrepresenting the true events of the past, but in using a variety of techniques to explore the edges of what we know and can imagine.