Writing Workshops

Writing About Social Issues: Writing with Conscience with Kavita Das

$395

6 Sessions

Out of stock

Once a week Thursdays, 6:30 pm EDT - 8:30 pm EDT October 26 to December 7, 2023

Online via Zoom

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The current fraught socio-political climate is motivating nonfiction writers to engage with social issues on the page. There’s a collective realization that the personal is political, and the political is personal. In truth, the writer has long played a role as a witness, conscience, and predictor of social change

In this six-week class, Writing About Social Issues, we will consider the following questions. How do we write compellingly yet responsibly about social issues? How do we write about the world as we’d like it to be without coming across as Pollyanna or propaganda?

In each class session, we will investigate these questions through lessons and reflections from my own experience as a writer who has written about and worked in social change. We’ll also explore these questions through close readings and discussions of work by writers which engage social issues and parse their relevance and application to our own work through creative writing exercises and assignments.

Course Overview

Some of the topics we’ll cover during the workshop:

  • Motivations for writing about social issues
  • Avoiding sensationalism, stereotypes, and bias
  • Relationship between writer, reader, and subject
  • Understanding the balance between context versus narrative
  • Writing from observation and experience, writing from research, and writing from opinion
  • Different levels of research
  • Considering the implications of your work out in the world

Writers will leave with more grounding in how to write compellingly about complex social issues with nuance and sensitivity.

Course Outline

Note: Workshopping will take place during weeks 3 through 6

  • Week 1: Understanding our Motivation to Write about Social Issues.
  • Week 2: Understanding the Relationship between Writer, Reader, and Subject.
  • Week 3: Research (Researched and Reported Pieces) vs. Personal Experience (Personal Essay) vs. Opinion (Op-Ed). Workshop 1.
  • Week 4: Taking a Blended Approach with Hybrid Essays. Workshop 2.
  • Week 5: Understanding Cultural Sensitivity and Avoiding Cultural Appropriation. Workshop 3.
  • Week 6: Implications (Positive and Negative) of Writing About Social Issues. Workshop 4.

Capacity: 12

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Led by

  • Kavita Das Author Photo 1 HR - Kavita Das

    Kavita Das

    Kavita Das

    Kavita Das came to writing ten years ago after working for social change and social justice for fifteen years. She writes about culture, race, gender, and their intersections. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Kavita’s work has been published in WIRED, CNN, Teen Vogue, Catapult, Fast Company, Tin House, Longreads, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, Kenyon Review, NBC News Asian America, Guernica, Electric Literature, Colorlines, the Rumpus, and elsewhere. Kavita’s second book Craft and Conscience: How to Write About Social Issues (Beacon Press, October 2022) is inspired by the Writing with Conscience class she created and teaches. Her first book, Poignant Song: The Life and Music of Lakshmi Shankar, was published by Harper Collins India in 2019. In the real world, she lives in New York with her husband, toddler, and hound. And in the virtual world, she can be found on Twitter: @kavitamix and Instagram: @kavitadas and at kavitadas.com.

By Kavita Das

  1. . 
    das-kavita.craft-and-conscience

    Craft and Conscience

    By Kavita Das

    Published by Beacon Press

    PURCHASE

    Writers are witnesses and scribes to society’s conscience but writing about social issues in the twenty-first century requires a new, sharper toolkit. Craft and Conscience helps writers weave together their narrative craft, analytical and research skills, and their conscience to create prose which makes us feel the individual and collective impact of crucial issues of our time. Kavita Das guides writers to take on nuanced perspectives and embrace intentionality through a social justice lens. She challenges writers to unpack their motivations for writing about an issue and to understand that “writing, irrespective of genre or outlet, is an act of political writing,” regardless of intention.

    The book includes essays from a fascinating mix of authors, including James Baldwin, Alexander Chee, Kaitlyn Greenidge, George Orwell, Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz, Gaiutra Bahadur, Jaquira Díaz, and Imani Perry. By including Das’s own perspective and those of the featured writers about motivations and approaches to writing about fraught social issues, this book both demystifies the process of engaging social issues on the page, and underscores the intentionality and sensitivity that must go into the work.

About this series

Writing Workshops

We strive to make our classes the most inviting and rewarding available, offering an intimate environment to study with award-winning, world-class writers. Each class is specially designed by the instructor, so whether you’re a fledgling writer or an MFA graduate polishing your novel, you’ll find a perfect fit here.

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