Creative Nonfiction Consultations with Alan Chazaro

As a former high school literature teacher at the Oakland School for the Arts, creative writing professor at the University of San Francisco, and journalist currently based in Mexico, I value the magic of real-world experiences shared and preserved through the written word.

Creative nonfiction, for me, then, is a universal language with limitless powers: to retell and reimagine, to process and comprehend, to reflect and recalibrate, to imagine and foretell. In writing about what’s around us, a writer must interrogate not just their own recollections of the past and present through private memory, but must often engage in a larger constellation of research, information, historical circumstances and truths that can, at times, impact actual change. That is, writing about our own lives, and about the systems and frameworks within which we inhabit  — creatively, openly, directly — provides a map of greater understanding through which we can navigate anything that was once invisible to us. That is the gift of nonfiction.

My goal as a consultant — with more than a decade of experience as a writer myself, but also as a full-time educator who has guided and edited others who are in search of voice, narrative and structure — is always to identify and strengthen the interweaving threads of possibilities for any work-in-progress: from macro-level, thematic opportunities to line-level revisions and word choice considerations. In doing so, each texture begins to cumulatively define what a story can, or might, tell in its fullest, most luminary way. I believe the process is just as important as the final result, and investing earnestly and deeply in the journey of writing is the most valuable thing one can do as a writer. In the end, each writer will walk away with a clear sense of what is working, and where various elements can be expanded in specific, tangible ways.