Word is that Our Hero is offering an online course in Creative Nonfiction through University of Toronto. It’s called The Art of Fact: An Introduction to Writing Non-Fiction, and it kicks off January 30, 2017. To see if it’s right for you, read on below. To register, click here.

About the course:

This online workshop aims to enhance
your ability to tell true stories by using techniques from both fiction and
journalism. Taught by renowned author Ken McGoogan, it focuses on learning
tricks of the trade that can be variously applied rather than on developing a
particular work-in-progress. Narrative non-fiction draws on memory,
imagination, research and analysis, and encompasses memoir, autobiography,
biography, history, adventure, travel and true crime.

What you’ll learn:

· Understand the genre of creative or
narrative non-fiction.

· Identify and develop storytelling
techniques to use in your work.

· Emerge with a few short pieces of
creative non-fiction.

About the instructor:

Ken
McGoogan is the author of more than a dozen books, among them four bestsellers
about Arctic exploration: Fatal
Passage, Ancient Mariner, Lady Franklin’s Revenge, and Race to the Polar Sea (all HarperCollins Canada). He has won
the Pierre Berton Award for History, the Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize, the
Canadian Authors’ Association History Award, the UBC Medal for Canadian
Biography, and an American Christopher Award for “a work of artistic excellence
that affirms the highest values of the human spirit.” His recent books include Celtic
Lightning, 50 Canadians Who Changed the World, and How the Scots Invented Canada, and he has
also published three novels.

Before
turning mainly to books, Ken worked as a journalist for two decades (Toronto
Star, Montreal Star, Calgary Herald). He has a bachelor’s degree in
journalism from Ryerson and an MFA in creative writing from University of
British Columbia. Ken has served as chair of the Public Lending Right
Commission, and is a fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and the
Explorers’ Club. He has taught writing for more than fifteen years, and won an
award for teaching excellence from the University of Toronto (School of
Continuing Studies). He also teaches in the MFA program at University of King’sCollege in Halifax. Ken sails in the Northwest Passage as a resource historian
with Adventure Canada. In 2017, he will publish Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of
Arctic Discovery. More at www.kenmcgoogan.com.