Writing the Quest: A Nonfiction Intensive with Rachel Jamison Webster

In one of his “Letters to a Young Poet,” the writer Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves . . . Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” In this workshop, we will honor both our knowing and our unknowing, our questions and our answers, as essential engines of creative nonfiction. Our nonfiction writing is often motivated by the desire to share a central narrative of our lives. But this past-tense process works best when it is enlivened by present-tense questions. We will identify a central question—or quest—in our writing, which will help us to cultivate compassionate honesty for ourselves and curiosity about the ways that our experiences connect to wider contexts. We will then expand our personal writing through various forays—into psychological self-examination, into research about an outside subject, into historical or ancestral memory, or into speculation and imagination. These experiments will help to bring new urgency to existing projects and will inspire future chapters and essays. Each day, we will begin with meditative freewriting designed to activate our attention and inspire self-reflection. Then we will discuss one essay from our handouts and engage in responsive writing. Finally, we will workshop participants’ essays in a generative way—by asking questions and making connections that will invite new lines of thought and new ways of working.  Participants should come with one essay or memoir chapter (of 1,000-6,000 words) that they want to workshop during the week, a notebook for writing by hand, and an openness to self-reflect, ignite curiosity, and generate new material.

Class meets in person, Monday – Friday, July 14 – 18, 1 – 4 pm

Class size: minimum 5, maximum 12.

Member discount: Members of Write On receive a 10% discount on all classes and workshops. To become a member, please click here. To receive the discount, members must log in to the website using their unique password and enter member10 in the promotion code box. The code is case sensitive.

Teaching Artist: Rachel Jamison Webster is the author of four books of poetry and the nonfiction book, Benjamin Banneker and Us, which was chosen as a Best Book of 2023 by The New Yorker and picked as an editor’s pick by The New York Times. Rachel writes about race, justice, ancestry, mystical women, grief, parenthood, and American history. Rachel has published essays in outlets including The Yale Review, Tin House, and the L.A. Review of Books.  Rachel’s book of poetry, Mary is a River, was a finalist for the National Poetry Series in 2014, and her book of art collage and erasure poems, The Sea Came Up & Drowned, is being put to music and will be performed by the choral ensemble, The Crossing, in 2026. Rachel is a professor of Creative Writing in the English Department at Northwestern University. She lives in Evanston, IL, with her husband, the poet John McCarthy, and their daughter Adele.